"What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated." – Thomas Paine

I've been thinking of this line recently — really gets at the heart of the matter for me. There is no substitute, no shortcut, no alternative for effort.

Yeah, the demos look really cool but you're thrown into them and there's nothing explained as to what you're looking at or why you should care. Funny, an article explaining something like how a camera focus works with a few illustrations would be far more useful than a fancy 3D interactive.

It turns out the more technology you throw at something does not equate to ease of learning.

It's low entropy. The amount of entropy is prompt + model but now that you have seen the model various times, the entropy comes down back to the prompt only.

You'd not be amazed by seeing a 2 sentences prompt and thus you are not amazed by this work either.

Depends, really. Ten different artists using Opus 5.5 and with some experience with LLMs, outputs may differ quite widely due to:

- Each phrasing the prompt(s) differently

- Each having different history accumulated in context

If you asked me to issue the same prompt as you to write some web artifact, chances are mine would be substantially stylistically different, simply because at some point in the past half-year, Clause started styling everything in LCARS form for some reason.

Whether the differences would be substantial or surface-only? Probably depends, but chances for substance increase with iteration. Real artists don't zero-shot their masterpieces either.

> If something that previously took weeks for a human to design, now takes 10 min, that means a whole week of salary went up in smoke.

To me, this is the depressing sentiment. The idea that, somehow, the goal isn't to produce useful things but to spread work out over a period of time in order to maximize payment.

At a high level,I conceptualize my job as "doing useful things." Whether that's design, writing code, debugging, sysadmin, CI/CD, writing doc, whatever. I just want to be useful. If there's some tool that makes that easier, I am happy about it. I don't think that tool will result in my getting paid less. But if it does, oh well.

Weird way to look at it, from another view we can now print a week salary in 10 minutes. Might devalue the output slightly but we still have the product.

> If something that previously took weeks for a human to design, now takes 10 min, that means a whole week of salary went up in smoke.

The problem also is, if a human took weeks to design this, it would be much better. This is quick but also bad.