--- title: On Making | daily.dev description: A Gen-X CS professor and longtime developer reflects on the personal meaning of 'making' things versus having AI generate them. Using a clever reveal — opening... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-yw9kxfbp2 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: On Making | daily.dev og:description: A Gen-X CS professor and longtime developer reflects on the personal meaning of 'making' things versus having AI generate them. Using a clever reveal — opening... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-yw9kxfbp2 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/yw9KxFbP2.png og:image:alt: On Making og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # On Making **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 16 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A Gen-X CS professor and longtime developer reflects on the personal meaning of 'making' things versus having AI generate them. Using a clever reveal — opening with AI-generated sci-fi, artwork, and Rust code presented as his own — he explores why he can't claim authorship over AI-generated work even when he initiated it. He draws a philosophical distinction between using tools (compilers, hammers) and delegating creation to agents (contractors, LLMs), arguing that prompting AI feels more like managing than making. He concludes that while prompting requires real skill, it doesn't satisfy the deep fulfillment he gets from building things himself — illustrated by his pride in 177 lines of hand-written JavaScript over anything Claude produced. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 6 discussions and 314 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-07-23). **TL;DR:** The community is deeply split on whether vibe-coding with LLMs constitutes 'making' something, with many commenters finding personal fulfillment in AI-assisted side projects while others feel the process-oriented joy of coding has been hollowed out; the debate is genuinely unresolved and heated. **Sentiment:** 30% positive · 45% mixed · 25% skeptical **The case for** - LLMs enable people with limited time (jobs, families, hobbies) to finally ship personal tools that solve real problems they couldn't have built otherwise. - Many commenters report an explosion in side-project productivity, completing long-backlogged ideas that would never have been started. - Expert users get better results from LLMs, suggesting meaningful human contribution remains in the loop. - Using LLMs for boilerplate/tedious code (SIMD intrinsics, YAML configs) while retaining design and algorithmic work is seen as a legitimate and satisfying split. **The pushback** - Several commenters report losing all interest in side projects because the process of building—not just the artifact—was the point. - LLM-generated code creates a 'distrusting investigation' relationship rather than the deep understanding that comes from building incrementally. - Purely prompt-driven creation is seen as closer to commissioning or ordering than to making, with the human contributing only direction, not craft. - Relying on LLMs for all code risks skill atrophy and prevents users from developing the judgment needed to evaluate output quality. - LLMs prioritize quantity and speed over quality, frustrating developers who care about craft. **By community** - hackernews (heated): A massive, multi-day thread with the community evenly and passionately split between those who embrace LLM-assisted creation as legitimate 'making' and those who insist the word is being misused to paper over a loss of craft and agency. - lobsters (mixed): Smaller, more reflective discussion that acknowledges LLMs can function as either a power tool (preserving agency) or pure automation (eroding it), with commenters expressing disillusionment about the industry while remaining open to nuanced use cases like code review and next-edit prediction. **Hottest debate:** Whether the word 'make' legitimately applies to AI-assisted software creation, or whether it obscures a meaningful distinction between directing/commissioning and actually crafting something. **Open questions** - Is there a better word than 'make' or 'vibe-code' to describe the role of a human who directs an LLM to build software? - Will future generations simply accept AI-assisted creation as equivalent to hand-crafted work, or will process-oriented values persist as a meaningful subculture? - At what level of human involvement (architecture, prompts, iteration, QA) does one cross the threshold from 'commissioning' to 'making'? - Does heavy LLM reliance prevent skill development in ways that will matter when the tools are unavailable or insufficient? **Highlights** > I think this is some of the most interesting revelation to come about during these times: there seems to be two kinds of people – those for whom the act doing something well has the highest inherent value, and those for whom accomplishing well has the highest inherent value. This of course doesn't mean the former group doesn't care about the outcome, or that the latter group does poor work. But the dichotomy seems very real. We've had conversations at work where the room splits in two and both sides struggle to grasp how the other side can possibly feel that way. Everyone involved respects eachothers' skills, but we've never known about this fundamental schism until now, and it's like discovering that half your coworkers are aliens. > — [gspr on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49019086) > > What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be made, even if that line isn't particularly clear. For me the difference is in the extent that I can reason about how changes in the input affect the observable behavior of the output. When the executable the compiler outputs doesn’t behave in the way I intended, then in 99.99% of cases this is completely on me, and, importantly, I could have predicted it from the source code. Conversely, I can analyze any such misbehavior by reasoning on the source code. This doesn’t hold to any remotely comparable extent for the relation between vibecoded programs and the prompts used to create them. > — [layer8 on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49009523) > I think this gets to one of the important points which is we tend to view a hammer as a tool (an extension of ourselves), but we don't tend to view our direct reports as such. There's a line there somewhere that gets crossed. Part of it has to do with direct one-to-one determinism. I pull that lever, the excavator bucket pulls up a ton of earth. There was no extra decision made in the middle. And it was completely reproducible. We might even go so far as to say, "I moved a ton of earth." Even though it was the backhoe that did it. Back to CNC, consider the manager who orders the machinist to use the CNC to make a widget. Does the manager qualify as a machinist? I think most people would say, "No. Not unless he coincidentally was one." There's another person in the middle in that case. That level of indirection is somehow making the manager not a machinist. I speculate it has something to do with the fact that the machinist in the middle is an independent being that holds knowledge to make things go. The manager gives a very high-level instruction and doesn't instruct the machinist on how to do it. And I think LLMs are starting to feel (to folks like me) a bit like that machinist. They're not deterministic like the backhoe and the compiler. And they seem human, convoluting the matter further still. > — [beej71 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012811) > When Claude Code/Codex first came about I'll admit it depressed me a bit, but I ended up realizing that the "code" part wasn't the part that I actually enjoyed about software engineering. Instead, what I've been doing for my personal projects has been about designing algorithms with TLA+. I write that by hand, model check and sometimes even prove the properties I think are interesting or useful, and then tell Claude to implement it based on the spec. Usually I still need to correct the generated code but it's a lot less. Certainly in these cases, I take pride in what I did, because ultimately the "Invisible Hand" always means I'm outsourcing some of the work of a project no matter how involved I want to be. If I build a deck outside, I'm not forging the nails myself, I'm not growing and chopping down the trees for lumber, I'm not designing my own power tools, etc. There's always a level of outsourcing of the work that I don't find interesting or that I don't know how to do, or don't have the resources to do myself. With software, the parts that I end up feeling proudest of, and this predates widespread use of LLMs, are the algorithms and tricks I come up with to build something. When I figure out a way to avoid a lock, or figure out a way to use less memory, or figure out a way to increase throughput, I'm less concerned with the actual "code", and much more concerned about the "how". > — [tombert on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49011643) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381166) · 3 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504285) · 3 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47805194) · 2 points · 0 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356186) · 5 points · 0 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/8xccbo/on_making) · 36 points · 6 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49008440) · 338 points · 308 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [On Making](https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-62egd2m2m) · Beej's Blog · 4 upvotes · 0 comments - [On Making](https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-er3hcl8jd) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I Miss Writing Code](https://daily.dev/posts/i-miss-writing-code-yxc7ryasd) · iamluminousmen · 0 upvotes · 1 comments - [Programming Isn’t Special](https://daily.dev/posts/programming-isn-t-special-u4q3stncs) · Planet Python · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#rust](https://daily.dev/tags/rust), [#genai](https://daily.dev/tags/genai), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-yw9kxfbp2) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"On Making","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-yw9kxfbp2","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/on-making-yw9kxfbp2"},"datePublished":"2026-07-22T17:11:07.983Z","dateModified":"2026-07-23T17:39:41.579Z","description":"A Gen-X CS professor and longtime developer reflects on the personal meaning of 'making' things versus having AI generate them. 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