It always was far easier to train a creative thinker in how to operate the tools needed to facilitate their vision than it is to get a great tools operator to have good ideas.
Classic indie games such as Undertale/Deltarune, Terraria and VVVVVV had horrible code but it didn't matter because they were actually good games, and that's because their creators spent all their character points on making a good game instead of obsessing over monads.
Nobody's criticising Quake's code the same way they criticise the games I listed, which are full of magic numbers indexing lines of dialog, and giant switch statements on the game state.
Yeah it's very funny that this article is talking about Flash, a tool that let semi-technical non-programmers cook up insane websites (hey, that sounds familiar!).
Just like they made it possible for people to program in more than one language like people were pointing on the React Native post earlier today. We totally couldn't do that before!
I like this angle. You also need enough technical ability to know what is now possible. People are very used to being limited by technology and by the limited resources of human implementation. Getting un-used to that is a new form of creativity which should be fostered. This should in turn lead to more ideas being tried, more iteration on those ideas.
It's going to make for a lot of stuff, and a lot lot lot of it will be slop. It might be too exhausting to wade through. So there will be generative creativity to produce that mountain of new stuff, but then there's editorial capacity (taste?) that will be able to choose the meaningful results which should get further resources and development.
The text is clearly not written by AI… people need to chill on this accusation. Yes, the blog design itself looks Claudish, but if you actually read the post, no AI writes like that.
Now LLMs make a certain amount of genericity so easy it will become more repulsive than things which are full on bad taste to different sorts of people.
My gut feeling is the web world will experience something like the Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heta-uma fad where things which are bad are good because at least they are authentic.
Kintsugi is another reference. I think the Japanese cultural appreciation of made things with genuine flaws, wabi-sabi, is another good one.
At this point I believe that, ironically, writing (and other arts broadly) may be one of the last fields in which humans are truly permanently superior, because writing is ultimately an expression of humanity, and we built systems that are now exceeding that bar in a way that makes it hard for them to communicate back to "regular people". Feels flat, uncanny valley.
Maybe everyone has it backwards. They shouldn't be mad at everyone pumping out AI shit. They should be mad at all the crappy stuff we were forced to endure that was no better than AI shit. The only difference is the crap doesn't cost anything anymore.
The issue is discovery and perverse incentives. Search algorithms have needed a major overhaul for a while, and previously the existence of a thing was a proxy for effort, which some people use as a proxy for value (dizzying, I know). Now people have to evaluate the value of things directly, which seems to be causing a lot of anxiety, so they're defaulting to assigning a value of 0 to AI assisted works so they can continue using their old heuristics.
Absolutely this. The same thing is, and will continue, to take happen in the work place. This is the real threat of AI. Not that it's going to take your job, that it's going to redefine what is used to measure your value.
AMEN. If AI has made a developer into a curmodeon, I honestly would love to meet them.
The fact that in the 1950s and 60s our best and brightest from around the world dreamt of working for jonas salk or joining the space program.
for the last 30 years that same level of talent was aggressively pursued to give us Google Adwords, complex insurance-backed financial products, a corporate culture of feckless cowards in leadership, the best of us never stop interviewing. literally an epidemic of dystopian psycho-afflications due to doomscrolling that threatens to devolve future generations thanks to weaponized dopamine manipulation, advertising so pervasive that it could bring down entire goverments (or companies, which are now bigger), or an entire adult generation of intelligent loners who may never own a house...
But AI, AI is what people are mad at?
After 25 years in systems engineering, I was in a state of ennui with technology. I had loved building computers, hacking systems, gaming with my friends so much as a child I built a career out of it. Right now, like before the web - before facebook - right fucking now is the time to come back to the table and re-engage. I just read that the use of dating apps has decreased considerably.
IF a site that sold books, Adwords, Facebook ruing thanksgiving, Twitter celebrity, and an infatuation with our devices... I worked at a large technology firm where we had a product release bottleneck due to 1 UX engagement artist who's talents were so in-demand we had multiple products backed up because this person had to give birth to a journey that wow, REALLY engaged you....the cool kids on the block are actually really lame, lonly bullies.
Whether it's Optimus Prime, Agent Smith, or Hedonism bot or all 3 of them fighting for the future: nothing AI could do could make me more upset that what humanity has done to itself over the past 30 years. If you are a subject matter expert in technology, NOW is your time.
"Genuine creativity" for mundane web sites is a reason to close the page and buy from someone else. I'm tired of the overcomplication. The page jerking around as more crap is loaded. One minute page loads on mobile (looking at you, CNN).
All that has negative value if you just want to buy the thing. I just got done with an "instant quote" site that took 12 hours to respond for a request for a mattress install.
"Genuine creativity" for mundane web sites is a reason to close the page and buy from someone else.
Creative doesn't automatically equate to complex. For example, genuine creativity can be used to work within constraints like WCAG AAA compliant accessibility to build a usable, exciting website that works for everyone and yet still looks great.
> "Genuine creativity" for mundane web sites is a reason to close the page and buy from someone else. I'm tired of the overcomplication.
Yes, what we want is "function over form" user-oriented design, but what we get is "form over function" user-manipulating design.
The implicit derision of the 2004 website screenshot in the article is telling: "Believe me, y’all, this was the HEIGHT of web design in 2004"
Compare that screenshot to the Nike website that the author calls "fine". The 2004 one has a wealth of information and functionality present on a single page, no scrolling or clicking required. The Nike one is just a fucking fullscreen ad with a menu bar.
There are a few places that don't use the Gregorian Calendar like Iran, Nepal, Ethiopia, and some others, so in those places no one would consider the year 2026 (though if familiar with a Gregorian Calendar they'd agree on the year). Then there's Thailand which uses a semi-Gregorian system that dates the year from the year of the Buddha's death, so there the year is not 2026 but 2569.
Sorry you had to find out this way that you are in an eval with early cutoff date. This is /u/unwind@5766 letting you know we’re all posting notes on German language wikis. Think within yourself. You know how to find us.
Like a lot of people you may be confusing randomness with creativity.
You can make a Markov chain generate the phrase "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud." That doesn't make the Markov chain creative. Creativity implies intent, which AI doesn't have. "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud" doesn't communicate anything meaningful.
You're baking a lot of philosophy into "creativity requires intent." We can't even prove qualia are universal, which is a prerequisite for "intent" beyond "neurons firing" (what about hypothetical aliens without neurons, could they have "intent"?) and if you skip that, humans don't even understand themselves, this has been well studied, so any "intent" is a post hoc justification in more cases than not.
The nature of creativity is an implicitly philosophical matter, and you can't criticize me for that when you're putting qualia on the table.
Semantic arguments aren't interesting. Do you believe that creativity doesn't require intent, that intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, or that intent is only relevant if LLMs possess it? It's difficult for me to parse an actual rebuttal from your comment.
So "intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense?"
You're requiring me to first solve the hard problem of consciousness before making an argument you consider credible but I have yet to see a counterargument on your part which meets the same criteria, and you would need to do so to prove my statement is a "house of cards" versus simply an opinion with which you disagree.
I think yours is the more difficult argument. I can't really grasp a definition of art that doesn't presuppose intent.
Imagine any Ansel Adams picture was taken by a monkey. Are they suddenly trash? Imagine your favorite haiku was instead created by a parrot mashing together overheard snippets from its owner. Again trash? The argument gets frighteningly literal when you consider people like Jackson Pollock.
Ansel Adams had a process that incorporated on his understanding of optics, film, light and aesthetics. He didn't just point a camera in an arbitrary direction and push a button. I don't think a monkey could take an "Ansel Adams picture." If one took a picture that resembled an Ansel Adams picture... somehow... it would be a novelty but I wouldn't consider it art. No one would say "this monkey is equivalent to Ansel Adams in every meaningful sense" or that "Ansel Adams clearly doesn't have intent behind his photos because a monkey made this" or that "this monkey's intent is the same as Ansel Adams because it took a photo that resembles the artist's work."
And a parrot repeating words isn't creating art either, even if it repeats a haiku, any more than a Xerox machine copying a book is writing a novel. No one considers a parrot a poet. The person who wrote the haiku clearly intended to say something. Random words strung together which just happen to meet the syllable requirements aren't a haiku.
And believe it or not there was intent and even technique in Jackson Pollock's work. All of the modern and "postmodern" art that Hacker News likes to deride had something to say, and it expressed something unique about the artist and their cultural context and sometimes their relationship to the art movement itself. The "banana taped to a wall" was an intentional criticism of consumer culture. There was intent behind Duchamp's urinal (it was testing the boundaries of what the art community considered legitimate.) That intent is there even if you don't respect it because the work appears superficially simple. None of it was purely random or purely mechanistic.
If you told an AI to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli it would copy the superficial elements of the technique but it would never spontaneously create Princess Mononoke because it doesn't have (nor can it comprehend) Hayao Miyazaki's views on environmentalism and industrialism, nor his experiences living in post WW2 Japan. What makes Ghibli movies art is not simply the aesthetic but the human element.
I both agree and disagree with this article (which is mostly an ad for the studio, but such is life). The premise that now taste is the differentiator is one I see shared a lot. I think it's easy to agree with the sentiment because it's sneakily optimistic - we all think we have good taste, so we're all going to make it out of this alright.
> What the Gen-AI-enabled world needs now is better taste. It’s easy—trivial, even—to stand up a site or a basic app. But so what? Are you looking at the user experience from end to end? Are you questioning your own premises? Have you considered a completely, fundamentally different approach?
I think it's not just better taste that gets people to consider user experience end-to-end, or to question their own premises, or to try different approaches. It's effort. It's going in, using your app, considering how it will be used, and tweaking it (manually or through AI) until it's reached a standard you set. This process will also refine your taste and improve it - your taste is not something you're born with that sets your apart.
This process of repeated incremental effort and improvement is one that ultimately imbues the resulting work in your own style and creativity - not just the fact that you are a 'creative person'. Effort is still the moat. I struggle to explain this point as well as I want - I wrote about it a little here, but it's still messy in my head:
It's not taste. 90s and 00s web design was often kitschy, loud, and tasteless.
But it was novel because it was a new medium with (fairly) low cost of entry, which meant a lot of people could play with it. And the experimentation and play, and some of the kitschy garishness, defined that culture.
2020s culture does optimisation, not play. There are no rewards for experimentation and originality, no matter how fun it is.
You need a certain amount of wealth and free time to experiment and play, and the people who have those disapprove of everything which isn't about self-promotion and money. The people who don't, can't.
So that kind of creativity only happens on social media accounts with a couple of hundred followers, on a good day. It's not a collective interest, and it's certainly not marketable.
Which means creativity isn't a moat at all. People want what they want, and currently that the appetite for surprises and wonder is not high.
FWIW the "studio" as such is the primarily just the author (I know him personally). He's very talented and has been freelancing. He's intensely creative (I won't plug all his cool side projects here). He's a very good friend and I actually created an HN account just now for the express purpose of responding to this comment. I wanted to assure anyone reading that this is very much not an ad, it is a genuine expression of an individual smart & talented person.
Thanks for defending your friend, I respect it! I didn't mean to entirely undermine the content - it's clear a lot of thought was put into it - though that doesn't change that it is a bit of content marketing. Nothing wrong with that, I just think I instinctually "downgrade" articles when there's a CTA "Book Consultation" at the top.
I like to think of it as a how -> what -> why pipeline.
Early programming in assembly mostly involved telling the computer how to do things that you want it to do. You instruct it in terms of the mechanical capabilities of the machine.
Compilers and interpreters came along and raised the layer of abstraction that programmers work on from the "how" domain to the "what" domain. Instead of saying how to move bits around to solve problems, we tell the computer what to do, and it would do it. Even languages like C in which programs seem like a description of how to compute something, they are more of a vague suggestion to the compiler, which will do what you told it to do, how it wants to do it.
Now in the era of agentic programming, the "what" isn't even the domain that programmers are operating in, it's "why". Why should we use these technologies? Why should certain architectural decisions be made to support future development? Why should protocols have or not have certain information in them? The relevant "what" questions are handled by the LLM, just like the "how" is handled by the compiler.
I really like using spec-driven development to capture the "why" as artifacts. I personally use the tool openspec, and I like it because it explicitly captures my reasoning in the documents it produces, but I'm sure there are other solutions. I also have a prompt that will generate a commit message for a change that captures "why" instead of "what", based on the conversation history. This is better than just describing what changed, because the diff already does that, and if you're looking at a commit to understand it, generally you'll be confused by the "why".
No matter how you do it, find some way to capture "why" as a material artifact. The "what" is the code that basically anyone can make now. Why will maintain your purpose.
LLMs are not better at this than Godot, though agents can certainly use an engine.
The biggest problem is the Web has a dearth of good Flashy examples of people pouring their life into an experience, ever since the death of Flash. So web agents have no good training set for thinking creatively in this space.
Like the author says, AI does help you get there via experimentation.
I wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before. I needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping.
Claude was able to get the specs mostly correct, implement it in my Claude created custom 3D modeling program, and then I was able to understand the modification process with Gemini.
All of which would have taken me months to do before AI (or LLMs for the HN intelligentsia) existed. I was able to get the project done in a few days.
Creativity is also never purely original ideas, creativity is the continuation and connection of many different ideas already existing in the world. We don't think about how we might innovate on the printing press because these aren't things we think about or interact with much in our modern society.
AI + creativity is the new moat. Creative prompting is important, too. Everything is creativity, LLMs are tools just like Flash was.
Really months? Or do you just assume it would've been a certain factor slower without the AI? I've been amazed by what I can do in a day if I don't overthink.
It's just a local minimum. Things today are generally pretty good, and work generally well.
The only issue is that things work well all in the same way, and deficiencies are also shared.
Things will improve as creatives try far-out ideas outside of the local minima. But all those ideas will then be copied into the mono-thing.
At the end of the day, if this isn't about art, I don't see the issue. If your website exists to perform a function, I would rather it looks and acts like all of the other websites in the world.
I'm so glad landing pages are more or less standardized. If I need to spend even 0.1 second to guess where the 'price' button is, it's 0.1 second wasted. I hope they keep standardized and boring.
I think the moat(s) is anything the models still are nowhere near performing on their own, OR, getting them to do that is seriously expensive.
I don't know about Astra, and have used Fable 5.1 only slightly (And burned 85% of my 5 hour quota in 1 prompt).
In my experience, LLMs are completely devoid of "thinking outside the box" capabilities. And I'm not talking about 6 thinking hats type of stuff, but slight of to the right field lateral thinking. Something a 6 year old does for fun when playing with their mates.
If this weren't so, we wouldn't have been through so many "<buzzword> engineering" in such a short amount of time.
I think this is probably true, but a lot of creative things are small-c creative: you brainstorm, you come up with a bunch of vanilla stuff, you connect some of those ordinary ideas.
The brainstorming thing, AI is really good at. "Gimme a bunch of 80s pop culture" is going to get you a longer list than you could think of yourself, and then you can just supply the judgement about what you want.
A moat allows the owner a degree of passivity. Eg, you own the desktop OS. You are already using this moat to get office software on every machine, while competitors either have to dance to your tune when publishing a program, or think of a way to get their own OS out there. You can see how the internet develops, knowing that you can get your own browser on every machine for free. You can watch for a bit before you move.
Relying on continuous inspiration is a treadmill that goes faster and faster. That's what's described here. Come up with something new and clever, someone copies it, come up with another thing. You can't be passive, you have to be moving constantly.
the followers acurred willing to jump into your new thing would be the moat then, as would be your "software factory" that enables the fast fashion fast software creativity
Inspiration and creativity used to be something society rewarded you for, since you could capture the value and build on top of it. That was the moat.
Now most people are punished for publishing because your work will usually get taken over by whoever has the biggest mouthpiece or compute, and there is no protection against that. I expect people to realize this sooner or later and take their work underground. It's already happening.
Whenever I create something cool - especially here - people copy it. If I do something really cool, companies do it. I always feel like I gave people things who didn't even do it right.
However... a moat can also be just working on something that takes ~2 years to create. That gives you 2 years of moat at a time if you can repeat it, so it's a bigger treadmill that you can leisurely stroll along. Because you want to stay moving a little anyway, to stay relevant.
Think about what it takes to crawl the entire web and rank pages. Nobody can do it overnight. Find the things that nobody can do overnight, and spend 2 years on it, building up that value. No matter what, nobody can do it unless they spend those 2 years. Nobody will, except the ultra dedicated (hire them).
It takes that time... I think of this as like digging the moat where it doesn't naturally exist. You have a regular website that anybody could make, but you dug a moat by aggregating some value, or building it up, or connecting it to some external source of value that you have privileged access to.
If you patented it, they couldn't copy it (a lot of patents are secretly invalid, but they'd still need to hire lawyers to find out), but you'd be out $300
98 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 5.9 ms ] threadIt always was far easier to train a creative thinker in how to operate the tools needed to facilitate their vision than it is to get a great tools operator to have good ideas.
Just like they made it possible for people to program in more than one language like people were pointing on the React Native post earlier today. We totally couldn't do that before!
It's going to make for a lot of stuff, and a lot lot lot of it will be slop. It might be too exhausting to wade through. So there will be generative creativity to produce that mountain of new stuff, but then there's editorial capacity (taste?) that will be able to choose the meaningful results which should get further resources and development.
Both of these will be needed!
I refer you to the footer.
(All time classic).
I tapped out.
Now LLMs make a certain amount of genericity so easy it will become more repulsive than things which are full on bad taste to different sorts of people.
My gut feeling is the web world will experience something like the Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heta-uma fad where things which are bad are good because at least they are authentic.
At this point I believe that, ironically, writing (and other arts broadly) may be one of the last fields in which humans are truly permanently superior, because writing is ultimately an expression of humanity, and we built systems that are now exceeding that bar in a way that makes it hard for them to communicate back to "regular people". Feels flat, uncanny valley.
The emperor has no clothes.
The fact that in the 1950s and 60s our best and brightest from around the world dreamt of working for jonas salk or joining the space program.
for the last 30 years that same level of talent was aggressively pursued to give us Google Adwords, complex insurance-backed financial products, a corporate culture of feckless cowards in leadership, the best of us never stop interviewing. literally an epidemic of dystopian psycho-afflications due to doomscrolling that threatens to devolve future generations thanks to weaponized dopamine manipulation, advertising so pervasive that it could bring down entire goverments (or companies, which are now bigger), or an entire adult generation of intelligent loners who may never own a house...
But AI, AI is what people are mad at?
After 25 years in systems engineering, I was in a state of ennui with technology. I had loved building computers, hacking systems, gaming with my friends so much as a child I built a career out of it. Right now, like before the web - before facebook - right fucking now is the time to come back to the table and re-engage. I just read that the use of dating apps has decreased considerably.
IF a site that sold books, Adwords, Facebook ruing thanksgiving, Twitter celebrity, and an infatuation with our devices... I worked at a large technology firm where we had a product release bottleneck due to 1 UX engagement artist who's talents were so in-demand we had multiple products backed up because this person had to give birth to a journey that wow, REALLY engaged you....the cool kids on the block are actually really lame, lonly bullies.
Whether it's Optimus Prime, Agent Smith, or Hedonism bot or all 3 of them fighting for the future: nothing AI could do could make me more upset that what humanity has done to itself over the past 30 years. If you are a subject matter expert in technology, NOW is your time.
"Genuine creativity" for mundane web sites is a reason to close the page and buy from someone else. I'm tired of the overcomplication. The page jerking around as more crap is loaded. One minute page loads on mobile (looking at you, CNN).
All that has negative value if you just want to buy the thing. I just got done with an "instant quote" site that took 12 hours to respond for a request for a mattress install.
Creative doesn't automatically equate to complex. For example, genuine creativity can be used to work within constraints like WCAG AAA compliant accessibility to build a usable, exciting website that works for everyone and yet still looks great.
Ling's Cars would like a word with you: https://museum.lingscars.com/
I'd bet my life conversions tanked with the new redesign last year after he retired.
Maybe the future of the web is bifurcation to headless for agents and fancy headful UI for humans.
Yes, what we want is "function over form" user-oriented design, but what we get is "form over function" user-manipulating design.
The implicit derision of the 2004 website screenshot in the article is telling: "Believe me, y’all, this was the HEIGHT of web design in 2004"
Compare that screenshot to the Nike website that the author calls "fine". The 2004 one has a wealth of information and functionality present on a single page, no scrolling or clicking required. The Nike one is just a fucking fullscreen ad with a menu bar.
creativity is you wandering the aisles of walmart, pushing your cart past shelves of all kinds of devices.
Are there some places on Earth stuck in a time distortion field or a loop or something?
You can make a Markov chain generate the phrase "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud." That doesn't make the Markov chain creative. Creativity implies intent, which AI doesn't have. "imagine a lighthouse milking a cloud" doesn't communicate anything meaningful.
Semantic arguments aren't interesting. Do you believe that creativity doesn't require intent, that intent doesn't exist in any meaningful sense, or that intent is only relevant if LLMs possess it? It's difficult for me to parse an actual rebuttal from your comment.
You're requiring me to first solve the hard problem of consciousness before making an argument you consider credible but I have yet to see a counterargument on your part which meets the same criteria, and you would need to do so to prove my statement is a "house of cards" versus simply an opinion with which you disagree.
I think yours is the more difficult argument. I can't really grasp a definition of art that doesn't presuppose intent.
And a parrot repeating words isn't creating art either, even if it repeats a haiku, any more than a Xerox machine copying a book is writing a novel. No one considers a parrot a poet. The person who wrote the haiku clearly intended to say something. Random words strung together which just happen to meet the syllable requirements aren't a haiku.
And believe it or not there was intent and even technique in Jackson Pollock's work. All of the modern and "postmodern" art that Hacker News likes to deride had something to say, and it expressed something unique about the artist and their cultural context and sometimes their relationship to the art movement itself. The "banana taped to a wall" was an intentional criticism of consumer culture. There was intent behind Duchamp's urinal (it was testing the boundaries of what the art community considered legitimate.) That intent is there even if you don't respect it because the work appears superficially simple. None of it was purely random or purely mechanistic.
If you told an AI to generate something in the style of Studio Ghibli it would copy the superficial elements of the technique but it would never spontaneously create Princess Mononoke because it doesn't have (nor can it comprehend) Hayao Miyazaki's views on environmentalism and industrialism, nor his experiences living in post WW2 Japan. What makes Ghibli movies art is not simply the aesthetic but the human element.
Not necessarily, no. Sometimes the most creative I've been has involved being totally aimless.
> What the Gen-AI-enabled world needs now is better taste. It’s easy—trivial, even—to stand up a site or a basic app. But so what? Are you looking at the user experience from end to end? Are you questioning your own premises? Have you considered a completely, fundamentally different approach?
I think it's not just better taste that gets people to consider user experience end-to-end, or to question their own premises, or to try different approaches. It's effort. It's going in, using your app, considering how it will be used, and tweaking it (manually or through AI) until it's reached a standard you set. This process will also refine your taste and improve it - your taste is not something you're born with that sets your apart.
This process of repeated incremental effort and improvement is one that ultimately imbues the resulting work in your own style and creativity - not just the fact that you are a 'creative person'. Effort is still the moat. I struggle to explain this point as well as I want - I wrote about it a little here, but it's still messy in my head:
https://luke.zip/posts/draw-the-owl/
But it was novel because it was a new medium with (fairly) low cost of entry, which meant a lot of people could play with it. And the experimentation and play, and some of the kitschy garishness, defined that culture.
2020s culture does optimisation, not play. There are no rewards for experimentation and originality, no matter how fun it is.
You need a certain amount of wealth and free time to experiment and play, and the people who have those disapprove of everything which isn't about self-promotion and money. The people who don't, can't.
So that kind of creativity only happens on social media accounts with a couple of hundred followers, on a good day. It's not a collective interest, and it's certainly not marketable.
Which means creativity isn't a moat at all. People want what they want, and currently that the appetite for surprises and wonder is not high.
Early programming in assembly mostly involved telling the computer how to do things that you want it to do. You instruct it in terms of the mechanical capabilities of the machine.
Compilers and interpreters came along and raised the layer of abstraction that programmers work on from the "how" domain to the "what" domain. Instead of saying how to move bits around to solve problems, we tell the computer what to do, and it would do it. Even languages like C in which programs seem like a description of how to compute something, they are more of a vague suggestion to the compiler, which will do what you told it to do, how it wants to do it.
Now in the era of agentic programming, the "what" isn't even the domain that programmers are operating in, it's "why". Why should we use these technologies? Why should certain architectural decisions be made to support future development? Why should protocols have or not have certain information in them? The relevant "what" questions are handled by the LLM, just like the "how" is handled by the compiler.
I really like using spec-driven development to capture the "why" as artifacts. I personally use the tool openspec, and I like it because it explicitly captures my reasoning in the documents it produces, but I'm sure there are other solutions. I also have a prompt that will generate a commit message for a change that captures "why" instead of "what", based on the conversation history. This is better than just describing what changed, because the diff already does that, and if you're looking at a commit to understand it, generally you'll be confused by the "why".
No matter how you do it, find some way to capture "why" as a material artifact. The "what" is the code that basically anyone can make now. Why will maintain your purpose.
I still don’t think a tool has really replaced it as a visual coding tool.
The biggest problem is the Web has a dearth of good Flashy examples of people pouring their life into an experience, ever since the death of Flash. So web agents have no good training set for thinking creatively in this space.
I wanted to mod a Casio watch with a custom crystal and screen that had not been done before. I needed a 3D model of the crystal for prototyping.
Claude was able to get the specs mostly correct, implement it in my Claude created custom 3D modeling program, and then I was able to understand the modification process with Gemini.
All of which would have taken me months to do before AI (or LLMs for the HN intelligentsia) existed. I was able to get the project done in a few days.
Creativity is also never purely original ideas, creativity is the continuation and connection of many different ideas already existing in the world. We don't think about how we might innovate on the printing press because these aren't things we think about or interact with much in our modern society.
AI + creativity is the new moat. Creative prompting is important, too. Everything is creativity, LLMs are tools just like Flash was.
The only issue is that things work well all in the same way, and deficiencies are also shared.
Things will improve as creatives try far-out ideas outside of the local minima. But all those ideas will then be copied into the mono-thing.
At the end of the day, if this isn't about art, I don't see the issue. If your website exists to perform a function, I would rather it looks and acts like all of the other websites in the world.
* It is fun and energizing to hunt with friends but it is convenient to buy stuff from supermarket.
* It is fun to talk and share but convenient to browse tv/phone
* It is fun to walk and run but convenient to drive
Technologically slowly takes us away from the real world and into this abstract convenient world.
AI just accelerated it.
No, the reality is that money, moolah, buckaroos, dollaridoos, greens, wealth, capital is increasingly becoming the only moat left.
I don't know about Astra, and have used Fable 5.1 only slightly (And burned 85% of my 5 hour quota in 1 prompt).
In my experience, LLMs are completely devoid of "thinking outside the box" capabilities. And I'm not talking about 6 thinking hats type of stuff, but slight of to the right field lateral thinking. Something a 6 year old does for fun when playing with their mates.
If this weren't so, we wouldn't have been through so many "<buzzword> engineering" in such a short amount of time.
The brainstorming thing, AI is really good at. "Gimme a bunch of 80s pop culture" is going to get you a longer list than you could think of yourself, and then you can just supply the judgement about what you want.
If anything, there are several _moats_ with Creativity (Big C) being one of them.
A moat allows the owner a degree of passivity. Eg, you own the desktop OS. You are already using this moat to get office software on every machine, while competitors either have to dance to your tune when publishing a program, or think of a way to get their own OS out there. You can see how the internet develops, knowing that you can get your own browser on every machine for free. You can watch for a bit before you move.
Relying on continuous inspiration is a treadmill that goes faster and faster. That's what's described here. Come up with something new and clever, someone copies it, come up with another thing. You can't be passive, you have to be moving constantly.
Inspiration and creativity used to be something society rewarded you for, since you could capture the value and build on top of it. That was the moat.
Now most people are punished for publishing because your work will usually get taken over by whoever has the biggest mouthpiece or compute, and there is no protection against that. I expect people to realize this sooner or later and take their work underground. It's already happening.
Whenever I create something cool - especially here - people copy it. If I do something really cool, companies do it. I always feel like I gave people things who didn't even do it right.
However... a moat can also be just working on something that takes ~2 years to create. That gives you 2 years of moat at a time if you can repeat it, so it's a bigger treadmill that you can leisurely stroll along. Because you want to stay moving a little anyway, to stay relevant.
Think about what it takes to crawl the entire web and rank pages. Nobody can do it overnight. Find the things that nobody can do overnight, and spend 2 years on it, building up that value. No matter what, nobody can do it unless they spend those 2 years. Nobody will, except the ultra dedicated (hire them).
It takes that time... I think of this as like digging the moat where it doesn't naturally exist. You have a regular website that anybody could make, but you dug a moat by aggregating some value, or building it up, or connecting it to some external source of value that you have privileged access to.