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by tempest_ 83 days ago
Every "I created <xyz>" or "I rewrote x (y lang) into z lang" should really read "I prompted Claude Code to <insert thing>"

"I" create stuff all the time with AI Agents but am real uncomfortable claiming ownership over them. Others don't seem to have this problem though so /shrug

p.s. - in this case the commits are claude commits, even if they tell it not attribute itself you can tell because good commit messages were incredibly rare (even my own) until the last year or so when they started to look like entire pull requests

2 comments

I designed the system, wrote the spec, validated the output, and ran it through a test framework I'm building that generates constraints in isolation. Then checks the implementation against those constraints in a feedback loop until they all are met/pass. But yes, claude wrote the code.

I'm comfortable calling that building something. If you're not, that's fine, but the distinction between 'prompted an AI' and 'designed and validated a system using AI tooling' is important.

My opinion is I think that there is a massive gulf between 'wrote the spec' and 'validated the output'.

I think if the answer to "could I do this again without claude" is no then it is difficult to claim ownership.

If you're just adding endpoints to some web project and doing feature work then whatever, if you are "rewriting tree sitter in rust" which a lot of these posts seem to be I think it deserves some skepticism.

Yeah, like whatever I prompt I'm fine sharing it, but I'm not gonna claim I made something. It's like claiming I'm an artist because I paid a guy to paint someone.
Is it though? The person who commissions a painting doesn't design the composition, validate every brushstroke, and run the output through an automated test suite. The analogy breaks down pretty fast.
> The person who commissions a painting doesn't design the composition

They often do! Of course the artist has creative liberty to make it work, similar to how LLM's will deviate from the spec.

Was your automated test suite also AI generated?

You probably could have avoided all criticism by simply writing the article yourself instead of publishing raw LLM output. If someone isn't willing to write about a project they made, it's usually an indicator that they spent an equal amount of effort on the code as well.

And why did you make a commit to remove em dashes? That seems odd.

There are certainly artists that have helpers that do the actual execution.