LLM assisted, or even just whole hog generated content, is all the rage these days. Whether it's an image, a video, a thought piece, a program; it frankly doesn't matter. We now live in a time where someone can go from thought to implementation at nearly that speed.

Midjourney let people feel like artists, just prompt it the right way and you get fantastic art! Never mind that the use of light and tone and composition aren't quite the same as what a real person might do. Claude can build an entire SaaS platform in a couple of long weeknights while I toil away at my day job to pay for the subscription cost! Never mind that the application is insecure, and that no developer in their right mind would ship it to production. Gemini.. well I don't actually think anyone uses that one, it sucks. But ChatGPT! Oh ChatGPT started it all!

But, wait, what did they start precisely? I'm a bit confused. I thought we were all told that these tools were egalitarian. They lower the barrier to doing complex work. They level the playing field by granting curated knowledge to people. They automate the bits we don't want to do.

Wait, the bits you didn't want to do are a craft? You mean the artist takes joy in the production of art? And the programmer takes joy in the process of development? Naw, that's not the point! The output is what matters! The joy comes from the output! I have a half formed thought, a machine grinds that out and presents it to me on a plate, and then I show the world the thing I made. That's how this is all supposed to work right?

Well, I fundamentally disagree.

The output isn't the part that matters. It has never been the part that matters for any Craftsman in the pursuit of any craft for that matter. Whether the output of your craft is words or images or code or anything else, the output matters very little. But the process? The act of trying, failing, struggling, learning, sitting deeply with issues and thinking critically on them, carving out time for this feedback loop of try fail try to exist because you care deeply about it. That matters.

The use of LLMs to short circuit the try fail loop is the inherent problem. Not that the output isn't impressive, or better, or faster. The output doesn't matter if you never learned from it. Do any of us actually think that people like Ken Thompson or Vincent Van Gogh would have produced the software or art they did if they just short circuited it and fed it through a machine?

Fuck no. But if I want a "Starry Night" themed image or a Unix-like microkernel I can vibe it right up. Look at this slop I made! It is a brummagem artifact, not craft. But we treat it like a market disruptor, or the artifact of our labors. Certainly you produced it, but is it truly yours? Is it good enough to put your name on it? Did you sit deeply with the problem of creation and try, fail, and learn in so doing?

This is the fundamental issue, in an age of instant output the product of creation matters very little. Ikea can produce millions of pieces of furniture each year, but nobody would hold an Ikea chair and call it the finest furniture in the world. It is a mass produced product, meant to be fast and cheap and just good enough. By way of comparison a Thos Moser chair is also a chair, it is made of wood, each piece carved by a craftsman's hands. They are fundamentally different items.

The Ikea chair exists as a CAD design, maybe the Thos Moser chair does too. The mass produced chair is stamped out in a factory and given a cursory QA before it hits a store. You buy it, you break it, you buy another. They are cheap, transactional.

The Thos Moser chair is hand carved wood. A craftsman hand selects the wood, using their lifetime of skill to find the right grain, feel, shape. They carve the pieces, assemble them, and when it's all said and done they sign their name on the product they produced. This is a process of days where at any point the craftsman may stop, recalibrate, change something minute or start over completely. The chair doesn't exist if you take away the craftsmen. And the purpose of the work is not to create a chair, but to breathe life into a piece of functional art. Could a wooden chair be made using CAD/CAM and a CNC machine with no craftsmen? Sure, but it'd be less durable, less sleek and formed, and more wasteful; and it almost certainly wouldn't be art.

Which in a sort of reductive way is where we currently sit with LLMs.

If I'm not particularly fussed about the outcome, then I can poke the machine and get it to make a decent facsimile of the thing I want, regardless of whether that thing is prose or code or art. I can go from idea to thing instantly, or damn near it. With agentic workloads I can do even less thinking or participating even. But the result is.. well, less sleek and well formed, and more wasteful.

What actually matters.

The point is, and always has been, the process. Human learning and creation is an iterative process of trying, failing, and repeating until we succeed. We are the sum total of both sides of this loop, our failures form our success directly. If we choose to skip over it all and jump straight to success we cheapen the process by which we learn, and that's the fundamental problem I have with LLMs. But this framework assumes that you care sincerely about the output you're working towards and that isn't always a valid assumption.

I've used LLMs. Mostly when I don't care about the output, it just needs to be good enough, I don't need to learn anything from this process. That's what I tell myself anyways.

And the more I sit with that thought, the less and less comfortable I am with it. The fact of the matter is that I care deeply about the things I do. If I did not, I would (should!) choose to do something different with my time. It is a finite and fleeting resource in a finite and fleeting world, and whether I get a presentation done in 2 hours or 20 minutes is a small component of that, but I should always care about the product which I produce. The point is never just to produce, it is always to care.

And to that end, I think there is probably a healthy way to engage with LLMs such that you stay in the loop, but I worry about my own ability to do that when I use them. It isn't a grand thing, I'm simply a lazy human being who will choose the laziest solution so I can bounce as many fascinating ideas around my head as is humanly possible. But that lazy human being cannot, and will not, divest themselves from the ownership and pride they feel around the product that is produced.

So here I sit, typing away a blog post using just my head, emacs, and a spell checker because the product I produce matters even if it's less coherent. Making myself vulnerable enough to think it through and discuss it openly matters, because it's how I refine who I am and what I believe. And you the reader deserve to read something written by a person, not some made up junk from a machine, even if that would be easier and I'd be able to write a million blog posts a year! What a cool quantity it would be, but it'd mean fuck all if I didn't do it myself, because this blog and all the software I write, the art I create, the thoughts that I think; they're not actually for you. The fact that you can share this with me is a happy accident, a side effect of the try, fail, learn loop in action.

Why this, why now?

I've been reading through Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics lately. For anyone who isn't familiar with it, it's a book about virtue ethics, and not just what good is but how the choices we make can lead to a life worth living. In that book Aristotle describes a million different things, but one that really has resonated with me is his description of Craftsmen and their relation to craft labor, there's a whole subsection of the book (part VI) dedicated to the understanding of craft and intellectual skills.

Aristotle's particular brand of Ethics revolves largely around choice and finding the median between two radicals, but of these when it comes to intellectual or moral engagement, his argument almost always boils down to the choices we make defining where we land on the scale between those two radicals. For someone to engage genuinely in an intellectual or creative endeavor, they must first choose to do so, in so doing they express a seriousness and a longing towards its creation. It simply does not exist without this desire to be engaged with.

In fact, Aristotle describes the entire creative act as "contriving and contemplating how something that admits of either existing or not existing may come into being"; our creative process is quite literally a contemplative act that requires active engagement to exist, otherwise the object of our creation would exist unto itself. Further it is through both contemplation of creation, and the act of creation itself (techne), that one hones their skills in such a way as to become wise. That is to say, that a craftsman is two fold, the creative act that begets the idea of their craft, and the actions they take to produce their craft. And this combination of characteristics begets the highest possible good, Phronesis (wisdom). But the type of person who can be considered wise requires both depth and breadth.

The wise person therefore, ought not only to know what proceeds from the principles but also to attain the truth about the principles. Wisdom, as a result, would be intellect and science, a science of the most honorable matters that has, as it were, its capstone.

Further, for someone to participate in the type of wisdom that Aristotle outlines, their process must be trifold. It requires action, contemplation, and habituation. If we fail to act and only think, we fail to reinforce what we know ergo cannot prove it. If we fail to think but act, we make false assumptions about what we do, and act foolishly. But if we embrace the process of both action and contemplation, and we habituate that process, we create a self reinforcing feedback loop. We simply try, fail, try; and in so doing create wisdom.

he who deliberates -- whether he deliberates well or even deliberates badly -- is investigating something and calculating.

However, the manner in which we go about this remains important. If the intent and purpose of being is to live well, if we are sincerely concerned with the process of creating as an extension of our ability to live well, then the manner in which we engage with that creative act is of the utmost importance. We must deliberate, think deeply, about what we do. If we care only about the results of our actions, the product of our output, it is entirely possible to short circuit the creative process and put something out into the world that meets the definition, but not the intent of our craft. Aristotle describes this short circuiting a little more eloquently as a failure to deliberate which results in a short sighted determination that what was done obligates the intent.

it is clear that correctness of deliberation is not every kind of correctness; for the person lacking self-restraint or the base person will hit on, as a result of calculation, whatever he sets before himself as obligatory, with the result that he will have deliberated correctly but nonetheless have gotten hold of something very bad.

Now none of that even matters if the calculus you're solving for says that the greatest goal is in production. I am not writing this to personally convince you to not use LLMs. If the creation of the product is the thing you're optimizing for, then that's fine. But I am deeply concerned that in my own creative process the use of LLMs optimizes for the product, and not for Phronesis. Doing something means more to me than the product that is the result of the action, "doing something well is the same as doing it nobly", I can't look at the creation of an LLM and say "what I have created is noble". It is a product, it obligates the intent of the deliberation, but I skipped the learning component that enables me to claim I have both acted on and contemplated my craft.

For in both children and beasts, the natural characteristics are present, but they are manifestly harmful in the absence of intellect. Yet this much does seem to be seen -- that just as a strong body moving without eyesight will end up stumbling with considerable force because it is without sight, so it is also in this case [of having the natural virtues in absence of intellect.] But if someone gains intellect, his actions will alter accordingly; an the characteristics he possesses, though similar to what it was, will then be virtue in the authoritative sense.

From my perspective as a self taught technologist, everything I do is in some sense childlike, at least to begin with. I am curious, I make guesses, I lack the foundational intellectual education to explain key compsci terminology; but I can apply the concepts well enough through action to fail and learn in so doing. I can create intellect where none exists if I am simply calibrated to focus on the process, and not the product of the actions I take.

The output has never mattered for me, it will never matter. It is, as designed, a happy side effect of a conscious choice to embrace a craft I care about, sincerely.