Creativity is defined by what one did in the creative process, not whether you did something else outside of the creative process or not. I.e. if the only thing you do is say "make me a piece of art, I'll pay you $x" then you had 0 creative involvement. Not because you paid for it, but because of the lack of doing anything during the creation process.

The same is true of using any tool. If you just click a premade and generic "process photo" button in an image editor for every photo you get then you're doing no creative work (unless that whole action is a meta statement itself or something). If you mess with the different options and settings to find the one which matches your creative vision then you've played a part in the creative process, even if you weren't the one responsible for the code of how the pixels changed and paid for the software to do that part.

To LLMs directly, if you just say "make me some art" then you've done nothing creative as well. If you iterate and mess around with what you like until you get something you find interesting, then you've played, what seems to me, the biggest part in the creativity process of that output (which has nothing to do with where the code to match that vision of the output came from). I think LLMs and creativity can be confusing because "make me some art" will produce something that, at a glance, looks very much like we'd expect creative art to look like (regardless the reason or if it actually is), and we often falsely jump to the conclusion anything that looks creative out of an LLM must therefore only ever be able to source from the LLM. This would be like assuming because an image editor has that generic "process photo" button one can never do anything creative with an image editor.

Commissioning a painting, if it needs describing a scene, a thought or some direction, then yes.

This is literally what photographers do. Most do not even deal with exposure or any other setting. "Auto".

Explore the editing angle: do you really think that absolutely nothing of artistic value would be lost if we just stopped editing films entirely? Or is it clear that an editor can bring value simply by offering input?

Certainly the extent of the input matters - "cool art of a dude" is a very generic concept, but at a certain point, just writing the idea down has to count as creative, because otherwise books are all uncreative.

A big chunk of the software development industry is not typing code but figuring out what code to write in the first place.

If you want to draw out the construction analogy, ask a mason or carpenter if they'd rather be an architect. (a lot would probably not want to, but I know a few people in the trades that can do a lot more than just welding two pieces of steel together, it's just that their job is the welding part.

Actually this will be one of the challenges; LLM assisted coding has empowered people to be more decision makers, lead developers, architects, etc than code monkeys. But it's a pyramid, there's only so many lead developers you feasibly need on a project.)

Writing software and having software running on a computer is not the point of all of this. The point is to then use these tools to improve your physical world outside of the computer, and to use the computer to improve your mind and then apply that to how you live in the physical living world. The computer is not your friend, your colleague, or your enemy, it's a screwdriver the over excited gave a celebrity complex.

Do I get the same satisfaction from defining and directing a project that my team at work implements?

Yes. Writing code was always fun but running a project is itself a systems engineering problem. Especially if you’re the one defining project scope.

So yes, absolutely it is the same level of joy. The code I wrote was just the method needed to solve the low-level problem but it was never the entire problem space.

I can see my fingerprints all over the user facing design and I can see all the places where I agonized over different approaches to maximize user enjoyment. Seeing the solutions manifest is thrilling frankly. I see users of LLMs as filling a similar role to mine in this respect.

That said, I understand that not everyone enjoys the entirety of the problem space to the same degree and so I can see how a reasonable group of people might not find the higher-level puzzle as enjoyable as its low-level counterpart just as there are those who might find the low-level tedious instead of rewarding.

Imagine you're getting an extension to your house. You might not be an architect, an electrician, a plasterer, a carpenter, an interior designer, a grounds worker, a gardener, a labourer or any other profession I've missed off (apologies) but you get a great sense of joy from designing and seeing your extension built.

You outsourced literally everything, you didn't lay a single brick, didn't calculate a single beams "load-bearing" capacity but at the end you have this awesome extension you can live in that brings you joy. There's going to be snags here and there as there always is with anything, even if you crafted and did it all by hand, but seeing it built and guiding and adapting things along the way is the fun part.

yeah man the point of software development is to develop software that is useful, helpful, thoughtful, creative, productive, or just cool. For me and most non hardcore engineers like on hackernews, the outcome is all that matters.

Not OP but if it comes to Claude or OpenAI use, that does make me roll my eyes.

I keep my local AI rack under my 3D printer because they are the same type of tool to me.

What are you saying then?

And why are you implying that using AI does not improve those skills?

You can learn nothing or become a master both ways. AI will just give you some tangible results first but in the end it depends solely on you.