> No, but if I asked an intern to eat it for me, I wouldn't feel like I did anything at all.

That's a poor analogy.

If I asked an intern to implement a function, I know I did the instruction and that I worked through them. The intern did work, but I did fancy high level work and killed several birds with one stone.

Even better analogy: if I'm a film director, I'm working through a lot of people. The DP, the cast, the crew, the AD (though they're my boss, telling me what I can/can't budget for)...

The best analogy for AI is the "film director" analogy.

There are good directors and bad directors, good films and bad films. No director works alone (unless it's some kind of avant-garde film school project).

You wouldn't say a film director isn't doing work. That they can't be uniquely felt through their work. That what they're doing isn't hard, doesn't require talent/taste, and doesn't get better over time.

We're all basically becoming film directors.

So yeah, our job that we were all interested in has transformed into a different thing (directing), which some people are also interested in, and some aren't.

There's no substantive difference between directing an intern and directing people on a movie, by the way, except the number of people. If you never aspired to direct people, it's all kind of the same, and if you actively dislike it, I imagine directing more people would probably be worse!

Directors do work, but a different kind of work. Not really what most people would consider hands-on filmmaking. They're more like managers--telling others what to do, how to light this, how to shoot that, where the characters should be. It's work but it's not "making." If I want to make a film, I'm going to grab a camera and point it at something. If I wanted to tell other people to make a film, I'd become a director.

That's the major difference I feel between writing code and having an LLM do it. We're all being asked to become directors when we just want to make movies.

Making movies is hard. Ai basically made the smaller personal sized things easy, but substantial projects are still out of reach. There isn't anything for an individual to feel good about.