While I don't disagree that there's no craft most of the time, it's interesting to note that the anti-analogy with art and artists doesn't really work (or works in an unexpected way).
I'm visiting a lot of museums and exhibitions for a number of years now, without having any kind of art education, etc. After some time you start seeing patterns and understand more even if you still haven't read your art history. What strikes me time and time again, is that there's a huge amount of repetition even in great artists' work. It's definitely not an assembly line, but they do the same thing over and over again for years and years. That was true centuries ago and that's true today.
That is a very thoughtful piece. Thank you for posting it. I especially like the idea of that new mode of programming (or problem solving, whatever you call it) when people very much enjoy getting an LLM to do what they want.
This is both new and old, because it's the same joy (or dopamine hit) of making a machine do your bidding. Honing your prompts is not that different to honing your shell scripts. I think many people overlook this aspect.
I'm visiting a lot of museums and exhibitions for a number of years now, without having any kind of art education, etc. After some time you start seeing patterns and understand more even if you still haven't read your art history. What strikes me time and time again, is that there's a huge amount of repetition even in great artists' work. It's definitely not an assembly line, but they do the same thing over and over again for years and years. That was true centuries ago and that's true today.