2/6/2026 at 9:23:16 PM
> Recently I was listening to music and doing some late night vibe coding when I had an idea. I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. So I wondered, maybe Claude Code does?Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all. Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no shortcut.
by ramon156
2/6/2026 at 11:05:39 PM
Author of the article here. Appreciate your sentiment here, but my goal wasn’t trying to make a hit song or shortcut the obvious very significant time and effort that goes into creating any sort of art. It was meant as a fun experiment to try to highlight a feeling that we’re barely scratching the surface of the breadth of things that agentic coding may be able to tackle. I’ve been learning guitar and taking painting classes in my free time, but it’s not my profession nor something I was encouraged to do when I was young. Thanks for the comment, it’s helpful to see ways I can improve my writing styleby jshchnz
2/7/2026 at 1:09:33 AM
I've got to come to the OPs defense as well. This was a remarkable demonstration of Claude performing a task thats probably very out of distribution. This would not be interesting if it were a music generation model or program, it's interesting because this is not what Claude code was explicitly trained for. The fact that it generated waveforms from scratch and built up from there is really amazing. Your cynicism was applied before even reading the article.by jablongo
2/7/2026 at 2:02:33 AM
How is it out of distribution? There are plenty of Python libraries for sound and music generation; it would be surprising if they were not in the training set.There's a general pattern becoming evident of people being surprised with AI capabilities because they didn't realise (and none of us do fully) how broad the training set is, the variety of human output AI companies were able to harvest.
Even if all AI does is remix and regurgitate, there's a segment of the audience that is going to find some particular output brilliantly creative and totally original.
by kranner
2/7/2026 at 2:28:17 AM
This sounds like keygen midi music, which wouldn't necessarily be out of distribution.by prodigycorp
2/6/2026 at 11:05:46 PM
I've gotta come to OPs defense here. In the age of Suno indistinguishable-from-human-quality hits, this whole endeavor was an art piece and more interesting than most human OR AI music I've heard in the past year.The medium was using the "wrong" tool for the job, which creative musicians do on a regular basis. And the output was so cool, it really felt like a relic from a different era even though it's hyper-modern.
by arcticfox
2/7/2026 at 1:44:18 AM
Yes, you do need to read further. The “no artistic talent” was clearly a throwaway comment and a lighthearted excuse to play around with Claude. Not everyone wants to become a maestro.by reassess_blind
2/6/2026 at 9:38:29 PM
Yeah, it's just weird to expect people to find AI-generated art interesting when the person generating it has no unique take or talent. This is the worst case where there is absolutely 0 creativity in the process and the created "art" reflects that imo.by altmanaltman
2/6/2026 at 9:46:08 PM
I don't find it interesting in an artistic way, but I do find it very interesting from an "AI experiment" angle.by Marha01
2/6/2026 at 9:59:12 PM
I don't get what the "AI experiment" angle here is? The fact that AI can write python code that makes sounds? And if the end product isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile, what is the point?by altmanaltman
2/7/2026 at 1:13:38 AM
I have a deep background in music and I think that while the creation was super basic, the way the output was so unconstrained (written by a model fine-tuned for coding), is really interesting. Listen to that last one and tell me it couldn't belong on some tv show. I've had always issues with any ai generated music because of the constraints and the way the output is so derivative. This was different to me.by jablongo
2/6/2026 at 10:34:26 PM
What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile?(Most of it isn't.)
Art is on a sliding scale from "Fun study and experiment for the sake of it" to "Expresses something personal" to "Expresses something collective" to "A cultural landmark that invents a completely new expressive language, emotionally and technically."
All of those options are creatively worthwhile. Or maybe none of them are.
Take your pick.
by TheOtherHobbes
2/6/2026 at 10:52:22 PM
> What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile?Because it is a human making it, expressing something is always worthwhile to the individual on a personal level. Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very least. Which is why a lot of people just find enjoyment in creating art even if its not commercially succesful.
But in this case, the criteria changes for the final product (the music being produced). It is not artistically worthwhile to anyone, not even the creator.
So no, a person with no talent (self claim) using an LLM to create art is much less worthwhile than a human being with no/any talent creating art on their own at all times by default.
by altmanaltman
2/7/2026 at 1:34:10 AM
>Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very leastI think that's the point though. What op did was rewarding to themselves, and I found it more enjoyable than a lot of music I've heard that was made by humans. So don't be a gatekeeper on enjoyment.
by kevin42
2/7/2026 at 7:56:06 AM
How am I a gatekeeper? I provided my own opinions; you are free to enjoy what you want or disagree with me. If you want to get into an objective discussion of why you find it enjoyable more than human works or what is art, we can do that but I do not like the personal slights.by altmanaltman
2/7/2026 at 3:46:18 AM
I think you're mistaking the .wav as the final product, whereas instead it's really the .html blog post and this discussion.by pizza
2/7/2026 at 7:54:26 AM
I was discussing it on the basis of music with the commentator and the actual product. Sure if you want to go all Andy Kaufman then yeah the .html and this discussion is art but I wasn't talking about it in the original context of the conversation.by altmanaltman
2/7/2026 at 12:00:05 AM
At least it wrote a song, instead of stably-diffusing static into entire tracks from its training data. I can take those uninteresting notes, plug them into a DAW and build something worthwhile. I can only do this with Suno-generated stems after much faffing about with transposing and fixing rhythms, because Suno doesn't know how to write music, it just creates waveforms.AI tools are decent at helping with code because they're editing language in a context. AI tools are terrible at helping with art because they are operating on the entirely wrong abstraction layer (in this case, waveforms) instead of the languages humans use to create art, and it's just supremely difficult to add to the context without destroying it.
by tadfisher
2/7/2026 at 1:59:32 AM
I just want to know what's in there. It doesn't need to be artistic at all. They put terabytes of data into the training process and I want to know what came through.by smallerize