Not every project one does will be or should be considered art or a source of joy and pride.
The boring CRUD apps that put the “bread on the table” are just that, a means to an end, they will not be your main source of pride or fulfillment. But somewhere in between there will be projects where you can put all your heart in and turn off that LLM.
Think of the countless boring weddings playlists a DJ has to do or the boring “give me the cheapest” single family homes an architect has to design.
Well, that's a good example. Why would you get a DJ when you can say "Siri, play Weddings Classics"? There's no humanity involved, no skills to read the room or cater to audiences. So you get a DJ; what if your DJ thinks his job or your event is boring and generates the same playlist you could have done yourself? You need passion, you need interest, you need to be involved. Otherwise every job becomes tedious, and humanity dies.
One thing that differentiates a (good) DJ from a playlist is that a DJ will react to the crowd. That'll influence song selection, mixing, live looping, and so on.
Which means clearly we need to feed video of the dancefloor to a vision model and output MIDI tokens!
I think it’s more nuanced than that.
Not every project one does will be or should be considered art or a source of joy and pride.
The boring CRUD apps that put the “bread on the table” are just that, a means to an end, they will not be your main source of pride or fulfillment. But somewhere in between there will be projects where you can put all your heart in and turn off that LLM.
Think of the countless boring weddings playlists a DJ has to do or the boring “give me the cheapest” single family homes an architect has to design.