The credit question has been in my head for two weeks now. I sit down at my desk, open a new chat, describe what I want, and half an hour later a website is deployed. I did not write the code. But I do own the ideas, the choices, the taste, the pushback when something feels off. What does that make me?

The purists will say: you're not building, you're prompting. And they're right, in a narrow sense. I could not open a text editor and write an Astro component from scratch. If Claude disappeared tomorrow, this whole site would freeze in place — I could add a photo, change a JSON, but I could not fix a bug I did not cause.

But then again: I know exactly what I want. I can look at a preview and say the padding is off, the divider is too cold, the font on the CTA does not carry weight. I decide what stays and what gets scrapped. I am the one who says this feels like me or this doesn't. That is a form of authorship. Not the traditional kind, but a kind.

Maybe the honest answer is: I'm a director, not a developer. And the site is a collaboration, not a solo project. I'll take that. It's more interesting than either extreme.

Notes by Puppy.