No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.

If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.

I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.

That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.

I think you're being pedantic to the point of losing all credibility. And you're gatekeeping in the worst possible way.

Your argument that using an LLM means you didn't "make" a thing could just as easily be used to say that if you used a framework or a library, you also didn't "make" a thing, because you didn't write all the code yourself and you didn't understand everything.

Would you say the authors of YT-DLP didn't "make" anything because they are a wrapper over FFMPEG and CURL?

If you produce something useful (even just to yourself), you "made" a thing.. It has a purpose, and it's useful. Who cares how you made it or how long it took?

For example I've made plenty of bash scripts over the years that were effectively thin wrappers that combined other tools, but they did something novel and useful that saved me tons of time, and I've shared those as gists or in other ways.

Some of these scripts took me mere minutes to make. I didn't use an LLM to make them, but the "heavy lifting" definitely wasn't in my script. No one ever showed up to berate me and try to tell me that I didn't actually produce anything useful in any of these cases.

So this "in the past" that you imagine where people were held to some bullshit standard for what is accepted as "making" a thing?

That past doesn't really exist, and if does where you are, it sucks.

OK, clear enough. But that's an unusual definition of "build" that I don't think you should necessarily expect others to share.

The first entry for "build" in the OED is: To construct, put up, erect (a house or other dwelling or building); to construct (a permanent static structure such as a wall, bridge, or architectural feature, a road or railway, etc.). Also: to commission, finance, direct, or oversee the construction of (something of this type).