Probably a human could put a copyright on a prompt (that would be the "source" and the LLM would be a compiler or interpreter) and the generated code would be derivative of the prompt and any inputs.
It would probably get into whether the prompt itself is considered copyrightable. There is some threshold for that since I have heard some patches are considered insignificant and uncopyrightable.
This sort of translation is probably well trodden the status of something like "Translate Jules Verne's 'Vingt Mille Lieues sous Les Mers' to English" has plenty of predicates.
In terms of images, this seems more like a translation. "Translate this photo into the style of George Seurat". Whether George Seurat would have a copyright claim is not as clear but it seems pretty intuitive that the result is a derivative of the photo.
Checkout PythonCall.jl and juliacall (on the python side). Not to mention that now you can literally write python wrappers of Julia compiled libraries like you would c++ ones.
> you can literally write python wrappers of Julia compiled libraries like you would c++ ones
Yes, please. What do I google? Why can't julia compile down to a module easily?
No offense but once you learn to mentally translate between whiteboard math and numpy... it's really not that hard. And if you were used to Matlab before Mathworks added a jit you were doing the same translation to vectored operations because loops are dog slow in Matlab (coincidentally Octave is so much better than Matlab syntax wise).
And again python has numba and maybe mojo, etc. Because julia refused to fill the gap. I don't understand why there's so much friction between julia and python. You should be able to trivially throw a numpy array at julia and get a result back. I don't think the python side of this is holding things back. At least back in the day there was a very anti-python vibe from julia and the insistence that all the things should be re-implemented in julia (webservers etc) because julia was out to prove it was more than a numerical language. I don't know if that's changed but I doubt it. Holy wars don't build communities well.
My impression is people build very fragile Rube Goldberg devices on top of the models and those things break. That's not to say anything is wrong about the Rube Goldberg machines! They're very interesting and do new things (and they help me understand how things work). I'm just saying that there's probably a significant misattribution about where the fragility exists.
I sort of agree with this about cognitive load. I'm somewhat new (started dipping my toes around July) but use Claude code heavily now. I did spend a lot of time playing with configuring it at first and creating agents etc. But I have a weird setup where I have three computers that I work on and at one point I realized vanilla Claude Code had adopted the things I was doing as defaults (and improved on them). So I have sort of declared a configuration bankruptcy and just use the recommended things. The only things I still do are things that help both Claude and I keep track of things (md files describing decisions and context of files).
[I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand]
> I still haven't figured out MCP or how/why to use them or why to bother. You run servers. I guess. It's too complex for my smol brain to understand
I know this is self-deprecating humor, but you do NOT have a smol brain: MCP servers are not as needed anymore now that Claude Code supports "Skills". They are also very token hungry as their spec is not lazy-loaded like the skills.
It was / and still is very useful if you collaborate with other engineers or want to perform operations in a non-stochastic fashion.
MCP servers are a way to expose a set of APIs (openAPI spec) to an LLM to perform the listed operations in a deterministic fashion (including adding some auditing, logging, etc). LLMs are fine-tuned for tool calling, so they do it really well and consistently.
Examples:
- Documentation / Glossary: MCP server that runs somewhere that reads a specific MD file or database that is periodically updated: think "what are my team members working on" / "let me look up what this means in our internal wiki".
- Gating operations behind authentication: a MCP server that is connected to your back office and allows you to upgrade a customer's plan, list existing customers, surface current. Super useful if you're a solo-founder for example.
It's more like you want Claude to interact with X, and you go to see if there's an MCP server for it.
Claude could use the API directly but most MCP now comes with OAuth so you can let it act as you, in case API keys are hard to come by or chargeable. Sometimes with a good skill or a preconfigured CLI tool skills can be just as good if not far more powerful than an MCP server.
But the trigger you'd look for to decide to use an MCP is 'i wish Claude could access X'. My top examples:
- pulling designs from figma to implement them
- fetching ticket context for a job from JIRA
- getting a stack trace to investigate from Sentry
If you haven't grokked MCP yet don't bother now; it's on the way out. Instead do learn to write an AGENT.md file (create a CLAUDE.md file to point to it) then list all the tools you have at its disposal. It will probably know how to use them; it just needs to be told what's available.
I definitely relate with your sentiment and I like your term "configuration bankruptcy"
on MCP, the mental model that clicked for me is "giving claude access to tools it can call" so that instead of copy pasting from your database or API, claude can just... query it
Nice way to put it. Skills feel great for shaping how Claude works inside a repo, while MCP really shines when you want it to talk to “live” systems : databases, test runs, CI, all that external state.
I've not explicitly used skills or MCP, but have had zero issues with Claude calling apis via curl as an example. I'm not sure what the MCP server or skill is actually enabling at this point. If I wanted CC to talk to SQL Server, I'd have it open a nix-env with the tools needed to talk to the database. One of my primary initial claude.md entries has to do with us running on NixOS and that temporarily installing tools is trivial and it should do things in the NixOS way whenever possible. Since then it has just worked with practically everything I've thrown at it. Very rarely do I see it trying to use a tool that isn't installed anymore. CC even uses my local vaultwarden where I have a collection of credentials shared with it. All driven through claude.md.
I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
It would probably get into whether the prompt itself is considered copyrightable. There is some threshold for that since I have heard some patches are considered insignificant and uncopyrightable.
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