Author here. Setting aside the effort and cost involved in refurbishing the Mac itself, I can assure you this was not a one-prompt project. It required some planning and steering to build something friendly without scope creep. Despite (or because of) the non determinism, there is still an art and science to engineering by prompt. Just as C and so forth were shortcuts to allow creativity without learning machine language and having to painstakingly manage a memory heap, LLM tools further allow us to manifest creativity.

Best description I heard is that LLMs are like “eyeglasses for the mind.” It levels the playing field for people like me who maybe don’t have time to learn classic Mac C, the retro68k dev environment, how the hell TCP/IP works at a low level, and all that. Maybe in the same way that professionally it’s allowing me to contribute to areas of the codebase that i couldn’t before and vice versa with my colleagues who used to rely on my area of expertise.

While I was certainly proud that I had some slightly unique or scarcer talent before, I don’t feel a need to be a gatekeeper about it in the new world (and I’m not suggesting you are), since I’m able to deliver a ton more value at a higher velocity now. That follows thru to personal projects like this, where I can finally do this kind of project and see results without losing too much of my precious free/family time.