[Willish42]

I think another aspect is the deep understanding one gains from building the thing, and the idea of the thing being entirely the creator's and translated into "reality" through some kind of physical or mental labor. An author of fiction prose would have their vision in their mind or some other ideas of what the prose "should" be, and then created it with their own word choice, and tools. Similar for visual art. This applies even if parts of the creative vision were improvised while the creation was happening, but it started in the creator's mind and if faced with the final product, they could remember the small details and understand the work that went into it.

I think if I'm honest about when I look at LLM output for code, it feels close to a code review of code written by another person, where I spend a decent amount of cognitive effort figuring out those similar small details in reverse, without knowledge or memory of the specific motivations. And furthermore, if I were to read every single line of code, word in a written work, and pixel or brush stroke in visual art of some kind, it would feel like an artificial understanding, rather than something I can fully sign my name to as a thing I understood the ins and outs of while creating it.

I fully get that some people don't care about this, and see themselves more as "designers", but I think those are the same sorts of people who if given a choice, would rather "build" by leading a team of people and claiming credit for "building" as part of their leadership, rather than by doing it themselves by hand and getting a sense of fulfillment from that effort. Also, "agentic" workflows feel a bit like giving up even the leading / designing aspects. With Claude specifically, I'm often impressed (albeit other times often frustrated too) by the small design choices it made while building the code that I hadn't explicitly asked for but end up preferring once I see the output. This to me indicates I didn't really build it