alt Hacker News> It seems to me that in order to obtain the ability to build things that other people like, you need to go through the process of creating things they won't.
Okay, granted. What does that have to do with how the code is written? Do people generally care if a web app is running from nicely formatted JS or minified JS? Is a product manager not getting better at building things people like because they're not iterating on the code themselves?
Without agreeing or disagreeing with the premise, I think a relevant metaphor* here is that the painter can practice and iterate and go from creating crappy paintings to creating good paintings, without needing to make their own paint and canvas and brushes. If they're particular, they can have their assistant go to the supply shop and get just the right things they want, with increasing specificity as needed, but they don't need to manufacture them by hand.
* Like most metaphors, it's not perfect; please try to understand the intent.
I agree mostly with your metaphor, I think perhaps I disagree slightly on how it's applied. You don't need to create your own tools to create art, but I don't necessarily map the "tools" to code. The act of programming is mapping information to hardware, the value is in the information, and using LLM's to bypass the phase where you obtain, synthesise, and extend that information is the part where you lose the benefits of iteration. If you're just using the LLM as a mechanical tool to output code, it's mostly not different from, say, using speech-to-text to output code. When you start hearing things like "I don't care about the quality of the code, just it's outputs" that starts sounding like someone isn't iterating on the information which is the crucial bit.