[Beej's Bit Bucket
⚡ Tech and Programming Fun](../..)
Beej's Bit Bucket
⚡ Tech and Programming Fun
2026-03-12
On Making
I made this!
TLDR: I gain a lot of fulfillment by making things. I don't consider
things built by others at my request to be made by me, and are therefore
much less fulfilling. And then I feel sad. This article starts strong
and then heads off into the weeds.
There have been a lot of pieces written about what I'll call "the AI dev
schism" And I think there's a lot of truth to those:
Loss of the craft, coding things by hand
Loss of low-level problem-solving
Loss of fun
Gain of high-level problem-solving
Getting through back-burnered projects
Gain of fun
We'll just grant those as being correct for various developers. But
there's something else that troubles me.
Backstory before we get going, so you can get a better idea of my
perspective:
I'm a Gen-X hacker; I cut my teeth 80s microcomputer era.
I hold a BS and MS in CS.
I have 20 years industry experience, (Hewlett-Packard, startups,
cofounder, Activision, etc.).
CS instructor for the last 9 years, now at Oregon State
University-Cascades.
I'm 65% Doom on the AI-Utopia/Doom scale.
I'm a Claude Code user sometimes.
I code by hand sometimes.
My father taught philosophy at a community college for 35 years. This
might help explain the latter part of this blog entry.
I'm going to use "AI" to mean "Generative AI and LLMs" in this essay.
Sorry, veterans of so many AI winters.
Interlude!
Before we begin, I'd like to share with you a bit of my latest sci-fi
novel. Some of you might unaware that, in addition to Beej's
Guides, I also write science fiction.
[Beej's
Guides](https://beej.us/guide/)
Kael pressed his back against the shattered bulkhead, plasma scoring
the air centimeters from his face. The Vorrkai assault drones had
anticipated their route through the lower decks and now Rin was
bleeding through her jacket sleeve and old Maret couldn't stop
coughing from the vented coolant still hazing the corridor. Kael
counted the pulse-intervals between shots. Three seconds. Maybe four.
That was all the universe was offering him.
Then he saw it: the maintenance shaft behind the collapsed generator
housing, its grate blown half-open by the same explosion that had
caved in their original exit. It was tight. It was ugly. It ran
directly over the Vorrkai's forward position, which was either the
most dangerous path imaginable or the last one they'd ever think to
watch. Kael grabbed Maret's collar and pointed without a word. The old
man's eyes went wide, then hard. He nodded. Rin was already moving.
Kael came last, returning fire blind around the bulkhead corner, not
to hit anything, just to make noise, and to give the drones something
thermal to track while his people scrambled into the dark. A bolt
caught the generator housing and the whole structure groaned, raining
sparks down into the shaft on top of them. He hauled himself in, knees
burning on the torn metal, and pulled the grate closed behind him with
a sound he was certain every Vorrkai unit on the deck had heard. In
the black ahead, Rin's hand found his wrist. Move, her grip said. Now.
And so they did.
—Excerpt from The Vorrkai Interval, by Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall
And, in my now-copious spare time I make art! This is a woodcut, painted
in pastels, showing some of my favorite subjects.
Mirrors of the Machine by
Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall, $1300.
Carpentry? You bet I dabble! I rebuilt my front deck recently. The old
one was rotting out, so I grabbed a bunch of cedar and put it together.
I'd been meaning to do it for a while, but couldn't find the time.
And, finally, here's some of the code I wrote for a TUI adventure
roguelike:
I'm an extremely prolific polymath, I'm sure you'd agree!
I Am Uncomfortable
I don't like lying. And yet I feel, dear reader, I have misled you. Yes,
all that has been created (including my deck) and I was the initiator of
all that creation. But I don't really feel like I made any of it. I'm
uncomfortable claiming that I did so.
Since you are certainly aware by now that all of the above is
AI-generated (except my deck, which was created by skilled, paid
craftsmen), perhaps you feel a little bit of discomfort with me claiming
credit for doing those things, too.
However, I don't think everyone feels this way. I know many people who
ask contractors to build things and they phrase it like they built it.
"I put in a new front deck," they'd say, even though other people did
all the work. Personally, I feel that's misleading. I'm more of a "I had
a new front deck put in" kind of person.
And when I do have Claude create something for me, I just can't say
that I made it. Other people can, but I just can't. Again, I'm more
prone to say, "I had this code built for me." I don't even feel
comfortable MIT-licensing that (not-for-hire) work, if that's even
legally possible. I just Unlicense it all.
As a manager, I'd never say that I built a product. "My team built
this," I'd say. And as a manager of LLMs: "My Agents built this."
And that, for me, has very little weight in terms of making.
I don't feel like I did anything. And I like doing things. I find
pride in doing things.
Completing projects is great. I love completing projects. Capitalists
love completing projects. Real artists ship.
But having others complete projects I initiated is entirely less
fulfilling to me.
It's not just the loss of the craft and the problem-solving challenge
and whatever else. It's the loss of making.
What Did I Make Recently?
My wife wanted a no-frills flash card system for learning Spanish. "I
just want a thing where I can put the words I want in a spreadsheet and
then see it on flash cards." A prompt!
So I wrote it. By hand. I did use Claude to learn some basics, like the
easiest way to get the data out of a Google Sheet (spoiler: it's the CSV
endpoint), but I told it to generate no code.
Didn't take long. Only about 50x longer than it would have taken Claude
to do it.
But I can put my name on that code and say that I made it. Was it a lot
of code? No. Was it groundbreaking and amazing? Certainly not. But I'm
infinitely more proud of that code than anything I've had Claude write,
because I'm not capable of being proud of the latter.
And my wife wouldn't go to her book club and say, "I wrote a flash card
system to study Spanish." Admittedly, part of this would be because she
didn't want to appear a geek, but mostly it's because it's untrue, even
though she initiated the process.
What About The Art and Craft of Prompting?
After all, you create the prompts, don't you? You said you were proud of
doing things. Isn't that doing a thing? And since so much got done,
isn't it even more of doing a thing?
I don't disagree. And I do agree that there is skill here in some
important ways.
You have to apply vision.
You have to apply judgment.
You have to apply communication skill.
You have to apply prompting skill.
Not all prompts are equally effective. Not all users of AI are as
effective as one another. There's a very human contribution to be made
here.
But the skill is in effectively asking someone to make something for
you.
"Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you
want done because he wants to do it."
—Dwight D.
Eisenhower
And I'm the kind of person who really misses the making of software.
And prompting for software, to me, isn't the same as making the
software. It's the same as asking someone else to make it.
What About Compilers, Smartypants?
Isn't it just turtles all the way down?
For any given C or Rust program, did I write that program? I wrote it in
C. I didn't write any machine code. The computer wrote that.
There's something different in my mind about that. I'm not sure if it's
the mathematically-precise relationship between the C and the machine
code...? And yet that's not spelled out. I'm relying on some hacker's
deep knowledge of the CPU to generate that magnificent set of optimized
instructions when I stupidly divide something by seven. And it's not
deterministic, strictly, in that Clang and GCC emit different
instructions. What about different platforms? The C is portable and the
machine code is not. Did I write that program that's running on Windows
even though I personally only ever built it on Linux?
Going further in the murky gray, what if I instruct an LLM to be a C
compiler and emit assembly code for some platform?
Let's try:
Claude says:
OK, clanker, but does it work?
Well, holy golden ratios! It even used XOR to set exit status 0, the
cheeky devil!
So did I write that program? Yes. I feel I did. (I actually did
hand-code the Fibonacci thing just now—I've done it a million times for
classes.) I feel I wrote the program even though I didn't write the
assembly, which is the program that actually runs! The LLM wrote that!
Technically, it's the machine code that runs, but going from assembly to
machine code now we're really getting into the land of strict,
brainless, mathematically-precise translation, which I feel doesn't take
away from the act of making any more than using a hammer to drive nails
does.
What's the real difference in that gray area? I'm not sure. I think it
hinges on something that has to do with making versus asking to be
made, even if that line isn't particularly clear.
"I know it when I see it."
—US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart
Things that I do:
Write C code and run it.
Use a hammer to drive nails.
Use an assembler to convert assembly to machine code.
Things that I ask others to do at my command (inspired by a nice
capitalistic investment):
Write a piece of software.
Build me a deck.
Paint me a picture.
When I have ChatGPT create a painting, I don't feel like I painted it.
When I use the hammer, I don't feel like I'm asking the hammer to do
something for me. Same with a C compiler or assembler.
And yet I just had Claude compile some C code right up there. Was that
me writing C code and running it? Or was it asking something to write
software for me? I have no doubt I could have prompted Claude with an
English description of what I wanted and gotten the same output.
Is it because AIs seem human? You are asking them to do things in
imprecise, human language. They respond in human ways and do the things
you ask. And the relationship we are used to in those circumstances is
more one of manager-report than one of colleague and peer. Whereas our
relationship with a compiler is more similar to that of one with a
hammer.
And yet... looking into that gray area makes me feel more confident that
telling the AI to make something for me actually is an act of
creation. What if I had an AI-powered hammer and asked it to hit a nail
for me? What's the difference? But at that point, I can't say that I
hammered it. It is important to me, this difference. Why?
By now, dear reader, I suspect we're both running out of steam and maybe
we should leave it here to ponder.
I feel it's appropriate to conclude with some classic DNA:
"All I wanted to say," bellowed the computer, "is that my circuits are
now irrevocably committed to calculating the answer to the Ultimate
Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything." He paused and
satisfied himself that he now had everyone's attention, before
continuing more quietly. "But the program will take me a little while
to run."
Fook glanced impatiently at his watch.
"How long?" he said.
"Seven and a half million years," said Deep Thought.
Lunkwill and Fook blinked at each other.
"Seven and a half million years!" they cried in chorus.
"Yes," declaimed Deep Thought, "I said I'd have to think about it,
didn't I? And it occurs to me that running a program like this is
bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole
area of philosophy in general. Everyone's going to have their own
theories about what answer I'm eventually going to come up with, and
who better to capitalize on that media market than you yourselves? So
long as you can keep disagreeing with each other violently enough and
maligning each other in the popular press, and so long as you have
clever agents, you can keep yourselves on the gravy train for life.
How does that sound?"
The two philosophers gaped at him.
"Bloody hell," said Majikthise, "now that is what I call thinking.
Here, Vroomfondel, why do we never think of things like that?"
"Dunno," said Vroomfondel in an awed whisper; "think our brains must
be too highly trained, Majikthise."
—The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
My Actual Contributions
As a post-script, here are my applied skills in the first part of this
article.
Science fiction (honestly, the result was so vomitous I feel genuinely
embarrassed having signed my name to it):
Write three paragraphs of sci-fi. Setting: We're in the middle of the
novel at one of the pivotal fight sequences. The hero (choose a heroic
sci-fi name) is leading two other refugees out under heavy laser fire
from the baddies (choose an evil-sounding sci-fi name for this group).
Our heroes have just been pinned down, but now see a way out.
What's the name of this novel?
Paintings and artwork:
Generate an image that shows the following: a woodcut, but with pastel
coloring. Two wizardly computers hackers, one on the left of the frame
and one on the right, facing each other, computers between them, both
head down and focused. The left and right sides should be
complementary and opposite colors to show that both sides are the
same, yet different.
What's the name of this painting?
Ultima-likes:
I'm thinking of a game like Ultima I, except with a TUI. Visually, I
was thinking of a 3x3 grid of characters per map cell. Some of them
would be animated, e.g. the water on the ocean cells. And the map on
the screen would be 7x7 map cells (or whatever Ultima I had)
It would be also like Ultima I in that it was fantasy.
The world should be procedurally-generated maybe with perlin noise.
And the monsters should roam randomly, though they will be of prebuilt
classes (no need to procedurally-generate monsters on the fly).
There should be some kind of DnD-ish stats, as well. No classes--just
a general player is fine.
I'd like it in Rust using Ratatui. Color.
And I'd like the code well structured, with good separation between
the UI and the game logic, as well as good code directory layout.
Carpentry:
Please replace my front deck.
Though I really did drive that nail into that piece of wood. I needed a
picture to open with.
Uses of em dash within this piece are deliberate. Vim digraph: ^K-M.