Writing vs Programming

You can't prompt an LLM to draw something and come up with the same thing you would have drawn yourself. Same with stories. But you can prompt an LLM to write a function and come up with the same function you would've written.

This must point to a fundamental difference between drawing (or painting, whathaveyou), writing, and coding. That difference might be that relationship between input and output. In programming, they're separate. You have the code, and you have the GUI. But in art and writing, the input and output are one and the same. When you write a story, there's no build step. You don't compile it and transform the words into other words. There's just the words.

In programming, you can change the input without affecting the output. You can change the code of your app and come up with the same result. For example, you can refactor a block of code into a function, then call the function. The result is the same, but the code is different. You can't do that with writing. If you change some the words in an essay, it's a different essay, because the input and output are the same.