I think the arguments in this article/blog/etc. aren't as strong as they ought to be to make the point the author tries to make. My formal education was in mus

I think the arguments in this article/blog/etc. aren't as strong as they ought to be to make the point the author tries to make. My formal education was in music composition and film scoring specifically. I never once, even then considered myself "an artist" or thought that I was pursuing art. I did consider myself a craftsman: I was learning a style of music composition where I was expected to realize someone else's vision for their purposes. One could argue that the filmmaker was an artist and the film a work of art, but as the composer my job was to produce a work product that conformed to a specification as directed by someone else. I cared about creativity, quality, and having my product fit for purpose. I do not see the craftsman as inferior to the artist, but the goals are different and in a medium such as film you must have both artists and craftsmen (and sure sometimes a single person is both, but that's not a requirement). When I am a programmer I see myself in exactly the same way. Professionally, I'm paid to satisfy someone else's need for automation/data wrangling. The solution I deliver is a work of craftsmanship, not of art. I will be creative in exercising my craft: often I'm just given a statement of the problem that needs solving and the solution design and development are left to me. I may find unique capabilities or processes which are better than those anyone envisioned... but at the end of the day I am creating an expression of my craft, not trying to achieve a deeper artistic goal. Trying to achieve an artistic goal with programming, at least in most professional programming, would likely lead to some sort of malpractice: the craft of the product diminished in time, cost, or features to gain an unasked for message. Another issue I take with this article is that it confuses the tools with the result. Today, artists that paint use a large variety of brushes, spatulas, and other tools and paints which have all the benefits of being formulated with the knowledge of modern chemistry for stability, texture, and durability over time. Would the artist of old be justified in suggesting that using the new tools make you not an artist since you don't have to control for the limitations of the past? As a composer, I used sample players, sequencers, notation programs, and DAWs, even when writing for a conventional orchestra. True Beethoven didn't have these tools, but does this mean a modern composer that might use the same tools as me don't produce art... even if the final result is played by a traditional orchestra? I find LLMs to be in this category. When producing art (or craft as I discussed), the final product is ultimately what is to be judged... unless you find programming as being more about performance art where the journey is more the product that the final result. Anyway, as a programmer I absolutely use LLMs. Sometimes they help, sometimes not. Even at my most creative, I don't find developing a good regex or a shell script something I care to be creative in approaching. How I apply the LLM, my judgement of the quality of what it produces, or whether I think the kind of "lowest common denominator" approach an LLM will produce is appropriate or not in a given situation still puts me and my creativity plainly at the center of producing a craft-full, and perhaps artful, product.