On craft and automation
excerpted from an email conversation about creating with LLM-enabled tools
I think there is probably a different kind of enjoyment that we could learn to feel when creating with such a heavy level of intermediation.
As I've gotten later in my (still pretty short) career I've gotten a deeper understanding of what some of my founder/leader friends call "physics of business". In the same way that building software is about organizing software abstractions in just the right arrangement to make it easy to reason about and improve, there's a skill to organizing people, economic incentives, communications, and networks of trust in a way that makes the whole people system (companies, partnerships) possible to debug and predict and improve.
Just as good software engineers seem to find deep craft in designing elegant software systems that hum and perform reliably, I've found good people-systems-organizers can find similar craft in designing people systems / companies that hum along to do big things in the world. There is a kind of elegant physics to teams that are working really really well, and that physics is often carefully balanced by a system designer or many.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that there may be a craft to building software at a distance, with things like LLM agents chugging along beneath your hands, but that feels to me like a distinct kind of joy from working directly in the medium of code. And just as we shouldn't expect the same people to enjoy both coding and managing all of the time, we shouldn't expect people to enjoy doing both coding "by themselves" and coding "with a team of agents" the same. And I think that is OK. And I think the people like you and me who like the craft of working directly with the system will find ways to accelerate ourselves in our craft.
I was joking with a friend earlier today that, if you can't work as fast as the best "agent-using" engineers using just code autocomplete, your codebase probably needs to be better designed. I kind of do mean it though — in well written codebases you can say a lot with a few words. Similarly, good writers don't need an LLM to write hundreds of words quickly because they know how to say the same in a dozen perfect words.
Maybe the question I'll leave here at the end is: how can we better organize our creative environments so we can say a lot with a few movements of our hands?
A founder friend of mine working on Flora told me about a mission statement I always found really inspiring — he wants to allow artists to "speak beauty into existence." I love this phrase because all of the focus here on about the precision of the words, and the ease with which the words can conjure ideas into being. There has got to be a way to get there by finding better ways to speak of beauty, rather than by mechanizing the means of beauty-production. It is a harder problem; language and culture moves at the speed of people rather than of computers. But I think it is what really yields new understanding about the world, and where real progress as a culture is made.