[bitwize]

Back in the day, if you went to a website you could always tell who wrote their HTML by hand and who used a tool like GruntPage, Dreamweaver, etc. even without looking at the META tags. The by-hand stuff was like a polished jewel that had only as much layout, styling, and markup as needed to get the desired effect. The proprietary web editor stuff was encrusted with extraneous tags and vendor-specific extensions (like mso: attributes and styles in GruntPage).

Then as now, if you let the machine do the thinking for you, the result was a steaming mess. Up to you if that was accessible (and for many, it was).

[wffurr]

You can make the same claim about compiled code vs hand written assembly, and yet the vast majority of software is compiled or interpreted.

[dgfitz]

A compiler is written by very smart humans to a spec written by humans, also probably smart but I don’t know enough to claim that bit.

An LLM is just displaying the next statistical token.

Completely different.

[bitwize]

Or, as I like to put it, pulling out the next refrigerator poetry tile from a stochastic bag of holding.

[DowsingSpoon]

In the past, hand-crafted assembly code was common because it was easy to beat the compiler. This is still true today in some niches.