The restaurant comparison doesn't really hold up. The parent didn't go choose from a menu of new apps that they wanted AI to create. They discovered a problem or a feature that doesn't exist on other platforms and they employed tools to create that. Does a product manager not get to claim they "made" something because they plan it out and employ others to actually build the finished product?
Both of the examples the parent gave include some kind of planning and ideating to get to a final product, regardless of the fact that they employed tools to do a bulk of the coding work.
Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"
Mark Zuckerberg made "Meta"
I feel just as proud of everything I'm making with LLM, image, and video models as I do the code I wrote by hand for years and the photons I shot on film to make movies.
This is just a new higher level thing. I'm still the "director".
It's my design and my taste.
Author is right about this though,
> "Didn't take long. Only about 50x longer than it would have taken Claude to do it."
I'm never writing code by hand again. I stopped in February.
Typically the builder crowd absolutely agrees that leadership did not in fact make the things that bear their name. Like Musk didn't make Tesla, neither the company nor the cars nor any of its engineering advancements.
So I think it's playing both sides. Nolan didn't make The Odyssey. He directed and produced it. Large projects require many many people; with this in mind I realize this whole discussion is just one's ability to make something of their own accord: a cake, a pottery bowl, a wood shed. The whole LLM thing blurs the lines but really it turns the conversation into AI rallying.
It's as simple as recognizing the difference between "making" The Odyssey and "making" breakfast from scratch for your family. (and no you didn't have to have laid the eggs to claim "making" so it's really not so rigid)
While you can say Roger Deakins shot "Blade Runner 2049" or Hans Zimmer scored "Interstellar", even these masters of their craft paired with directors to make their films. The film is still typically the work of the auteur director, and the director (usually) exercises control over all of these pieces.
You can tell when that doesn't happen. You can tell when the producers exercise outsized control. Or when the studio controls the editing table. And it's not like that's ever kept a secret - people talk about this openly and loudly when it happens.
Musk built his empire, and even if he bought his way in, he still used his unique methodology to turn it into what it is today. "Founder Mode", if you will. Same thing with Steve Jobs.
All of this hand-wringing about who painted the shed in "The Evil Dead" doesn't matter. It's Sam Raimi's. Everyone else on set dances to the beat of his drum.
Software can (and will) be like that too.
Game design, company formation, product development, you name it.
I agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.
Future people will look back on this transitional time with curiosity. This is all going to be a non-issue in time.
The fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it. It's the path of least resistance, and it's something that will only increase in normality in our daily lives and experience.
Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation. People are just going to say, "I made this."
And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output or work.
Canon mountaintop photography : smartphone selfies :: Quality AI art and software : ChatGPT Miyazaki cartoons
Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".
Nobody will bicker about "created", either.
If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. It'll be something they "created". But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools, nor will it stop us from calling their outputs "creations" and something they "made".
I'm making something with Claude Code right now. And to be very deliberate about it - I am making it.
> Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".
Uh, yeah, because there's nothing to bicker about in the definition of a photograph itself. But people absolutely do not view photographers the same way they view illustrators. Nobody would ever, in a million years, consider you an artist because you snapped a selfie. You also don't "make" a photograph, you "take" a photograph (and this kind of distinction exists in every language I speak). You really couldn't have introduced a better example to defeat your own point.
Photographs presented as works of art have something about the choice of what and how to photograph that is artistic. I can't just, like, take a photo of my leg and call it art. At least not without writing a thought-provoking blurb about is a photo of a leg really art? Then it becomes artistic parody, like the toilet sculpture.
People seem to be downvoting you because they don't want it to be this way, but I feel you're absolutely correct and this in inevitable. No matter how we - 2026 - feel about it, this will be the norm for future generations.
We know it's not inevitable because people are sticklers about the process of creation today.
People claim certain artists work is uninteresting because they didn't paint or sculpt it themselves but instead acted as more of a creative director.
People claim The Odyssey has more value because its physical effects and uses film not digital.
People claim digital art/digital photography isn't real art/photography still.
It's not an insignificant number of people but yeah it's definitely not everyone too but there are definitely ones born way after the argument was already settled on a lot of these things and still argue it. Will be mostly interesting to see how children today think about the value and ownership of education, knowledge, art, etc in a world where they're completely devalued and democratized and if they still have people who think it's not art if you didn't paint it and it's not your work if you didn't think it.
I just watched The Odyssey this evening. Loved it! These stories were passed down in song over thousands of years. Humanity scale type stuff. Thousands of years of spoken and written language based connections.
And it’s all survived. Durable.
So I just sit here and think and laugh wow the ego on us. Call me aged out but im not so sure that your vibe coded app or that tik tok upload is gonna hit the same in 5080.
>> 'Shigeru Miyamoto and Eiji Aonuma made "Ocarina of Time"'
I googled that to check, and on first few pages no one said that they did? It was always "the team made".
Mark Zuckerberg for sure made "Meta" – whatever it is – at least into the joke it is today, but that's beside the point. Meta isn't a product, it's a company
As a programmer I wrote my app TheseusA by hand. As a product manager I vibe-coded my other app TheseusB. Then I had my LLM port TheseusA to Python, while I ported TheseusB to Python by hand and deleted the original codebases.
Do I get to claim I made the Python TheseusA, or TheseusB, or neither or both?
Let me correct this then: "Do product managers get to claim that they helped to make something?"
I think product managers surely have a right to claim they "helped" to make something at least. If the team made something then those who work on the team all assisted in "making" the thing.
This is actually the exact opposite for me. Rubber tipped buds will not stay put in my ears when I move around, while the original airpods models sit within my ears and don't fall out unless I'm doing cartwheels.
The AirPods Pro do come with buds in a few different sizes—have you had the opportunity to try both the small and the large types?
I've also heard that the most recent AirPods Pro fit much better for people who have had problems in the past—I think because their rubber buds also have some foam in them, to help them create a better seal.
I can think of a better analogy than littering for pirating an item at more than 1 place. When you litter, you add to the trash. If everyone littered, it would be awful. But if everyone pirated the same content on a different site/platform/protocol, it would still be 1 pirated item.
The better, IMO, analogy, is if you have an ad glued somewhere, say at a bus stop. Another person comes with their ad and wants to glue it. They glue it over the previous ad. The amount of ads visible remains the same. There's a negligible disadvantage for the city - they have to haul away twice as many paper. But most importantly, the amount of visual clutter hasn't been increased if the second ad is glued over the first one.
That analogy works if you're against piracy and ads on public places, of course.
People trying to justify piracy was tired in 1997 and it's embarassing now.
It would be better if you just embrace the fact that you're unwilling to pay for creative effort and OK depriving creators of money - that isn't my ethos but it's at least honest and consistent.
Arguing that piracy doesn't hurt someone is trivially wrong, lazy, and self-centered.
This isn't even abandonware. If you don't want to buy the book, go to a library or read a publicly accessible blog, but piracy is bullshit full stop.
People trying to justify anti-piracy was embarrassing in 1997. It's petty and sanctimonious now.
Not everyone lives in rich Western countries with cushy Silicon Valley pay grades; lots of folks are young, studying; they may be temporarily underemployed, or simply have to prioritise other costs.
Knowledge is a right, not the privilege of a moneyed minority.
I'm a bibliophile. My current library stands at over 600 books, I'd wager I've purchased around a thousand in my lifetime. Please shed any assumption that this is the only way I read.
I am one of the book industry's better customers. This is pretty typical, AFAIUI. We see study after study suggest that pirates spend more on music and film than non-pirates.[1] Just the other week, I bought a physical copy of a book I'd first read from LibGen.
I pirate when I'm broke, or when living somewhere where certain books are hard to come by, as I did for a good 15-20 years of my life.
I have zero qualms about anything I've pirated. Not because of my prior "support" to authors, but because I'm aware most people in the world cannot afford to spend 65 dollars (plus postage) on a book.
Let me invert your claim on rights. What right do US lawyers have to deprive the majority of reading? Why should only the wealthy be able to access quality material on Linux? There is a particular irony in your gatekeeping of knowledge on an operating system which is designed to be free and accessible for all.
Imagine a world in which there was no Libgen, or Anna's Archive, or people sharing PDFs on forums. Would this be a better world? These things exist today, authors still get paid. In a world without, we'd have worse engineers, dumber people.
Frankly, I wish book piracy was much more mainstream. I'd much rather everyone was sat down of an evening with a copy of Linux Basics for Hackers, or The Leopard, or God-help-me, even Harry-chuffing-Potter, than doom-scrolling bile on their social media platform of choice.
Piracy is, all told, globally, a service to humanity, and we'd be better off with more of it.
Adobe fixes PDF zero-day security bug that hackers have exploited for months
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/adobe-fixes-pdf-zero-day-security-bug-that-hackers-have-exploited-for-months/
Another example is Old School Runescape, who reverted back to an earlier save and has now diverged as an entirely separate game running with older systems as they lost a ton of players with their "Evolution of Combat" update. While nostalgia is definitely a powerful tool, I agree with the previous commenter that the original WoW was a very different game than the modern version and it seems like that is one of the core aspects of what people desired.
This comes entirely down to the scope of the agreement for the assessment. Some teams are looking for you to identify and exploit vulns in order to demonstrate the potential impact that those vulnerabilities could have.
This is oftentimes political. The CISO wants additional budget for secure coding training and to hire more security engineers, let the pentesting firm demonstrate a massive compromise and watch the dollars roll in.
A lot of time, especially in smaller companies, it's the opposite. No one is responsible for security and customers demand some kind of audit. "Don't touch anything we don't authorize and don't do anything that might impact our systems without explicit permissions."
Wiz is a very prominent cloud security company who probably has incredibly lucrative contracts with AWS already, and their specialty, as I understand it, is identifying full "kill chains" in cloud environments. From access issues all the way to compromise of sensitive assets.
I'm sure you are correct about being able to do some clever prompting or tricks to get it to print inappropriate stickers, but I believe in this case it may be OK.
If you consider a threat model where the threat is printing inappropriate stickers, who are the threat actors? Children who are attempting to circumvent the controls and print inappropriate stickers? If they already know about topics that they shouldn't be printing and are trying to get it to print, I think they probably don't truly _Need_ the guardrails at that point.
In the same way many small businesses don't (most likely can't even afford to) opt to put security controls in place that are only relevant to blocking nation state attackers, this device really only needs enough controls in place to prevent a child from accidentally getting an inappropriate output.
It's just a toy for kids to print stickers with, and as soon as the user is old enough to know or want to see more adult content they can just go get it on a computer.
ChatGPT allegedly has similar guardrails in place, and now has allegedly encouraged minors to commit self-harm. There is no threat actor, it's not a security issue. It's an unsolved, and as far as we know intrinsic problem with LLMs themselves.
The word "accidentally" is slippery, our understanding of how accidents can happen with software systems is not applicable to LLMs.
It sounds like that's a possibility, but why on earth would you take the time to setup a 3 node cluster of object storage for reliability and ignore one of the key tenants of what makes it reliable?
"If you select those people, what’s to keep them from creating a system that gives them ever more amounts of money, to the detriment of their constituents?"
That is literally the system that exists today, except instead of in the open (e.g. salary) it's through stocks with insider information and who knows how else.
The point isn't to optimize for people who are most incentivized through money, the point is to make the position more accessible for anyone who actually wants to do the "service" part, and to minimize the reasons that it's hard. As the previous commenter pointed out, right now independently wealthy people are some of the only ones who are actually capable of running, and someone who isn't independently wealthy who wins is even more susceptible to bribes because they may be in a tenuous financial position.
I would agree with you that we want individuals who's goal is to do "service" for their society, but our current system obviously isn't working and there are a lot of solid reasons why something like this _could_ improve the situation, what alternatives would you recommend?
Agreed. But the difference is I'm saying a better solution is to adjust the incentives rather than just keeping the same incentives but making it more transparent.
I would be in favor of higher pay for Congress given the limits of the job (maintaining at least two residences in DC and their home state, for example). Perhaps we just disagree on the level. I don't want it to be "lucrative" as you said originally (ie I don't want it to be a way to get rich), but it should be high enough to not be prohibitive to go into service. There are also some knock-on effects that would need to be managed; for example, I think overall civil servant pay is pegged to Congressional pay limits. Other solutions may be to have designated Congressional housing (so at least they can't use the housing cost as an excuse).
That is awful, but it doesn't lessen the impact of someone who right now has access to your email and or other accounts. China having your DNA profile is not near as impactful as someone actively stealing your identity and potentially ruining your finances. Use 2fa everywhere, and if your email is in this list, you should change your password.
Both of the examples the parent gave include some kind of planning and ideating to get to a final product, regardless of the fact that they employed tools to do a bulk of the coding work.