Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by austinthetaco 5 days ago
It's the level of effort and involvement (also if you listen to any director talk they will never say "I made", they will say "we made"). Similarly to AI, nobody gives credit to the guy who "thought of the idea for the movie", they give credit to the leadership of the movie who worked alongside the crew. Directors dont just give an outline of a movie and then step away from set, they put real effort in to every aspect.
1 comments

> Directors dont just give an outline of a movie and then step away from set

But I don't think people using AI to write software give an outline of the software and then just step away? It seems like a very iterative process to me with a number of decisions on the order of those needed to be made by a director of a movie.

The level of effort is minimal. It's not a quantitative definition, its qualitative. Also absolutely in no way shape or form is it anywhere near the level of decision making of a director. Your average director of some low budget B netflix slop is still making thousands of decisions per day, organizing teams, reading and writing documents, going over shot review with DP's. A director is the CEO of a film production, not some ideas guy. They require and utilize a technical understanding of all parts of the production.
The effort can be minimal but there’s a gradient as far as I can tell. At one extreme is what you said: write a prompt and walk away. At the other end you could actually instruct the agent to write every character of the program, and that would be more effort than typing it out yourself. Then there’s the in-between state of writing half and letting the agent fill in the other half. People are using it at all levels of effort, I don’t see how you can presume everyone uses the minimum level.