There’s a fine line maybe.

If you go to a shitty rated restaurant and ask to prepare a steak that meets certain procedures and requirements, and they bring it to you to test it, and you send back with corrections, repeatedly till it resembles a quality cooked meal… then you are somewhat a chef.

It’s an old debate, like when the camera was invented (while artists were painting landscaoes in the field) and could make perfect landscape pictures…is the photographer an artist?

It’s a tool.

If you just pump out slop and don’t curate anything then its just garbage slop; because its still slop automata at this stage.

I went through this this weekend. I have a bash script I wrote years ago to unlock my WD backup drive in Linux. I’m not a programmer, I just know the process and searched forums and stackexchange till I could cobble together a script that would do a few simple things.

• check if a WD drive is connected
• ask if you are setting a new password or using old one
• branch to cooking a password file or branch to unlocking the drive
• send command to drive with encryoted password binary.
• report back success or errors

So, did I make that script or did stackexchange?

Then this weeknd I wanted a GUI for it…but I know way less about GUI programming, so I fed my script into an LLM and asked for a GTK interface. It took my code and rewrote it for a dialog interface. It took six attempts to get it working with me guiding it. It added a few features on its own that I hadn’t thought of, and were actually good choices.

• is password.bin the proper format/character byte length check
• file browser if you wanted to pick the password out of a state directory, or send it direct

I feel I made more of the bash script than the GUI program. But both were done by using tools and tweaks