[satvikpendem]

I don't understand the question. For one thing I use local models mainly, but even if I didn't, I'd be buying the tokens from cloud model providers, not the prepackaged, fully complete software itself. I buy the tokens to make what I want.

It's actually quite similar to buying the services of a programmer off Upwork to build something for me, only with LLMs it's way cheaper and faster, with a shorter feedback loop.

[slopinthebag]

I think their point is that you aren't really doing the implementing, Claude (or any model really) is. If you genuinely find prompting LLMs to be fun, then by all means go for it.

[satvikpendem]

What I find fun is getting the output to exactly what I want. I don't care whether I'm personally implementing something or not, and that's what many in this thread seem not to understand.

[unknownfuture]

I'm just gonna hop in and say: I get it.

If I spend a weekend standing up a self-hosted media system or something, I doubt anyone would dispute that's a fun building exercise.

If I do the same thing but use an LLM to build out instead, somehow it's not.

Yeah it's not the same kind of building as what we might have done pre-LLM but it need not be any less satisfying or rewarding.

The real disconnect seems to be the classic dichotomy: people who see coding as the point and the purpose, vs people who just want an outcome.

And that's fine!

I'm just don't understand why the one camp feels the need to deride the other.

[satvikpendem]

Like Lego, assembly can be fun too, and I don't have to manufacture the individual bricks from scratch just to enjoy assembling them together. But no one doesn't call that building something, similar to your experience.

[ori_b]

And sometimes buying a statue can be fun, but nobody calls it building a statue.

[josephg]

Help me out with the metaphor here. Do you think designing and architecting some software, then getting an LLM to write a lot of the code, is the same as buying a computer program from a store?