alt Hacker NewsI agree with you. There would be no X without Y person. Undeniably. The scope of the project matters seems clear though. I think it should be clear and obvious what one means when they say "I made this" recipe from scratch. Even then, there's "did you invent this recipe!?" or do you mean you "prepared it in your kitchen?." That scale and scope is very different from what it means to make a film. And it's where I agree, there's substance to a Hitchcock film being made by Hitchcock. It doesn't mean he literally wrote, acted, set/wardrobe-created, and filmed the movie! But we're losing the plot here to give a similar substance to "I made this app" and allow it to mean one-shotting Fable to clone the latest "you don't prompt AI, you build your empire with a team of Agents" orchestrator.
Future people will look back on this transitional time with curiosity. This is all going to be a non-issue in time.
The fairy path of human language is going to adopt "creation" as assuming someone could have prompted it. It's the path of least resistance, and it's something that will only increase in normality in our daily lives and experience.
Nobody in the future is going to have these paragraphs-long diatribes about what does and does not constitute creation. People are just going to say, "I made this."
And that's that. We'll judge based on the significance and novelty of the output or work.
Nobody bickers about the definition of "photograph".Nobody will bicker about "created", either.
If someone in the future wants to spend a year making a stop-motion, claymation-animated feature, people will still think that's cool. It'll be something they "created". But it won't stop the world when most people are using new tools, nor will it stop us from calling their outputs "creations" and something they "made".
I'm making something with Claude Code right now. And to be very deliberate about it - I am making it.