I wrote a WordPress plugin the other day. Nothing complex. Just a little tool that I couldn’t find a solution for in the official WordPress plugin repository collection. So I whipped up a few lines of code and installed it and solved a small little problem with my website.

Easy peasy, right?

Only I didn’t write it. I asked Claude^[1] to write it.

But also I did write it. Kinda.

Or… did I?

Claude put my name in the author credits, after all, so Claude is acting as though I wrote it, and true enough it was my idea and Claude would not have come up with the idea on its own—I don’t think so anyhow, so maybe I did have some guiding hand, y’know the same way my former managers often took credit when a project they oversaw but did no actual coding work on launched.

So was that it? I managed the little plugin project: I prompted it, called it forth and…

Or.

Look, who the hell gets credit for this anymore?  

I mean, I sat on the couch that night wondering if Claude had invented the software whole cloth, hallucinated a WordPress plugin for me, or maybe it just picked out pieces of something it had copied from somewhere else… but then who wrote that code? And then also that code because it was tied into WordPress might have been open source anyhow, so maybe that’s what the author intended… or? 

Credit is important. Ownership is the basis of our little civil capitalism-focused society. Things get rowdy when we don’t understand who made stuff.

So this get’s stupidly complicated very quickly. And it kinda begs the question: if we don’t understand credit, how will we understand blame when things go wrong?