alt Hacker NewsHandwriting machine code seems like an arbitrary line to draw.
I'll preface that "built" is an overloaded term, and different people use LLMs with lower or higher levels of involvement.
But does a tech lead "build" a feature when he delegates to a junior engineer and makes suggestions/corrections as needed?
With modern agentic coding harnesses, the delegation analogy seems much more apt than a compiler analogy, which never really held water.
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simonw • today at 4:42 AM
The tech lead's team "built" the feature, when the junior engineer did the actual work and the tech lead delegated it to them and coached them.
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The main issue with this analogy is that despite how similar to a human's writing its chat-based UI is, Claude is software, not a person.
Junior engineers are humans like the tech lead.
LLMs are software like a compiler, an IDE or a paint program.
So IMO comparing an LLM to a junior is dehumanizing. Comparing it to a compiler is more apt (though a better comparison is with IDEs and editors: after all you use an LLM to write the code, not compile it).