Comment by JKCalhoun
2 days ago
I guess I don't get caught up in the distinction of whether I created the software or not. But for Claude/Gemini and me, it would not have existed—and did not exist beforehand.
At the end of the day, I have tools that are helping with screen-printing (and stereo photography, and other hobbies). I don't care if Brownies gathered around my computer when I was sleeping and wrote the software (to my specification).
I suppose that puts me in that group of programmers that are focused on the end-product, agnostic as to how the thing was made. I have truly never enjoyed the plumbing part of the job—just want clean tap water.
(Well, the algorithms have always fascinated with a mathematical appreciation: matrix transforms, Bloom filters, etc. Aspects like robustly handling multi-threading has always been a kind of painful Sudoku puzzle I try to do in my head—while a challenge, I sometimes would rather not hurt my brain that way. The tedium of stubbing in functions, filling them in to make a boiler-plate image cache–never very interesting.)
I don't copyright anything I do. I had some software published 36 years ago and the publisher slapped a copyright on it, but I have never done so.
> I suppose that puts me in that group of programmers that are focused on the end-product, agnostic as to how the thing was made. I have truly never enjoyed the plumbing part of the job—just want clean tap water.
FWIW I think most people don't belong to either group exclusively. I often care mostly about the outcome (e.g. at work or when i make small tools for myself), but occasionally i care mostly about the process (e.g. when learning a new programming language or solving problems akin to advent of code)
Yeah, I enjoy some of the puzzles that come along. And the learning part you mentioned—that has been fun.
I think you're right that it's more of a spectrum.