When does a woodworker cease to be one? When he uses a handsaw? A circular saw? A sawmill?
> When a tool blurs the line between who performed the task
Who saws the wood? He who operates the tool, or the tool performing its function? What is the value of agency in a business that, supposedly, sells product? Code authorship isn't like writing, is it? Should it be?
Or is the distinction not in the product, but in the practice? Is the difference in woodworking vs lumber processing?
Or is it about expectation? e.g. when we no longer expect a product to be made by hand due to strong automation in the industry, we prepend terms such as "hand-made" or "artisanal". Are we currently still in the expectation phase of "software is written by hand"?
I have no dog in this race, really. I like writing software, and I like exploring technology. But I'm very confused and have a lot of questions that I have trouble answering. Your comment resonated though, and I'm still curious about how to interpret it all.
There's also the perception of time. How long did it take you to write that email/comment/code? Did you laborious pour over every word, every line, for hours, before you hit send, regardless of if you used an LLM or not. Or did you spend barely five minutes, and just pasted whatever ChatGPT shit out?
That's the real question that people are trying to suss out.