5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.
If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you see steps 2-4 as mostly a chore. If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. I don't ever need to show any code to anyone. In fact, most of the time when programming I do steps 2 and 3 and even skip 4. I don't even finish! I work weeks on something until I lose interest, and I know that in order to even run it, it would be several more weeks. A PoC is enough. Or just a half one. It's just code-to-structure-thoughts, not to create anything finished.
The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. If you're a product owner or CEO, you might work strictly at steps 1,5. Then steps 2-4 are the managerial/architectural steps. If you're a very senior IC at a large company, you might work at this level, without actually doing much coding. Only the inner most step (3) is the manual creation of source code. Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.
The problem as I see it is that I enjoy step 3. And LLMs are good at step 3 almost exclusively. So they just pick the best bit of this dish, and leave me with the rest.
If you're an entrepreneurial type, the LLM appears to take the _worst_ bit of the work from you. Great.
There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work.
Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little), the programmers that (indirectly) helped build it are told they're fools for doing so, and threatened by losing their status if they don't adapt to the "entrepreneurial way" (well, the full promise is "you'll lose it anyway, but if you cooperate in stuffing sama's pockets then maybe you get to keep it a bit longer").
So what really surprises me is not that people are upset but that so few are.
I'm not concerned. Never in my life have I experienced stakeholders just going "hmm, yes - this is enough software for our purposes - we won't be needing your services any more".
There's always another feature that can be implemented or a new problem to be solved. Tools only ever accelerated the pace at which we were able to follow this insatiable hunger for more software.
Right now people are getting fired left and right because all the money that used to be spent on staff now goes to build more data centers and also because cutting corporate expenses is in vogue now.
This too shall pass and with demographics as they are and young people getting discouraged from pursuing this field I believe long term my position is safe.
Also a huge chunk of what AI company CEOs say is just pure bullshit that they only say because they need that sweet, sweet investor money. Bullshit writes a check that eventually must be cashed.
The impression I get is a lot of people are very upset. Most of the good programmers I know are just burnt out even talking about this, and are irritated with the people invading our profession pretending they know what they're doing while they don't.
I remember talking to the biggest AI booster at my last job. When I got him one on one, he admitted that he actually doesn't like AI and that it terrifies him, but he wanted to be seen as pro AI to keep his job. Fair. (Sadly, like me, he was also laid off, so I guess it didn't work)
Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt to the ground and replaced by robots than to have it become a status profession like lawyering.
100% agreed, especially that last line. What I do not understand is why so many people are entirely okay with this change. I'm not interested in working with LLM's and after having been forced to work with LLM's at my current job, I can pretty confidently say that this will not end well for most of these companies. The people in charge pushing for this new tech do not understand the rammifications, nor do they understand the risk they are exposing themselves too. My boss expects more and more productivity with each passing day, while questioning why I'm not using as many tokens each week as he does. The software quality has gone down the drain, and it's beyond tiring that I have to pretend that my boss is just as competent at coding with his slop machine as I am after spending the last decade learning how to code, both as a hobby and for work.
It is upsetting to see our work stolen and our livelihoods threatened by a group of (mostly) incompetent, arrogant assholes who are convinced that the "computer that lies" is somehow a better programmer than the programmers it stole knowledge from. I've already started looking for a way out of this industry, and I'm genuinely worried for the fall-out this will have for the tech industry and the economy as a whole.
>Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little
I think people underestimate just how much users scorn buggy, flaky technology.
The main issue with solid, reliable technology which Just Works is that users have relatively few reliable cues to distinguish that from vibe coded crap.
A vibe coded piece of shit looks very similar to a well engineered product made with care. That's a problem which needs to be solved.
self hosted communities are reacting to this by trying to detect signals of if a product is vibe coded but that in and of itself is still quite a poor quality cue.
This is unfortunately just the result of technological progress. People for centuries have crafted extremely hard to acquire skills over decades only to find their labour being made completely worthless due to automation or better alternatives disrupting their industry.
We can get mad about it, but it just is what it is. Ultimately for most people the loss of these jobs are a net-benefit because it's the result of better or cheaper alternatives.
The thing that worries me more specifically about AI is that it has the potential not to just disrupt an industry, or handful of industries, but in theory everything.
If machines are faster, strong, and more intelligent than humans, then you don't need human workers for anything. In the same way machines suddenly becoming faster and stronger than horses meant that the role of the horse in labour dropped rapidly during the industrial revolution.
It's not clear how civilisation functions if humans become effectively useless and the only thing of value is one's ownership of wealth producing assets.
Still, there's really no point in thinking about how we stop this. Humans are humans and we'll do the stupid thing then try to deal with the consequences after the fact. All regular people should be doing now is prepping for this outcome.
It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line? No, we haven't figured out how to fairly compensate everyone -- the frontiers aren't even trying. Spotify does at least try in their domain (and fails badly). Regardless of how the entitled get paid, the plagiarism label isn't fair and is diametrically opposed to Fair Use. Fair Use allows the commons to build on its history. Those against are typically parroting IP conglomerate conservatism and localized greed. I see immense benefit from the distillation of all available knowledge with an LLM interface. A recent article posted here says it perfectly "AI rewards expertise". I see vast benefits -- am willing to pay a significant monthly fee -- and sense that many are simply blind to and inarticulate about the growing force multiplier potential of modern AI.
This is also missing step 6: when your solution breaks in production or needs to be extended.
Having done step 2 & 3 by hand is the difference between being able to fix/extend it quickly with no further damage or fumbling around like an idiot and sometimes breaking more stuff in the process.
>Having done step 2 & 3 by hand is the difference between being able to fix/extend it quickly with no further damage or fumbling around like an idiot and sometimes breaking more stuff in the process.
Plenty of shitty spaghetti code has been written by human hands.
LLMs can write good, maintainable code too, but they need to be kept on a shorter leash with focused goals.
It's funny, because I would consider myself a tinkerer (and I have a large backlog of pre-LLM programs), but the coding itself isn't the main thing that brings me joy, it's the phase 2 and phase 4 combo: figure out how to solve it, see whether your solution was correct (and actually use the program for its purpose). The actual implementation is extraneous to that.
To carry forward the sudoku analogy, I care about figuring out which numbers go where, and whether I was correct, I don't care about the mechanical part of actually penciling-in the answers (coding).
I'd say, in this analagy, step two is filling in half the numbers by gut feeling, and then three is seeing how wrong the guesses were and actually solving it.
3 doesn’t matter that much (unless it’s part of 2: new language or new libraries), and that’s why I don’t use LLM for it. Because LLM forces you to pay attention, yes you can have something that works somehow in one go, but the code makes you queasy (too complex for the purpose, or just weird).
So I do 3 because coding is like writing English for me (which is my 3rd language). I don’t care much for it, because it’s neither hard no easy. It’s just mechanical.
The type of problem also makes a massive difference.
- Writing my tiny hobby gameboy emulator? Heck, Why I'd let Claude take away the fun part of implementing new features and then see Super Mario Land start and run step by step?
- Debugging why a legacy Wordpress store with more than 50 active plugins is returning an error 500 just to some random customers? Claude can 100% take the wheel, I'm good.
Here's where the important difference is: unless you actually finished the wordpress thing, or ever had active users etc, it would never have become a maintenance burden. If it's not fun to maintain, I burn it.
For me, the reason I don't have that is because I never ship anything. I never want to maintain that. I never cared about solving an _actual_ business problem, making a dollar, or pleasing a user. As a tinkerer I must be extremely careful not to end up completing or delivering anything. Only pain lies down that path...
> If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. [...]
The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps.
Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".
In my opinion the difference between "entrepreneur type" and "programmer type" (and yes: it can happen that both of these types work in the reciprocal job) is rather:
- People of the programmer type see solving problems as their primary goal. Satisfying customers just serves the purpose that these people pay money so that they can continue working on solving problems.
- People of the entrepreneur see satisfying customers as their primary goal. Programming is just a means to an end.
Yeah. I enjoy 2-4 most, 1 is the next, and 5 the least. I think the litmus test here is "if you knew could never deliver this to anyone, make money of it, get recognition for it, or even make it solve one of your own problems you have. Would you still be willing to spend time on it?"
If the answer is "no" you are probably more entrepreneurial than tinkerer. But it's a spectrum.
I enjoy the process of solving problems with LLMs. I understand it's chaotic (what many people call non-deterministic), and that doesn't appeal to some people, but solving problems with statistics is problem solving just the same. Just because medicines don't work with 100% reliability doesn't mean Jonas Salk didn't solve a problem. The same is true with LLM solutions that don't work 100% of the time.
I think most people will come around to this way of thinking once the pro-LLMers stop pretending like the statistics don't exist too (i.e. that ML is the solution to any problem, despite how unreliable it is).
LLMs can be very good at 2. Finding the best architecture, data structures, algorithms, looking on arXiv to see other ways to solve the problem, etc.
You have to work in design mode and stop it from pissing code. Describe the requirements as detailed as possible and refine them based on the responses. It's quite rewarding and helps structure the way you think about the problem.
I have always thought that there are two kinds of programmer, the tinker and the mathematician. The tinker likes to code operating systems and shells, the mathematician likes to code Haskell and Agda. You've updated my belief that there are a third kind, the entrepreneur, which sees programming as a means to an end and would gladly stop programming if possible.
Looking at your ladder, made me think where I fit in and I mostly enjoy steps 1 and 2. The implementation and shipping are big chores to me. Once I know, half in my head, that the problem is solvable and I could see a path towards implementation I loose motivation to continue.
So possibly there are other classes of people, not just either enterpreneur or thinkerer. Thou not sure what this combination is, maybe something more like R&D.
And LLMs give a lot of value here. They allow to quickly do steps 2-3 - "hard and tedious" stuff - to confirm that the thing, in fact, became solvable.
I really like that categorization, but I think you've missed a step (or several): designing and implementing all the extra stuff needed to make it work, but aren't directly related to the problem.
For example, you have an idea for a cool and useful app and you want to put it on a website. You need to figure out hosting, you need to write some copy, you need to do some visual design.
Maybe 3a) Yak shaving?
There are various ways to take shortcuts. For hosting, you can use something super easy like GitHub Pages or Netlify or Cloudflare, or maybe piggyback off an existing site that's already deployed. For both copy and visual design, you can just ask Claude or Codex to do it -- but only if you don't mind having that standard vibe-coded look and feel, all glowing gradients and punchy, mic-dropping text.
Maybe you're including that under 5), ship/deploy/publish, but I read that as being more about scaling, marketing, and making things robust. Even before you reach that stage there's always a bunch of bullshit to work through before you can even reach 4), seeing the solution work for yourself.
Nice analysis. I really love diving into 2 and 3, but I also notice I'm pretty good at 1; at several companies I kept identifying problems we should address, and also how to address them, though quite often they just wanted me to focus on 3 and 4.
Currently I'm in the process of starting my own business solving a problem my last employer underestimated, and I find myself focusing much more on 1 and 5, which I also enjoy, and I use LLMs a lot for 3 and parts of 2. The LLM and I often disagree about 2, but that often results in a better solution than if I'd just trusted either myself or the LLM. I iterate a lot between 2 and 4, letting the LLM do almost the entirety of 3, and advising on 2.
That's not a bad model to view it through, but I would say calling them "phases" instead of something like "activities" creates a false reliance on ordering. In many successful programming projects/products, those five activities occurred simultaneously, or out of order, or in waves of progress along all or some activities. Seldom has it ever been a clean single waterfall pass.
even for an entrepreneur type - you need to understand the technology to get to good enough solution e.g if you don't know shit & just accepted what the llm gave you - u might end up with an unmaintainable mess. the llm might recommend you use some proprietary solution when an open source solution exists that works well for your use case.
plus llms tend to be wordy or make things complex more than necessary.
The thing with programming a computer is that the computer does exactly what you tell it to, so in order to implement something well you need to have a very deep understanding of the problem. And it's that understanding that is valuable.
This is a really useful framing. I also love step 3 and when I delegate it to an LLM it takes the joy out of my work. But where I've found LLMs most useful is steps 1 and 2. They are terrible at steps 1 and 2 on their own, but they have a massive amount of knowledge that can help. I think a human and an LLM working together here is the best scenario.
That's actually a great classification and I've never seen it being laid out like that. I guess it can be useful to know "what kind" of programmer one is.
You are obviously missing the GOTO statement in your list but the other part is hobby projects tend to be architecturally small.
The moment you have more devs architecture becomes the overwhelming concern, and this is why professionally LLM usage explodes since the LLMs can implement bits while the humans work on the actual hard work of making sure they fit together properly in the intended way.
I have encountered a lot of people that view coding as a therapeutic exercise, and they were already a problem pre AI wave, now they are only going to be a hobby at least.
Best explanation I’ve seen. I’m an entrepreneur type. I would fall asleep after two hours of coding to solve a problem. I still remember 100 hours of coding to facilitate a data import into a new application only to realize half my time was wasted because the import library we were using back then didn’t support UTF data (this was a SQL-92 database). I love using an LLM to do the coding.
Personally I think I'm a 1-4 type, and I enjoy 2 but 3 is mostly annoying. LLMs are good at 3 and 3 is the worst part of programming. I don't think that's "manager type". 2 is also what LLMs tend to be bad at, especially the small ones, so there's a lot of value I still add to the process.
Nice analysis! I would perhaps add that LLMs are pretty helpful at (2) in my experience, as long as you don't turn your brain off. (As a Google/SO replacement, mainly.)
I have about three modes, working with LLMs:
A) Just use them for (2), do (3) and (4) myself.
B) Just use them for (2) and (3), but with very fine grained instructions - to the point where it barely saves me time.
C) Use them for (2), (3) and (4), but with this workflow, it quickly degrades into slop for me.
I still get the best results with (A), but for a quick PoC, (C) is hard to beat.
What's hilarious (or sad) is that I see a lot of people throw them at (1) as well, which seems to have a high chance of inducing AI psychosis and creating software nobody understands, let alone needs.
I agree. If you use the AI for (4), it's pretty much guaranteed to hallucinate whatever it wants and then approve it. For small projects, it might be good enough. For anything serious, it's not.
I find I get the best results when I just use it for (3), and sometimes a bit for (2). Going in with at least an idea of how to make it work has the best chance of ending up with a good changeset. And if you already know how to make it work, don't leave it to chance. Tell the LLM what to do, then let it do it.
Regarding (2) figuring out how to do things at a higher level (e.g. the general architecture of an application) is pretty different from figuring out things at a lower level (e.g. how to fill text with a certain gradient in CSS - the stuff where years ago you would have spent hours reading documentation or browsing StackOverflow until you figured it out, if you weren't familiar with the topic). So you could use an LLM just for (2b) and (3) and do the rest yourself.
Most software work is job related and business related. You are paid to work not to enjoy.
Because of this the future of software will most likely be overtaken by AI because the business aspect of it will overtake the enjoyment aspect of it. Why? Because business pays bills, enjoyment does not.
The fact that you are talking about lack of enjoyment on the job is a luxury not many employees can afford.
I might be weird, but I love phases 2 to 5 and I hate phase 1 with a passion. I hate speaking with people to see what their problems are. I want to solve problems, not user surveys. And all the itches I have are either already solved, not itchy enough or too wide / ambitious to approach them solo. If LLMs solved exclusively 1 and told me "this problem is actually valuable, go and solve it", I would be the happiest person in the world. It's not true that ideas are cheap. Or better: ideas themselves are dirty cheap, good ideas are invaluable.
Even if you're entreprenurial, LLMs are useless for this.
You can't go really hard unless you can come up with something people weren't expecting, but when they discover it they want it. You can't just sit around waiting for people to want things properly. That's extremely passive.
The point being, the idea of using LLMs to find what people already passively want is itself flawed, even if you like marketing and selling to people. It's a really fundamental problem with the idea.
While I agree with the premise that there are Thinkers and Shippers, I reject labeling of tinkerers and entrepreneurial. There's nothing entrepreneurial about working for a big business and shipping cool things.
But you're ultimately right, some people want to solve sudokus and some people want to change the world, and the sudoku solvers are really upset that a Sudoku Solver and World Changer 9000 device is widely available, because it spoils the fun they have with sudoku.
Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight faster. People that enjoy chess don't allow you to bring a computer to the chess table. The list is endless and the people that enjoy programming will create rules that force you to program, why shouldn't they? It's their hobby.
Writing code without an LLM is akin to cooking a meal yourself, as opposed to something in between hiring a private chef and pulling a slot machine lever. When I cook a meal for myself or my loved ones, I become deeply familiar with the ingredients and the recipe. I am a good cook. Every decision, small and large, I make myself. Using feedback, I can tweak the components and the process.
However, if I order food and call it my own creation, I’ll be speechless when my nut-allergic friend asks me if I used peanut oil or olive oil. And does it taste good? The end result is subjective, not binary, like your three similes. What if the food sucks? Must I now micromanage the chef? I don’t want to make them cook it again and again, hoping each time it’ll taste little more like how I want it to. I’d rather just cook it myself; I am a good cook, afterall.
Well to me using an LLM is akin to using microwave for food, and programming is getting your hands dirty in the art of cooking. I used to do the latter but the pace is too much, so I'm forced to go for the former. I still miss the days where I can cook myself
This is a good analogy. Also I hate cooking; it feels like a chore and waste of time. Given the means, I prefer to have someone else do it for me so I can focus on more interesting things.
I don't see it the same way. I see it as akin to building a machine which can do the cooking for you. There is a lot of experimentation in terms of how you can construct that machine and how you can set it up, and for some people the payoff is in exactly this process.
My boss tried to make me interested in agentic programming by showing me how "productive" the creator of OpenClaw is.
All I see is a fast food factory. Sure it's interesting that you can produce so much so quickly. But what is produced is endlessly uninteresting to me. It doesn't help that all the harness building is just SEO in disguise. Trial and error.
I don't doubt that agentic programming makes it possible to produce faster, but it also comes at a great cost for me, which is that I largely don't enjoy my job anymore. If I was given the choice between that and halving my salary I would have chosen the latter.
Yeah exactly. My go-to example is that if you enjoy playing guitar, you're not going to stop doing it because Suno exists now.
In addition, say if you had like a guitar-playing forum, where people share recordings of their practice. People would likely not appreciate it to share AI-generated audio of guitar-practicing there, either.
And while there are various reasons for a guitar forum that might not hold for a programming forum, one of them remains: There's nothing to talk about when it's AI-generated. What scale did you use and how did you tune it? "I dunno, AI did it"
All you can talk about is to say "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine you're paying subscription to access made you that thing, nice"
Or for example, even when a friend of mine vibe-coded a "synthesizer" app and he wanted to show me cause he knows I like that kind of thing. And I do, I love digging into and experimenting with DSP algorithms, but also the user interfaces and all sorts of things digital audio related. And I love talking about it, or explaining stuff. But my friend couldn't tell me anything (not even that it was using WebAudio, but also how). Anyway it made me a bit sad, and I felt like something is lost here. Something worthwhile. And I explained it to him that then all I could really say was "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine made you that thing, nice", and we talked it over, and it was alright. But still, it seems something is lost.
This is true, but as usual nobody can agree on what "doing it yourself" means.
Few cars are manual steering, manual brakes, manual transmission.
Few grappling bodies go all Greek-naked.
Few chess bodies forbid researching previous games or your opponent.
The list is indeed endless, and every single person thinks they are using just the right amount of assistance; anything less is pointlessly difficult, anything more is cheating that takes the sport out.
Me, I've been a hobbyist programmer since youth (6502 assembly, represent). I'm having a blast "writing" software without touching a line of code. Sure, I'm old, and maybe I'm like those guys blasting Veyrons through highways, relying on traction control and all the computers to let me drive beyond my abilities. And... ok? I'm having fun, even if I'm not doing it right, by random anonymous peoples' views.
> I'm having a blast "writing" software without touching a line of code.
And that’s totally fine, enjoy your hobby however you enjoy it best. Most people programming by hand for fun don’t care that you program with an LLM for fun. The problems come when those two worlds collide, like in the linked GitHub issue, in chess engine leaderboards. In the long run for both groups to have their fun and friendly competition you’ll need two separate leaderboards. This is also very common in other hobbies. In racing there are car classes so that your Veyron and someone’s old Miata don’t go head to head. In combat sports there’s weight classes. Most sports separate amateurs and pros. Usually there is respect across the group boundaries and appreciation for the other groups deeply specialized skill. There’s even the concept of cross training to get better in your flavor of a sport. This will be figured out with programming as well.
One of the great things about hobbies is that you can enjoy them whatever way you want. But honestly is it not more accurate to say that you are now a hobbyist prompter, rather than a hobbyist programmer? I get the "its just a tool" mentality and I guess LLMs can be used that way, but if you are not touching a line of code yourself then it seems less analogous to using power steering and more analogous to just taking a taxi.
> This is true, but as usual nobody can agree on what "doing it yourself" means.
Not everyone has to agree. Just everyone in a particular group at a particular time. Grappling competitions exist and so do MMA competitions, and both of them will expect you to follow their own rules.
But LLM usage isn’t equivalent to power steering, it’s what a full kitchen is to a microwave.
You can sure put effort into a microwave meal but it’ll always work against you and much of the time you’re better off just picking up a pan.
Not to diminish your enjoyment, you’re completely entitled to it, I just think this is a bit of a false equivalence
Fully agree with this. Also did lots of 6502 assembly, and also love doing agent-driven development. I also still like writing code manually and tweaking everything for myself, but those serve two different purposes.
Sometimes I'm having fun getting to the output I want and otherwise wouldn't have had time to. Sometimes I'm having fun exploring the code.
I don't care if someone don't see the value in one or the other of those, and to me they stand on equal footing as things I find both fun and valuable for different reasons.
I used to write code all day, solving maths and logic problems which is what my brain loves to do, and so I loved my job.
Now I talk to a robot all day, trying to figure out how best to tell it whats in my brain. I no longer do maths and logic and instead I think about language and questions all day, holding in depth conversations and thinking up responses. This is something my brain naturally doesnt like to do and so I fatigue quickly in the day compared to my old job.
I enjoy programming a lot, but still made the transition to using AI for my programming. It is a new tool that makes me much more efficient, I finally could continue working on my many open source projects that I couldn't touch for many years due to lack of time. My productivity is up, I'm pretty sure the code quality has improved, and I'm learning more than ever before; just in a different way.
for me its that software, wrought by hand is "bespoke". Yes, there is a loooooot of software that is just commercial, quickly vomited by hands that are just in it for the money. On the other hand there are open source projects who might have a miss guided design philosophy (Darktable comes to mind) but are otherwise build from people that care. There was an "artisan" at work, someone who cared.
When I see all those "show HN" projects that are slot level code it feels like they dont care about the result that much and just want to showcase their idea in a more tactile way, but there is no actual proper execution to make the thought into matter so to speak
True, but it sounded a bit paradoxical to me that the people who work on engines designed to beat humans at chess were themselves opposed to using engines that (arguably) beat humans at programming...
If you don't want to paint, and also don't want to pay somebody else to paint them, there's always various alternatives like printed out papercraft stands. Fold them, stick them on the base and you are ready to roll.
There's also a myriad of other creative ways to proxy your way out of the general costs (time, space and money) if you check out the term "poorhammer".
You can take already painted warhammer figurines, pose them, take a photo, prompt an AI to make that your first scene, and generate a hollywood level scene in about a minute or two.
Yes, sure, you can buy the figurine and get the joy of painting it. But there's new things you can do now too, things you couldn't dream about before.
But I'll grant you this, the AI coding extinction event is so severe that I do believe we need to support anyone trying to preserve any memory of it. Like, we need to build entire museums, one for each programming language.
1. Some programme because it’s the one of 2 ways to get the things they want (another way is hiring a team to code for them). Now that they have vibe coding, they’d happily never touch a line of code again.
2. Other people programmes because they just enjoy it. Vibe coding ruins the best part for them. Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."
Most people getting paid to code are probably somewhere in the middle?
But nowadays hand-writing code at work is starting to feel kinda 'illegal'. The manager is gonna ping you just because you fall behind on the company's token waste leaderboard.
Maybe it's just another "hobby should never become job" story?
Hobby should only become job if you enjoy the craft of it and if the profession / job rewards craftsmanship.
People in it just for the money won't care about craft - you see the same thing in plumbing. And when there's enough money and scale on the line, craft becomes progressively more niche - that is why Ikea furniture is a thing. And you can even say that there is craft in Ikea, just not along the axes a traditional furniture maker or user would consider.
why would you want to filter these people out? surely those that consider programming more than just a "means to an end" are going to be much more valuable employees, consider they are much more likely to be skilled at their craft? im genuinely interested in why you'd want to filter these people out!
Offer low pay and start using lines of code as a metric. Not only will you not hire such people, you'll also filter out any who might already be on your team!
(Assuming "these people" is a euphemism for "skilled engineers")
The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.
"Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."
> After our initial 0.9.0 pre-release (July 2026), community feedback raised that Coda contained AGPL-licensed code. This prompted a full audit of our codebase and dependencies, and steps to correct what it found. We now believe Coda complies with all applicable licenses. If you have any concern, please open a GitHub issue with the details and we'll happily investigate.
The debate is about whether or not the new code qualifies as derived.
They can remove all of the literal code matches from the codebase, but if it was written by having an LLM study the original code and then write something similar, it's hard to argue it's not a derivative work.
It's not like ideas are protected by copyright though. Copyright protects the specific expression of the idea, not the idea itself. Anyone can "lift ideas" from anyone else, including proprietary software.
Except "Claude, take this code and change the variable names up a bit" is not lifting ideas, and you would not get away with doing that to software belonging to a company with a competent legal department.
> lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.
You cannot copyright ideas. And that's a good thing. Remember the "one click checkout patent" saga? That is bad for everyone involved. We don't want that, as an industry.
Keeping in mind that I'm going strictly off the commit[0], a bit-packing layout is very much the kind of thing which is not subject to copyright in the first place. Neither are algorithms. Ideas, in general, are not subject to copyright: expression is.
So "lifting ideas from other engines", as you yourself put it, is entirely licit, no matter how you do it. _Should_ you credit others when so doing? I err on the side of yes, on that question. _Must_ you? No, there is no such requirement, this is not academic publishing. Does it constitute violation of license? Absolutely not. Straightforwardly, no. Furthermore, it _should not_, we would not like the result of that.
Think: SCO suing Linus Torvalds over his use of a.out: and winning. It would be bad. Even though I understand the reasons for it, it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of.
As I lead this post with: maybe there's something in the repo which is infringing, it's quite possible that commit doesn't tell the whole story. If so, keep in mind that I don't know that, and am able to change my opinion in the face of new evidence.
Based on what I _have_ seen, no: you do not get to lock down a bit-packing pattern just because you're the first to come up with it. Nor should you have that right.
You'll notice I didn't mention copyright, and that's because I don't think it's relevant. I think your analysis is correct. Keep in mind too that Stockfish – the engine I work on, although I wasn't at the time – was the subject of a high-profile defense of the GPL in Germany: https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che.... That case was different as it involved wholesale copying of the source code, rather than porting ideas. Ideas shouldn't be copyrightable.
But copyright and plagiarism are orthogonal, and questions of morality are much more tied to the latter. It would be illegal (in the United States) for me to publish a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but not immoral. It was not immoral, in my view, for Aaron Swartz to try to liberate JSTor articles.
That doesn't make plagiarism acceptable, either. And therefore, I'm willing to call it out when I see it.
No idea why you're getting downvoted. You're right.
> it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of
Yeah, it's surreal. It's not just intellectual property either, Hackers have already started complaining about automation now too.
Computers must have replaced tens of millions of jobs. It's the ultimate job destroyer, since it allows capital to do more with less. Automating me, a doctor, out of his job is essentially the holy grail of Hacker News.
But when hackers are automated away, then suddenly it's a crime against humanity.
I think that's true, but I'm not sure if this would characterize itself as "lifting ideas". I mean, it's one thing to personally take the idea and re-implement it yourself elsewhere. But I have to believe there could be an argument, that having an inference algorithm take the original source and re-implement it in the context of your engine might count as derivative work.
A particular work is deliberately supplied at inference time so the system can recreate or adapt it for another environment. It resembles commissioning a translation, port, or derivative adaptation through an automated tool, even where the output is not verbatim, so it seems it could hold a candle in court.
You have a few scenarios now up for legal debate:
1. Is training a model using copyrighted material fair use?
2. A model outputting chunks of identical coryrighted code from it's training material
3. A model being given in it's prompt copyrighted source code, and asked to implement the same in a new source code.
I think #1 and #2 have open legal battles on it, but #3, which seems to be this scenario, is new to me, and I feel it could have legal ground for being considered infringing on the copyright.
Sidenote: how is your account "samatman" and created "April 24, 2010", that's a really funny coincidence
Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together. You see it improving over time as a result of your efforts. You also build your skills and learn. It’s really a nice activity.
AI systems basically change that whole formula. I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows. I feel like there’s no material value in my 50th vibecoded demo since everyone in this world can vibecode now. Sure I’ve got my custom todo app which is nice, and my custom game plug-in with some neat features for the game I like, and a few other custom apps. Those are mildly useful to me. But every second I spend vibe coding something that’s supposed to be a success for others is just invaded by the thought that even if this thing is any good, someone with real capital can just direct a future AI at it to take it from me, so I’m not really gaining.
So I think I’ll just stick to using AI occasionally, without letting it ruin the programming activity I love by spoiling it. Due solely to AI, I don’t expect I’ll ever do anything in my life which will impact another person. That’s a personal tragedy, but in a sense I was going to die anyways and so will everyone else, so it doesn’t really matter.
>I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows.
It's just power fantasy. It's amazing the first couple of times but as it wears off and becomes the new norm you forgot how being the one who decides which thing does what feels like.
Luckily (or unluckily?) the industry only cares about the end result, and flushes out people who used to reward for their passion and dedication naturally.
A lot of this is from non-tech workers wanting to expand their repertoire as well.
They have no clue what they're doing programming-wise, and in some cases this is perfectly fine, but after years of SaaS, some people are taking it to extremes, and spending millions of tokens on things that could be a spreadsheet or a note in the calendar.
Just recently we had someone deliver a report in the format of a 200.000 LOC application that requires several clusters to run, for example. It does all querying in real time from clandestine APIs, or by crawling existing systems. The person who asked for the report asked for it not to be deployed.
I get nothing of the power fantasy, of it, but I do get joy out of vibe coding.
As I've gotten older, the amount of ideas I have here and there has remained constant, while the time I have, or brain power at the end of the day when I can work on my passion projects, has diminished. What was once basically a second day job at night became family time, baths, dinner, etc. So while I may be too exhausted to sit and code, I am not too tired to sit and type my ideas, or discuss a single feature I want to see, or review what's there. I get joy that ideas are getting out of my head faster despite less brainpower to get them there. I can always grab the reigns and take over myself, but that's not the kind of thing that wins against going to bed.
> I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows.
I get joy out of it because it solves actual problems I have that I don't have time to solve manually, or don't want to. E.g. I just recently had Codex add a mechanism for two-level virtual desktops because I wanted groups of them. An hour later I had two-level virtual desktops in my wm that worked exactly how I wanted it, with support for it in my desktop switcher. I could write it myself, but why would I? I love writing code for various projects, but sometimes I just want the outcome.
For me that’s a slippery slope. It’s not really clear what parts of my hobby project are the good parts and what parts are unfulfilling. When I start including AI too much I end up feeling that none of it is fulfilling. When I do things manually I feel pride in the details however, even though those same details on another day would make me feel like I’m wasting my precious life.
I spent 2 months having Opus build a demo for a project I dreamt of for 15 years, but somehow now I can’t feel interested in it. I’m trying to avoid this. A good use case for me has been using AI to help me acquire all primary source documentation on a topic and then prepare a curated sequence of study based on a small demo I’d like to build.
Keep in mind I’m talking about how I’m approaching creative programming in my personal free time.
In the past I’ve experimented with many different programming paradigms. I think my AI coding benefits from that experience. I want to find new paradigms to write extensible, modular systems with AI, a problem that is still open. One thing I’ve learned is that when implementing a complex system, no paradigm eliminates the need to write lots code (covering many ugly edge-cases) tests, which previously required lots of boring, slow work, but AI is very good at that so maybe can make it less boring and faster.
> I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects.
What? It's the simplest thing in the world. You get the product. Isn't that the point of all programming? You want a thing and you speak a magic incantation and then you have the thing, to keep and use.
> even if this thing is any good, someone with real capital can just direct a future AI at it to take it from me, so I’m not really gaining.
This kind of sounds like you're writing code for social credit. Like, you don't actually want the thing, you want to be "the person who made the thing". If you want the thing for its own sake, nobody can take it from you and what somebody with capital does on their own services does not harm your use one whit.
> Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together.
Programming is nice cause of this for you. Other people have other preferences. When I got my first LED to blink, I wasn't thinking about the elegance of my code. Same for when moved sprites or made a async stateless compute system for MATLAB analysis. There are people who are driven by the artifacts they produce. That's just how our brains are wired I guess, outcome oriented. I see nothing wrong in that.
Btw, I feel like there is this view that all people using agents are the apocryphal "vibe coders". That is just not true. The process of creation remains the same. Break it down into smaller pieces. Work those pieces till a piece it done. Make sure it all comes together. People seriously using these agents are not writing "implement gta6. Make no mistakes".
Programming has a lot of nice features and accurately capturing them all in a hacker news comment isn’t that easy, so maybe you could have some consideration for that in the future. I also want effects to happen in the world. I also like the slow process of craft.
I’m anticipating not a very far away future when “implement gta 6” will not be that different from torrenting gta 3 in the 2000s. The current agent era feels very ephemeral. You’re choosing to interpret some version of AI based programming that you enjoy with what I think is the common interpretation of vibe coding. If you like your process then go ahead with it. I’m not stopping you.
You seem to want the AI supported gratification and the feeling of process and craft. So make your process and think of it however you like. There’s literally nothing I can or would do to get in your way.
Have you seen what most people do for jobs all day? They do repetitive brainless things, not always new and interesting work. For all of those people, doing this is at least something you do sitting down alone in an office and so they will be queueing to do this.
And LLMs are what make so many jobs feel repetitive and brainless. Jobs that were engaging, interesting, from which people were learning, developing expertise over time, are now prompting + babysitting agents
A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
I think part of it though is that LLMs (especially in novice hands) create code that is more difficult to review and has subtler bugs. Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.
Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.
Or imagine a club where everyone cooks together and then cleans dishes together. Then one day some people show up at a club meeting with cooking robots that create 10x the amount of dirty dishes and then don’t help clean up at all. I bet the other members wouldn’t be happy, even if the robots mostly cooked decent food.
> Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.
I'm lurking around the OpenBSD mailing list and it seems that code review is where collaboration starts. You send a patch, explain its purpose, people try it out and comment. If it's OK (various factors decide that), it's imported inside the codebase.
The main issue in corporate settings is that the author of the PR wants to browbeat you into accepting his/her changes. Either directly or by appealing to the manager. They don't want collaboration, they just see you as the blocker between them and the "Done" status on the ticket.
Main course is this this and this, 1. Do this 2. Plug this 3. Run this.. step by step plan.
So you get a precise top down construction plan. Then it’s easy to split the parts where the coding needs to be manual (smoothing walls) vs where it can be whateverz (laying concrete).
LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.
Good luck making a grand strategy game in two months holidays without an LLM. Now you can.
People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Yes manual touch is still needed in some parts of the construction process but architecting the whole thing is the most important in 2026.
ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.
Specialists will be fed to the model weights, generalists will inherit the world.
Exactly. I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables), but because I enjoy gardening. Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point.
I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.
These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.
All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.
It depends what you value. There's "zoning out going through the motions" for mindfulness and then there's "building stuff!" for interest, learning and fun.
And you can have any combination of the two. Like maybe doing the same planting routine but with different details for a different plant or experimenting if a new layout works better.
I don't care to do the labour of gardening. But if I had time, I'd spend it bikeshedding optimisations. IE what about grow lights? Is it worth having a greenhouse in my climate? etc etc. And all the little details about building stuff.
Aside: I too want a robot. One for lawn mowing (they exist but expensive) and one for spraying the little lawn weeds that pop up.
>> I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables)
...cheaper how? My partner and I grow most of our veggies and, based on our calculations (including fixed costs that have gone into the garden, as well as e.g. water, fertilizer, etc.) we save a non-negligible amount of money every month.
Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.
If I'm any example, I'm on the other side. I got into computers in the '70s: plotter art, BASIC, then Z-80s, forth, PDP11s, Amigas and so to now with GPUs and supercomputers and visualization. I'm recently retired and having enormous fun plowing through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't that be a cool tool" (https://pcons.org) or a climate visualization (https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com) or a travel packing list app (packzen) or a bunch of 3d printer tools... so on and so on. Totally co-engineered with Claude. What we're doing together, and getting out to the world as useful open source projects, is easily 10x what I could've done on my own, in the limited time available to me in this life.
> Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.
At least those who really are into development to the point of writing their own OS, Language, etc can still enjoy it as a hobby.
I don't think that's quite fair. Computers have been my hobby since I was 4, I'm having a blast, this is so much fun. I've always had way more ideas I wanted to try than I've had time/energy to implement, especially true since having kids, now the implementation can almost keep up.
Computers were on a trajectory of becoming more consumption oriented, and this has shifted it strongly back towards creation. Normal people can make their own custom software again. This is awesome.
Really hate this characterization, although to be fair I love the ops/infra side of things more. I've used to set up so many parts of my homelab manually, but now I can just get it all done.
I've spent countless hours maintaining a Rpi server at the infancy of my interest in computing.
Truly a lot of it is maintenance and busywork tasks. I am having more fun than ever. Perhaps some people like those busywork sysadmin tasks and gain enjoyment of the homelab hobby just from that...honestly I can't say I really understand it.
That attitude isn’t universal to everyone who enjoys tinkering and making computers do interesting things. I just had lunch yesterday with one of the most tinkering people I know, who as a side hobby teaches kids to program using robotics etc. to make it interesting for them. Like me, he’s having a blast using LLMs.
LLMs are amazing tools for learning new skills and technology. I’ve recently moved into an ML adjacent role, am learning tons that I never knew before, and I’m delivering working systems more quickly.
One thing that’s been an eye-opener is how many details I miss in the code I write. LLMs can almost always suggest improvements, and usually, it’s quite obvious that they’re right. But this is making me a better developer, even though I already have decades of experience.
LLMs don’t force you to vibe code everything. You can use them as precisely or as vibe-ishly as you want. They can be a skill amplifier rather than a skill replacer, if you use them as such.
Not my experience at all. I taught myself assembly language when I was 11 just for fun, and I'm still programming as a hobby more than 40 years later, even though I also do it professionally.
And I love using LLMs. They take care of all the boring boilerplate, letting me focus on the parts I actually enjoy.
I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this:
- I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments
- I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours
- it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results
- after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself
- I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems)
- I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it
This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.
My hobby is making things. I used to make them with a screwdriver and a hammer and a handsaw. Then I bought a drill and got some screwdriving bits, an a pneumatic hammer and an arm saw. Now I can build things much much faster.
Similarly I've made lots of software projects. Over the last 15+ years I have over 250 github repos, the majority of them no one but me will be interested in but I had fun making stuff. LLMs let me make stuff faster just like the power tools. I'm still enjoying making stuff. I still direct, I still decide what to make, I still decide features, iterate on UX, etc, but at several X the speed of before. Loving it.
I think for those of us who got into software initially for the end result -- being the only way for the thing in your head to ever exist -- enjoying the engineering part was a nice, incidental surprise.
So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.
Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.
I enjoy molding hyper specific software across my whole eco system of tech through prose with LLMs. Iterating over time to hone the right solutions based on very abstract reactions to the results I get. I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
I also woodwork and I remember this discussion there between hand tools, power tools, and CNCs. It's all the same hobby just different entry points and doing it the least automated way doesn't make your work more or less than anyone else's.
> I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
I LOLd very hard at that one, thanks. Very relatable.
A hobby of mine is also woodworking. I can make jigs, I can buy jigs. I can use hand tools, I can use power tools. I can use screws I can use joints. I can even buy made furniture and just assemble it. Though the latter is more of interior designing. But the point is it is a spectrum and everyone has their own niche. SDLC are not the same and there is different value to be derived. But the process of woodworking makes me handy. The experience allows me to elegantly and cost efficiently fix broken things. It enables me to do interesting things in interesting ways and there is more of a community around that. If I automated away all the woodworking and just bought the furniture... Well there isn't much of a community around that except flexing who has more cash. Idk, I'm trying to have empathy for both those who are for and against it.
> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
It's an age-old debate in every hobby.
Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result, which is what they want to use or play with.
In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.
Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.
> Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something.
Indeed, and this is the problem: unlike woodworking, where my power-assisted creation is independent of, or complements, your handcraft, this engine is directly competing with other engines. Twiss is being disingenuous when he says he has no interest in submitting it to competitions; it plays on a rated account on Lichess, for example.
And to extend the analogy, before there were house cleaning machines the people who enjoyed cleaning were lumped in with the people who like having a clean house.
I will say that there are a lot of parts of programming I enjoy, but I used to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down obscure errors or learning arcane systems just to get to the parts I personally enjoy: the feedback loop of making a thing, seeing the result, and improving it.
There is a reason stack overflow is dead. LLMs are a strictly better product.
I think this is why that I limit the use of LLM in my hobbyist project, but not in my work. I found LLM particularly useful of generating say VSCode configuration JSON files and it saved me a lot of headaches. It is also very good at finding the right tool for the job (e.g. which binary to use to write a floppy image).
What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people
use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning
up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just
one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.
What’s missing here is an understanding of the negative effect the rise of AI has had on programming communities overall: both the decrease in positive engagement as people have moved from discussing things and helping one another online to chatting with AI, and the increase in negative engagement. The amount of low-energy abandonware being “shared” into these communities makes it really hard to filter out the signal from the noise.
So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community.
To be fair, the decrease in discussion and helping one another online has also decreased some significant amount of negative engagement in the form of nonsensical arguments and frustrating ways of responding to questions (e.g. the biggest complaints with stackoverflow).
It was like this with cryptocurrency to a lesser extent too. Suddenly lots of people pretending to have technical background and explaining what a Merkle tree is.
And telling everyone if they don’t embrace cryptocurrency right away they will be left behind, how you are all limiting human flourishing by refusing to embrace the future, excusing every single negative side effect of the technology — because we have to move as fast as possible. And of course no words on how unsustainable the businesses are, how corrupt it is to have so much power and control into a few really shady individuals
Is it gatekeeping in this case? Would they not allow beginners to join and learn? Are they not fully sharing the knowledge to anyone who's interested to learn it?
To me, it amounts more to disapproving showing up to a handmade sweater community and showing off your machine made sweaters, or maybe a machine made sweater you added a handful of stitches too yourself. It's like not realizing that the community wasn't about cool looking sweaters, but about hand-made cool looking sweaters.
Having said that, there might be another community that's more about cool looking sweaters, and new machine techniques that deliver really nice looking sweaters would be of interest to them. I actually think it's what is happening a bit in programming, there are niche that remain more about the manual programming, and others that are about any process that can lead to better outcomes.
The entire AI-pilled side-software development has a single goal: shipping as fast and as much as possible. The problem is that it’s not better code or a better product—it's just more
I can understand why people who aren't interested in "shipping daily" and are more interested in figuring things out are kinda annoyed by all the LLM noise
Imagine, if you will, wanting a narrow application to assist you personally in some side hobby, that is data driven but would take weeks or months to set up. Now imagine it's done in hours (and not even purely focused hours) and does everything you need it to do in an instantly verifiable and rewarding way. Imagine doing this on the regular for all of your various use cases. And then imagine not trying to sell or market that tool, as you dont care about that, you only care about solving problems and empowering yourself.
The vast majority of developers are like this, and as such, are silent about it. They aren't making production applications. They're making bespoke solutions and iterating upon them over time.
Somehow purists think there's something wrong with the process of that. I say there's something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. With a tinge of arrogance or narcissism thinking their applications are all of the purest order and construction, testaments to architectural beauty and edge case handling. With a tinge of fear and cope as so much of their identity is caught up in being a smart coder rather than a smart engineer.
If you are a software developer and don't see the value in and heavily utilize agentic tools, you are a poor engineer. Not every coder has the mindset of an engineer, but a coder should be able to recognize and understand a powerful tool when they see one instead of letting their emotions and irrationality take the wheel
Nothing says engineer mindset like calling people "something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. With a tinge of arrogance or narcissism" and "emotions and irrationality"
I think you missed the entire point of this discussion, but you also have a very gross view of the world!
> Somehow purists think there's something wrong with the process of that. I say there's something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD.
Are you really saying it is a sign of serious mental illness because programmers want to enjoy their craft? You do realize our entire industry exists because of the passion of programmers years prior, right? I genuinely think you should be ashamed of what you wrote here.
Well of course, if you enjoy writing software as a hobby then you value the experience of doing it, and you value the skill involved. You probably want a community of like minded individuals who all write code by hand, and where LLM use would be considered cheating.
That seems as natural as being against doping in sports or marking cards in poker.
None of this is anything against LLMs or AI assisted coding in general, even though the people involved probably have strong feelings about it given their preferences. It’s just the preferences of particular people and communities. Seems reasonable to me.
Yeah, it's just how you see programming in your perspective.
It's like lifting weight. Obviously, machines lift weight much better than human for a long time. But people still trains for strength or aesthetics. Even if machine can lift much larger weight and more efficiently, some people still care about how strong they are.
A machine can lift much more weight obviously is not the excuse for them to stop training.
Programming is just the weight lifting for your brain/mind. Even if LLMs can solve all coding problems perfectly, there will be people who still want to program all by hands, for training their mind, or simply enjoying the process. And there will be people care about how good you are at solving a problem with programming.
LLMs being able to code does not mean you no longer need the ability to code.
Cars do not mean you no longer need the ability to walk.
I don't exactly disagree, but I don't think your analogies work.
Machines can lift more weight than humans, but we all encounter situations where strength is useful and machines aren't available or wouldn't be suited to the task.
Cars are faster and easier than walking, but they require roads and are not a possible substitute for all of the walking we do.
But "if LLMs can solve all coding problems perfectly", and assuming that's sufficiently true of cheap/free models, there will be no practical need to code by hand; it'll be something we do purely for the joy of it and/or as brain training (but a niche form of brain training, probably practically inferior to other forms that target skills we still need).
> these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works.
not literally true, and I doubt the author meant to say this. The communities do not only care about if your code works at all, but also that you know why and how.
It's sort of like in math classes where you need to show the work, not just the answer. Surely the answer being correct, while not being sufficient, is still necessary.
I was somewhat conflicted seeing the way the OSdev community responds to LLM usage.
I understand the conflict: the point of doing OSdev is that you're learning the low level hardware details and directly commanding the machine from the lowest level accessible. LLM usage is at odds with this.
But, on the other hand, the primary issue with OSdev on modern hardware is the complete lack of documentation for most hardware. A lone developer simply does not have enough time to reverse engineer from Linux or BSD drivers to achieve much hardware support. Plus, often you run into hardware quirks that are incredibly painful to debug and offer no real learning opportunity.
Recently I revived a ~8 year old modular kernel project I had written. It was at the point of being able to setup an x86_64 CPU, load some drivers and enter usermode. Using an ESP8266 board I setup a little debugging harness for a AtomicPi devboard I had laying around, and set it all up so Claude could control and upload code to it. It could read the serial port, ping the board over ethernet and power cycle it. From that point I let it work almost autonomously to implement a USB stack, finish the network stack, implement drivers etc.
It worked well, and for the most part I didn't care about the results. I don't have the time to commit to such a big project now and of course, the satisfaction of doing something myself (besides building the harness) was gone.
But a thing that stood out to me was, when trying to implement the ethernet driver, the chip in question did not have documentation, but it was known to be similar to another well documented chip. Claude was able to spend a few hours just trying different things, rebooting the board as needed until the differences were sorted out and it was able to ping the board. I feel this kind of application would be pretty relevant for even hobbyist communities like OSdev.
We all have limited time, and while LLM usage for everything certainly defeats the point, targeted usage for tedium that has very little value overall, should be acceptable, and I can't help but think lesser of devs I otherwise respect, when they insist on being dogmatic even when it doesn't contribute to the hobby.
There are different kinds of tedium that LLMs automate, being a hobbyist doesn't mean you see value in all of them. Removing tedium that you personally find uninteresting or boring actually accelerates the hobby because now you're able to get past the tedious parts instead of giving up or delaying doing them. That does not mean that everyone finds those parts boring.
Even before LLMs came along a lot of hobbyists were using high level languages, linters, IDEs etc. instead of handcrafting assembly or machine language. Those tools increased the capability of hobbyists to build what they find interesting.
Isn’t that the point of a hobby? To enjoy the path and not the result? To learn something new.
I understand using LLMs as tools to help you with your hobby, but I think when “Claude spends hours debugging it” it probably is no longer a hobby, but an outsourced job.
That's why I was trying to make the distinction between stuff that actually pushes your understanding forward and teaches helpful information, and stuff that does not.
Isn't it more in the spirit of osdev to spend your effort implementing/working on the things that actually further your OS meaningfully? Discovering that a specific version of an obsolete undocumented chip has a quirk where one register doesn't reset in the expected way isn't really useful information and doesn't contribute to building new skills.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that not everyone enjoys every piece of the hobby, and I don't think it's reasonable to exclude people who do not enjoy some of the pieces that aren't even core to the hobby.
You can summarize this roughly by comparing art for its own sake versus art for a purpose. If I need software for a purpose, I don't care how it is crafted, only that it is crafted well. But if I care about the art of code done well, then obviously the means matter.
I find that a lot of "pro-AI" folks are very much doing software for the ends (myself included) and in the past, we were happy with the "means" primarily because there was no other way. The "anti-AI" folks are, as mentioned, mostly in the camp of caring about the means equally with the ends.
Lots of nuance here, but those buckets seem to generalize pretty well (so far) in my experience.
Very interesting stuff, and I believe the prejeduce against AI tools for use to code stems from the way they are currently package. The tools default out of the box are designed to throw away the most valuable process humans go through while learning, FAILURE!
If a human is never able to work through or process failures themselves they are bypassing one of the most important steps in the learning journey
More AI tools need to be made the opposite of this, humans should be able to achieve great learning USING AI.
The important message also remains, understand your code! It might just save you one day ;)
>even in the instances where there was earnest early engagement with LLMs in some of these niche communities, the well was quickly poisoned by a combination of a lack of a deep understanding by the LLM practitioners, and a vitriolic subset of those communities that view the LLM enterprise as a form of cheating
Yeah, the whole point is the street cred of doing something really hard.
Whether that chess repo is genuine or not genuine, legal or illegal, tasteful or tasteless, vibed or not vibed, stolen or copied, the signal to open source maintainers is clear: get off GitHub.
When you take away the cost people will treat the result worthless.
For example if you hiking in the mountains, reaching the summit and enjoying the views are valuable experiences to you because it had an associated coast, i.e the physical act of hiking up the mountain. If you take the ski lift to the top it's almost worthless and you have very little appreciation for the views.
Very apt comparison! This is how I feel too. In the sense that when I’m coding as a hobby, especially something like advent of code, using an LLM would defeat the purpose for me. A bit how I don’t double check my moves with an engine when playing chess online.
On the other hand though, if I’m being paid to build, say, the top station of a ski lift on a peak, I wouldn’t be surprised if the contractee would prefer I don’t try hiking up the building materials and used a helicopter instead.
I disagree with the conclusion. I think this is only half of the story, and I can say so as one of the people in question who is largely against LLM code (despite finding LLMs to be very useful tools). While I do care about genuine care in one's craft, I also am a free software advocate and fundamentalist, and I find non-trivial LLM code is too legally and ethically dangerous to be included in software that is distributed to other people (do whatever you want if it's just personal use).
"Aggressively Against LLM Usage" is the wrong way to think of it.
If my hobby is running, I would refuse to use a car to do my morning loop. Not because I have anything against automobiles, but because that's not my hobby.
Also, the issue linked to isn't really about LLMs. It's about someone being a dick in an online community and being called out for it. They just happen to be using LLMs to be a dick, but that's not the main issue.
I've found myself with this problem, as I've used LLMs to accelerate solving problems I've wanted to solve, only to find myself unable to share them back, because LLM usage has "polluted" my effort in the eyes of maintainers, even if the result has been something I've re-implemented by hand after learning from the agent-driven development what the issue is and how to reproduce it.
What's the solution, to just disengage entirely and not share back issues I find or features I'd like to see?
I get the negativity, because I enjoy hobby programming too, so I also enjoy the process sometimes. But then sometimes there's a problem and the fastest way to isolate the core of that issue is to use claude.
A long time ago, I had to take an ethics class to get my Computer Science degree. One of the things that came up in the papers about calculating the statistical value of a life was that people care more about being more prosperous than their peers than absolute material wealth.
I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.
I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.
Well yes. That's why you see many westerners complaining about the cost of living even though all things told they have a good life.
I would modify this slightly though. I think there's an expectation of things getting better, and expecting to do better than your parents. I think that's where many of the modern issues around living standards come from. They aren't getting better (quickly enough).
I'm a hobbyist, what am I missing? LLM gave me a new spark. I never managed to get a SE job so some weekends I tinker around with LLM for small personal projects and it helps me learn more.
I think that’s the difference. Using LLMs to learn how to write interesting code, I hope, would be welcomed. I’m not confident that’s true though, reading some of these comments.
I don't think anyone is learning to code by using LLMs.
We learn a craft in two ways: by watching other people do something, and by doing it ourselves. I've learnt many crafts in my life, to the extent that I've produced useful or enjoyable output: programming, wood working, gardening, cooking, baking. I read loads of books, but nothing you read in a book makes much sense until you do it yourself. If you read a book on wood but never pick up a saw then you might as well be reading fiction.
Programming has always been a bit more difficult because we can't really watch someone else do it. Sure, you can watch someone use their tools, but programming really happens in the head, and you can't watch that. So you very much have to just do it yourself, and read.
When you use an LLM you're not watching it do anything, except output text at a very high words per minute. And you're certainly not doing it yourself. So how can you be learning? I actually don't think I've learnt a single thing since starting to use LLMs and it seems that way for colleagues too. They're producing code they never could have written before, but they don't understand it. They aren't learning.
I'm against LLM usage in conversation, e.g. when discussing issues in open-source. It's like half-hearing a conversation, I'm missing the context that the other person has with their robot. Second, the person has usually at best half-understood the issue.
Provided the code does the job, it seems immaterial whether it was hand-written or LLM generated, provided it does the job and isn't straight-up plagiarism. The latter is admittedly a hard thing to judge.
Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonder if I could write a program to automate this" is when I quit the pursuit. After figuring out the basic tricks to sudoku, it turned into busywork. (Or trying to micromanage StarCraft)
(Tagentially, if you want to automate programming, then I'm going to find myself a different field, because I have no interest in the results of sudoku puzzles. I especially have no interest in managing agents, which I see as junior-dev bullshitters, and would not enjoy managing such a team in real life)
> Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
(I absolutely relate to your experience with sudoku etc. Of course, writing a basic sudoku solver is also interesting.)
The thing is, software architecture and systems design can also get the hobby treatment. I've found that I'm happy to have a short discussion with ChatGPT and have it barf out a few hundred lines of a concept, then refactor and maintain it myself. Or come up with a few different pieces that can be written fairly easily, let the machine skip over most of that tedium, make sure they conform to the interfaces I had in mind, and then verify for myself that the system actually comes together the way I imagined.
Of course, it does help a lot that I can understand the code, and work with it line by line if necessary. But SICP teaches us that it's abstraction and composition all the way down. So I feel like I'm exercising the same skills while not letting myself get intimidated by the sheer amount of initial typing or the self-doubt (instinctive immediate review of the code, you know) that creeps in when I try.
The interactive fiction community seems to have a subset of hardcore anti AI hobbyists. Partly at stolen artistic IP, but also the coding half of text adventures is viewed as art just as much as the story and writing.
I’ve selected a path where I think building tools with AI is fine. But I want people to play my games knowing I created all of it.
For me, domain discoveries and elegant solutions arise out of periods of deep befuddlement, and are often a saving grace that can avoid lots of code.
I'm lucky I guess that I've had enough time in this career to experience these moments, and enough experience to know which code I should write and which code really is rote and can be generated (most of the time). Hopefully it keeps the loss of enlightenment to a minimum.
> In these communities (keep in mind that there is an implicit “not all…” throughout) the process of mastering a difficult field itself is the product, and something that runs is generally a nice-to-have.
Most hobby fandoms have a dedicated core group who think like this: The end result is only an artifact or social proof to them. The real product is their own prestige of having built it and attracted an audience. There's always an IRC channel or Discord somewhere where there's a social hierarchy of who should be respected for their work.
Outside of those inner circles, most people don't care. The average emulator user doesn't care about the details about who wrote their emulator or the history behind it all the forks. They want to play a game and the emulator core that gets the job done, because the emulator is the product to them. The mastery of the author is not a product to them.
This has happened in multiple technical hobby communities I've been in. With 3D printing I even remember communities where Prusa was looked down upon for making 3D printers too accessible. The argument was that now anyone could buy a 3D printer without really understanding the pain of mastering calibration, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting. That debate exploded to another level when Bambu came along and made 3D printing even more mainstream.
Now it's happening with programming communities. There are some where hand-written code is truly the actual product: Competitive programming, code golf, and obfuscated programming competitions come to mind. Using an LLM here is about as appropriate as submitting LLM generated art to an art contest, which is to say it's not.
There are a lot of other domains where the mastery of the craft isn't interesting outside of a small social circle. It's interesting that they mentioned emulators, because emu communities are famous for having a ton of strange drama that most emulator users don't care about. If you're inside of the small community and spend every day on their Discord, it might be the only thing you care about, but you don't realize that you're a minority because everyone else in the Discord thinks the same way.
OSDev is another interesting one to mention, because even Linus Torvalds had to make a big post telling the anti-LLM people to chill out. There seems to be a split between the purists who think the primary value is their own mastery of being able to write the code, and the pragmatists who are adapting to use new tools in conjunction with their knowledge. If you find yourself in one of the purist camps you might think everyone feels the same way, but outside of that, the world is moving on.
I usually feel turned off by communities where social status is the primary currency. There's always a hidden social hierarchy that feels threatened whenever it feels like the rules my start changing. They react by trying to force the social currency back to the system where they spent years investing their time. Nobody wants to feel like you're losing a foothold because the rules are changing. I got a strong feeling from this article that this author feels they've developed some level of respect in some forum and they dislike the idea of that investment being devalued by a changing landscape
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora,
> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all...
I think the key word to all this is "communities." If you can make something alone, just do it. If you enjoy gathering together to build a bigger thing, often the bigger thing is 1/3 an excuse to gather together. In that way, the LLM is like revealing the answer to a murder mystery game too early and expecting it still to be fun for everyone.
I'm particularly annoyed with the complaint in the linked thread about the agentic-developed chess engine.
> Moreover, you are giving absolutely nothing back to the community, which is central to open-source engine dev. You are only taking.
What would that user prefer? That the developer push a PR upstream...that presumably would be shot down and the user subject to further harrassment because it would be LLM derived at minimum? It seems like a catch-22 where the only winning move is not to play.
That thread also highlights the overlap between "people who are against LLM usage for coding" and "people who are very particular about AGPL."
Presumably no one is forcing the maintainer at gunpoint to have an LLM slightly shake up other people's code, relicense it under an incompatible license and then claim that "every single line of code is written by Claude Code", so I don't see the issue with not playing if that's the only option.
If you can't make contributions that anyone finds interesting enough to include upstream and have no plans to publish your AGPL derived code under a compatible license, you can keep your changes to yourself. Nothing lost, nothing gained, license honored.
Is this novel? Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers to accomplish what the skill allows. Not every individual of that group but the group as a whole. It’s just that devaluation of one’s skill capital sucks.
I happen to think the alternative world where no one’s skill capital can be devalued sucks more, but it’s hard to build a community around that because the same hours that build skill also build taste, and when you remove the former you remove the latter.
> Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers.
I'm not sure of the truthiness there wrt LLMs: using an LLM to code your hobby OS doesn't actually gain you the skills of the existing members of that niche. Maybe those existing members are just annoyed at posers, not at newcomers?
Sorry, I didn’t complete the thought well. Amended. I meant that the skill allows for some things and newcomers no longer require that investment to get the outcome.
I think another reason to write code by hand is that you want to know what you get.
If you have an idea, then you can implement it better than an LLM, just like you can implement it better than another person, because you are the only one who understands what you mean exactly.
Details are always lost and misunderstood in communication; this is a weakness of LLMs.
Similarly, even if I don't write the code but I let someone else who I trust do it for me, there is value for me in that person not using LLMs, because only if they don't, I can know that the only spirit that lives in the code is of the person of my choice.
It's like a social thing; I can know and trust a human, but I'm not sure I can do that with an LLM.
It's similar to how you wouldn't want to use LLMs in politics: the whole point of expressing your ideas is that they are your ideas and if you let someone (or something) else do it for you, details will be missed and misunderstood.
So this is one reason that I think hobby communities don't like LLMs; they care too much about what they build.
Depending what you are making; coding slows you down and think as you build stuff step by step. Its kind of like speaking vs writing. Generating code through LLM for me is like talking -- I love talking, but when I write something down, I'm more structured, think more about things etc etc.
People say, if you you write elaborate well spec'ed prompts, it will do the right thing. Coding in a way is doing that.
All of this is exactly why I started Slow Code. I like programming. Lots of people like programming. I don't want to stop doing that. So we meet up once a month to practice that.
to someone hobby programming using LLM seems like running a marathon using a bicycle, you cross the finish, but at the end is not the same as running only by your only forces.
Others look only at the results, so LLM are only a tool (actually without a clearly instruction manual i suspect).
But programming (and so many others works) is not only about making, but learning and developping skills. When an LLM is not available? i think differences will be evident.
And roughly speaking: to check the result of LLM you have to be more capable than the bot, otherwise, who is the boss? And to develop those skills, you have to do it yourself.
I enjoy programming as a hobby and have done it for many years. I also enjoy building stuff with LLMs. Why is one pure and sanctioned and the other one is bad? Why do I need other people to decide this for me?
I'm in an _extremely_ niche hobby programming community of Scrabble engine developers. There are single digits of us, but we're building the best engines and methodology out there and have all embraced LLMs to help us do it. There's a lot of experimentation that goes into it and LLMs certainly make it easier to iterate and try new ideas. So at least for our community, I don't think the points here hold.
This is a case of an SV-brained person stepping outside the bubble and realizing that LLMs are not the universal savior they think it is.
AI isn't well liked in a lot of places. I agree with the communities - make something yourself, don't ask a robot to do it for you. If you vibe slop something into existence, I'm never going to look at it. Something you made yourself though? Hell yeah I want to see it.
Another example is the art community - use AI/LLMs there, you'll be excommunicated.
I think, without knowing, that art often is similar to the hobby programming communities the thread leads with: the end result is interesting not by itself, but through the process that made it. We have feelings about art pieces because we feel with and through the artist. Can't do that with silicon. The Mona Lisa, even if the end result were exactly the same, would be dead boring had it been produced by the hand of a machine. My take
Totally disagree. I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall. If they’re totally unique and nobody else has them, even better. I can have a mounted picture of me on a horse like the famous Napoleon painting. I don’t care at all about the dude who painted it, I don’t even know his name.
The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the backdrop of the sun. Amazing photo.
I feel like obsessing over some artist I’ll never be friends with and the story behind their art is just another way to have a parasocial relationship, and the new tools allows us to have absolutely bespoke art in every single home. Things like this used to be considered strange and irregular before mass media. Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
Here's my thoughts as a 29 year old: of all the things I've ever made in my personal life, the vast majority have ended up abandoned in barely worked on states, and those I have put varying degrees of significant effort in have gone unnoticed. I've never really been able to "enter" a community in a way that felt meaningful to me, either, when I've tried.
I say this not as a complaint, but to explain my perspective on using LLMs for personal projects. Granted, I'm publishing none of them, and not trying to make anyone care about them, so it's not really a response to the article or general discourse here per se, but I thought it bears mentioning anyway.
I'd like to buy into the idea that "doing it yourself" is more meaningful or personally edifying, but I don't get that feeling. I want to get that feeling, but I don't. I've found my private waste-of-time projects using LLMs have been more gratifying than my private waste-of-time projects that don't, and at the end of the day, neither really substantively matter anyway.
Again, this isn't really related to communities per se, but it is an answer why some folks use LLMs for projects/"hobbies".
I get all the fuzz about only being able to learn if you do the work. But frankly, as a hobby programmer with a rather unusual workflow/toolset and a love for the command-line, it has never been so satifying to scratch a few itches I've always had but apparently never was motivated enough to really follow through. In the past 6 months, I've "written" at least 3 tools which I kind of always wanted, and which I now use on a regular basis. AND, I finally have a peer I can talk to about the code I'm trying to write. Something I basically never had, because all my FLOSS projects were small-very-nieche-one-man-shows. Its nice to be able to pretend to have a coding friend :-)
we don't meet enough people to worry about why or how productive someone is ... productivity is half mania, half obsession and 100 % in vain except in life critical fields where LLM speed doesn't matter because querying DBs is fast and making associations within _contexts that speak the same language_, meaning they use the same register, is trivial.
I use LLMs to build some nice customized and some basically standard tools so I can go from learning about code to learning Rust et al properly ... the next 2 years are scheduled for me. I want code and LLM supply chains as a proper hobby, partially because I find the overall "transformers" approach pretty bad since there is no implicit path towards intelligence and zero chance to build one on top explicitly. it's just a bunch of parrots but parrots are awesome and i'm glad I get to have so many.
Also: I really don't care what the communities think, though ... it's 2026 and all that code, math, science, engineering didn't build any special amount of good, "bad" ( vs ugly personalities ) or cool characters that we didn't have already and it didn't cause any "mutations" in schools of thought either, or drive movements where they were needed.
but I'm a bystander, which wasn't my choice, unfortunately, so y'all know much better what I'm talking about.
most players in the lower leagues won't dope but some do and take bribes anyway, what?
it's a cowardly new world, everybody, happy Esoteric Right Wing Hanukkah!
Model steam enthusiasts have had this for literally decades with a variety of premade parts available, angering those who learned to use a lathe. "Did you really make that" is huge in this.
Relatedly, there needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between types of LLM usage. Nothing more boring -- and often not even favorable or useful to a semi-hobbyist -- than just one-shotting something with Claude;
Vs. what I do. I've always done tons of little quirky automation type things with bash -- that do actually strongly become a part of my life.
Today? Yes, that -- but more and faster. I'm actually typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.
Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.
You're right, there are tons of different workflows you can do. One of the more innocent ones, regardless of you opinions on vibe coding, is just using the LLM to understand the code base better. Even if I'm vibe coding something, I will often start by having the LLM construct documentation for the current code flows. It's a document that is useful to me as a human because it mostly just gives me code pointers and tells me what it does as part of the larger whole. It's useful for the LLM since it saves a ton on time and tokens in the long run.
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora
I think the problem goes deeper.
When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few months ago, Michael Niedermayer spam AI slopped a proposal on their mailing list; I don't have the link right now (need to really bookmark all those things) but someone else asked him why he spams other people with unfinished proposals created by AI? I don't know whether Michael understands this as a problem or not, but I think many AI users don't understand the problem when they AI spam slop other people. I think it is a hostile action by those AI users. So I can totally understand communities not wanting that AI spam.
I've also noticed people who have horrible english skills, suddenly have perfect english skills. I suspect AI use, but then I wonder: is that person interacting with me via AI spam slop? I'd much rather deal with broken english if it is autenthic, than people faking it, even IF the produced english may be better than the broken english (but even that is often doubtful, so much AI spam slop is just wasting time and awful to read).
The whole AI trend seems to lead to really dumber people and fewer real interactions. That is sad, even more so as many people lost real social cues these days anyway.
Did you read about the Canadian politician who was making a speech and simply thoughtlessly read out some of the LLM boilerplate prefacing the text some chatbot had written for him?
The problem with politics is it’s not a meritocracy.
You find abdicating your speech to an AI to be disqualifying, but to people who’ve already abdicated everything they do to AI, it’s folksy and relatable.
It's because they fetishize arcane knowledge and LLMs make all their arcane knowledge easy. That's all it is. If I wanted to go make my own NES game from scratch 2 years ago it would have taken months of full time work, and I would have had to learn a lot of new things, and most likely would have joined and participated in that community. Now I can do it this afternoon. I'm not going to because it's pointless now, you can't show it off, you can't impress anyone with it, and the result is not just economically worthless, it's worthless in every way.
So of course they are upset by it, it's annoying to spend years building up some skill and then end up being less capable at applying that skill than a 12 year old with a claude code subscription who has never even seen a CRT. Their entire hobby community is going to fundamentally change and the people who are influential and knowledgeable now are effectively has-beens who will have to learn totally new skills to stay relevant and most likely won't have the energy, or desire, and lets be frank the aptitude to learn those skills. (I don't mean the skill of using an LLM, they can do that and almost certainly would be great at it, I mean skills like charisma and presentation and promotion.)
If the things you're thinking about are intrinsically so totally worthless outside of impressing people with them, and if that's all there is, please do not attempt to do those things, with or without an LLM.
Heck, if everything is worthless, please, please try not to do anything :)
If it's valuable why do they want to ban people from doing it with help from an LLM. You are just mad, and I understand why you are mad, but you're not right.
The thing I'm saying is worthless is making a game in 2026 for a game system that people literally couldn't give away for free in 1998. Due to nostalgia and the fact so many were thrown in the trash surviving systems now have some limited cash value. Newly made games do not have a nostalgia value. The reason people do it is to prove they can and to show other people. Anyone can now (no proof needed really, it's super easy) and nobody cares. It's like climbing Everest, and Claude is your Sherpa. Nobody is impressed by it anymore.
It's not just the hobby programming community. Professional software developers too.
At least against as it is now, where everyone with Claude suddenly becomes a software engineer.
Software engineering is more than pushing code to main/master.
It's requirements. Acceptance criteria. Design. Documentation written for humans. Reviews. Operations. Maintenance. Understanding the product. Understanding the system you're changing.
Right now, I struggle with PRs being opened by people who don't fully understand the code they're changing, replying to review comments with Claude generated answers pasted back like a meat proxy...
What I see at work is that we're pushing code faster than ever, while losing the big picture of our product, or the architecture of our own network, even faster.
We're also generating documentation at an incredible pace. The problem is that the people writing it often don't understand it either.
Now more than ever it makes sense to have better programming languages that are more palatable to humans, because people may manually want to tweak LLM output, or other people who don't have access to the original prompts/context.
I don’t understand the world of people who have this degree of free time (time / energy) given how much everything costs just to be alive. Maybe they live in a different universe where programming for fun and first principals of “learning” matters. But for the other 99% of humans, costs have gone up 40% due to money printing and anything like this looks like a waste of time.
Hobbies are kind of by definition wastes of time. That's what makes them different than work.
If you only want to learn programming for work then you obviously have a different perspective than people writing chess engines from scratch for fun instead of using an existing one, right?
Surely most people in the US have hobbies at least in the minimal sense of downtime activities that they enjoy. It may not be golf or hobby programming, but even laying on the couch watching football is a "hobby" or sorts and takes up just as much time.
I realize there are people with young kids or 2-3 jobs that really have little to no downtime, but it seems that for most people time isn't really the issue - it's just are you more of a passive or active type of personality.
In the past, these folks have lived more or less in harmony unified under the common interest of applied maths, engineering and architecture that is necessary to write things that require a lot of vode. Aside for a few classic and very public spats.
Now that community is fractured because llms are increasingly making writing code irrelevant. If that weren't true, we wouldn't be having this convo at all.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to cultivate spaces that preserve that craft, but wish they wouldn't be so obnoxious about it. I imagine that a good handful of these folks in the "no llm ever camp" collectively rolled their eyes at vegans and animal rights advocates at some point, and are now feeling being on the unpopular side of progress.
Personally I think it's a cool prospect to have Trappist Monk-like communities producing hand crafted code. It will probably be really good and sturdy. We'll look at it in 10 years and say, "damn they really don't make it like that anymore!"
I can respect a developer who is still smitten with their craft to feel a bit anxious when the topic of LLM generated code comes up. I have a child who never grows tired of building their next game but first has to build the engine from scratch (needless to say they've built a lot of engines, not so many games). This use to frustrate me but then I realized the joy is in making a concept of a game for them. When I suggest Claude might get the job done faster I get a death glare followed by an eye roll. I get it, I've been in the industry long enough where coding is more of a means to an end and not the same novelty it once was.
More dangerous are communities who shun AI and treat every disclosure like a Scarlett letter. Generally the loudest opinions come from consumers (fan bois) and not creators. I think this will eventually drive new innovators away from these communities. These vocal naysayers have likely never experienced being a project manager, lead developer, and QA for an agent writing code. Instead they think a prompt magically creates software, but without wearing all these hats at once, you get something far worse than 'slop'. Call me crazy, but I think these multi-hat 'developers' using an agent and are dipping their toe into LLM development are going to raise the bar and leave us vim users in the dust.
Yeah you're right, it IS entirely fair to suddenly and quickly push the group that built your industry out of the industry. They should all just find new jobs, because that's very easy and simple. Thankfully we have bright minds like you to replace the talent lost, because with AI you can truly do anything your heart desires!
Obvious sarcasm aside, these LLMs have been trained (without consent!) on our hard work, on our passion. People have been writing code for years, and many have open-sourced their projects to share their knowledge, to better the world, to provide free solutions to problems. All that hard work, all that effort, has been stolen and used to create a machine that replaces us. And when we complain that quality goes down, that work is no longer enjoyable, that we don't actually see huge noticable productivity improvements across the board, bright minds like you tell us "lol just quit man fuck you". Do you not feel bad that you are actively destroying the livelihood of the very people that made your slop machine viable to build?
No, of course not. I feel good that technology is getting better and bitter activists are getting replaced.
As was said in that thread: "The age of the glorified individual is over - the collective mind is the future and the now. You will either be consumed by it, or trampled by it. It's time to ant up or fossil out."
Programming has five phases effectively:
1) You figure out what problem to solve.
2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem.
3) You actually implement the solution.
4) You see the solution work, for yourself.
5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.
If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you see steps 2-4 as mostly a chore. If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. I don't ever need to show any code to anyone. In fact, most of the time when programming I do steps 2 and 3 and even skip 4. I don't even finish! I work weeks on something until I lose interest, and I know that in order to even run it, it would be several more weeks. A PoC is enough. Or just a half one. It's just code-to-structure-thoughts, not to create anything finished.
The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. If you're a product owner or CEO, you might work strictly at steps 1,5. Then steps 2-4 are the managerial/architectural steps. If you're a very senior IC at a large company, you might work at this level, without actually doing much coding. Only the inner most step (3) is the manual creation of source code. Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.
The problem as I see it is that I enjoy step 3. And LLMs are good at step 3 almost exclusively. So they just pick the best bit of this dish, and leave me with the rest.
If you're an entrepreneurial type, the LLM appears to take the _worst_ bit of the work from you. Great.
There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work.
Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little), the programmers that (indirectly) helped build it are told they're fools for doing so, and threatened by losing their status if they don't adapt to the "entrepreneurial way" (well, the full promise is "you'll lose it anyway, but if you cooperate in stuffing sama's pockets then maybe you get to keep it a bit longer").
So what really surprises me is not that people are upset but that so few are.
I'm not concerned. Never in my life have I experienced stakeholders just going "hmm, yes - this is enough software for our purposes - we won't be needing your services any more".
There's always another feature that can be implemented or a new problem to be solved. Tools only ever accelerated the pace at which we were able to follow this insatiable hunger for more software.
Right now people are getting fired left and right because all the money that used to be spent on staff now goes to build more data centers and also because cutting corporate expenses is in vogue now.
This too shall pass and with demographics as they are and young people getting discouraged from pursuing this field I believe long term my position is safe.
Also a huge chunk of what AI company CEOs say is just pure bullshit that they only say because they need that sweet, sweet investor money. Bullshit writes a check that eventually must be cashed.
4 replies →
The impression I get is a lot of people are very upset. Most of the good programmers I know are just burnt out even talking about this, and are irritated with the people invading our profession pretending they know what they're doing while they don't.
I remember talking to the biggest AI booster at my last job. When I got him one on one, he admitted that he actually doesn't like AI and that it terrifies him, but he wanted to be seen as pro AI to keep his job. Fair. (Sadly, like me, he was also laid off, so I guess it didn't work)
Maybe I'm just old but people talking about being in programming for "status" or to be "highly regarded" really irks me. I'd rather see the entire field burnt to the ground and replaced by robots than to have it become a status profession like lawyering.
32 replies →
100% agreed, especially that last line. What I do not understand is why so many people are entirely okay with this change. I'm not interested in working with LLM's and after having been forced to work with LLM's at my current job, I can pretty confidently say that this will not end well for most of these companies. The people in charge pushing for this new tech do not understand the rammifications, nor do they understand the risk they are exposing themselves too. My boss expects more and more productivity with each passing day, while questioning why I'm not using as many tokens each week as he does. The software quality has gone down the drain, and it's beyond tiring that I have to pretend that my boss is just as competent at coding with his slop machine as I am after spending the last decade learning how to code, both as a hobby and for work.
It is upsetting to see our work stolen and our livelihoods threatened by a group of (mostly) incompetent, arrogant assholes who are convinced that the "computer that lies" is somehow a better programmer than the programmers it stole knowledge from. I've already started looking for a way out of this industry, and I'm genuinely worried for the fall-out this will have for the tech industry and the economy as a whole.
3 replies →
Why call it a plagiarism machine but not call other (pre-ai) programmers plagiarism machines?
1 reply →
>Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little
I think people underestimate just how much users scorn buggy, flaky technology.
The main issue with solid, reliable technology which Just Works is that users have relatively few reliable cues to distinguish that from vibe coded crap.
A vibe coded piece of shit looks very similar to a well engineered product made with care. That's a problem which needs to be solved.
self hosted communities are reacting to this by trying to detect signals of if a product is vibe coded but that in and of itself is still quite a poor quality cue.
3 replies →
This is unfortunately just the result of technological progress. People for centuries have crafted extremely hard to acquire skills over decades only to find their labour being made completely worthless due to automation or better alternatives disrupting their industry.
Carpenters, hatters, cobblers, miners, weavers, calculators, etc...
We can get mad about it, but it just is what it is. Ultimately for most people the loss of these jobs are a net-benefit because it's the result of better or cheaper alternatives.
The thing that worries me more specifically about AI is that it has the potential not to just disrupt an industry, or handful of industries, but in theory everything.
If machines are faster, strong, and more intelligent than humans, then you don't need human workers for anything. In the same way machines suddenly becoming faster and stronger than horses meant that the role of the horse in labour dropped rapidly during the industrial revolution.
It's not clear how civilisation functions if humans become effectively useless and the only thing of value is one's ownership of wealth producing assets.
Still, there's really no point in thinking about how we stop this. Humans are humans and we'll do the stupid thing then try to deal with the consequences after the fact. All regular people should be doing now is prepping for this outcome.
19 replies →
It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line? No, we haven't figured out how to fairly compensate everyone -- the frontiers aren't even trying. Spotify does at least try in their domain (and fails badly). Regardless of how the entitled get paid, the plagiarism label isn't fair and is diametrically opposed to Fair Use. Fair Use allows the commons to build on its history. Those against are typically parroting IP conglomerate conservatism and localized greed. I see immense benefit from the distillation of all available knowledge with an LLM interface. A recent article posted here says it perfectly "AI rewards expertise". I see vast benefits -- am willing to pay a significant monthly fee -- and sense that many are simply blind to and inarticulate about the growing force multiplier potential of modern AI.
1 reply →
This is also missing step 6: when your solution breaks in production or needs to be extended.
Having done step 2 & 3 by hand is the difference between being able to fix/extend it quickly with no further damage or fumbling around like an idiot and sometimes breaking more stuff in the process.
It's been pretty disheartening to watch SWEs rediscover/reinvent the SDLC.
1 reply →
>Having done step 2 & 3 by hand is the difference between being able to fix/extend it quickly with no further damage or fumbling around like an idiot and sometimes breaking more stuff in the process.
Plenty of shitty spaghetti code has been written by human hands.
LLMs can write good, maintainable code too, but they need to be kept on a shorter leash with focused goals.
4 replies →
It's funny, because I would consider myself a tinkerer (and I have a large backlog of pre-LLM programs), but the coding itself isn't the main thing that brings me joy, it's the phase 2 and phase 4 combo: figure out how to solve it, see whether your solution was correct (and actually use the program for its purpose). The actual implementation is extraneous to that.
To carry forward the sudoku analogy, I care about figuring out which numbers go where, and whether I was correct, I don't care about the mechanical part of actually penciling-in the answers (coding).
I'd say, in this analagy, step two is filling in half the numbers by gut feeling, and then three is seeing how wrong the guesses were and actually solving it.
2 replies →
3 doesn’t matter that much (unless it’s part of 2: new language or new libraries), and that’s why I don’t use LLM for it. Because LLM forces you to pay attention, yes you can have something that works somehow in one go, but the code makes you queasy (too complex for the purpose, or just weird).
So I do 3 because coding is like writing English for me (which is my 3rd language). I don’t care much for it, because it’s neither hard no easy. It’s just mechanical.
The type of problem also makes a massive difference.
- Writing my tiny hobby gameboy emulator? Heck, Why I'd let Claude take away the fun part of implementing new features and then see Super Mario Land start and run step by step?
- Debugging why a legacy Wordpress store with more than 50 active plugins is returning an error 500 just to some random customers? Claude can 100% take the wheel, I'm good.
Here's where the important difference is: unless you actually finished the wordpress thing, or ever had active users etc, it would never have become a maintenance burden. If it's not fun to maintain, I burn it.
For me, the reason I don't have that is because I never ship anything. I never want to maintain that. I never cared about solving an _actual_ business problem, making a dollar, or pleasing a user. As a tinkerer I must be extremely careful not to end up completing or delivering anything. Only pain lies down that path...
2 replies →
> If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. [...] The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps.
Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".
In my opinion the difference between "entrepreneur type" and "programmer type" (and yes: it can happen that both of these types work in the reciprocal job) is rather:
- People of the programmer type see solving problems as their primary goal. Satisfying customers just serves the purpose that these people pay money so that they can continue working on solving problems.
- People of the entrepreneur see satisfying customers as their primary goal. Programming is just a means to an end.
Yeah. I enjoy 2-4 most, 1 is the next, and 5 the least. I think the litmus test here is "if you knew could never deliver this to anyone, make money of it, get recognition for it, or even make it solve one of your own problems you have. Would you still be willing to spend time on it?"
If the answer is "no" you are probably more entrepreneurial than tinkerer. But it's a spectrum.
1 reply →
I enjoy the process of solving problems with LLMs. I understand it's chaotic (what many people call non-deterministic), and that doesn't appeal to some people, but solving problems with statistics is problem solving just the same. Just because medicines don't work with 100% reliability doesn't mean Jonas Salk didn't solve a problem. The same is true with LLM solutions that don't work 100% of the time.
I think most people will come around to this way of thinking once the pro-LLMers stop pretending like the statistics don't exist too (i.e. that ML is the solution to any problem, despite how unreliable it is).
I don't think that should be an issue either way, especially if it is not production code and just a hobby thing.
1 reply →
LLMs can be very good at 2. Finding the best architecture, data structures, algorithms, looking on arXiv to see other ways to solve the problem, etc.
You have to work in design mode and stop it from pissing code. Describe the requirements as detailed as possible and refine them based on the responses. It's quite rewarding and helps structure the way you think about the problem.
I have always thought that there are two kinds of programmer, the tinker and the mathematician. The tinker likes to code operating systems and shells, the mathematician likes to code Haskell and Agda. You've updated my belief that there are a third kind, the entrepreneur, which sees programming as a means to an end and would gladly stop programming if possible.
Looking at your ladder, made me think where I fit in and I mostly enjoy steps 1 and 2. The implementation and shipping are big chores to me. Once I know, half in my head, that the problem is solvable and I could see a path towards implementation I loose motivation to continue.
So possibly there are other classes of people, not just either enterpreneur or thinkerer. Thou not sure what this combination is, maybe something more like R&D.
And LLMs give a lot of value here. They allow to quickly do steps 2-3 - "hard and tedious" stuff - to confirm that the thing, in fact, became solvable.
I really like that categorization, but I think you've missed a step (or several): designing and implementing all the extra stuff needed to make it work, but aren't directly related to the problem.
For example, you have an idea for a cool and useful app and you want to put it on a website. You need to figure out hosting, you need to write some copy, you need to do some visual design.
Maybe 3a) Yak shaving?
There are various ways to take shortcuts. For hosting, you can use something super easy like GitHub Pages or Netlify or Cloudflare, or maybe piggyback off an existing site that's already deployed. For both copy and visual design, you can just ask Claude or Codex to do it -- but only if you don't mind having that standard vibe-coded look and feel, all glowing gradients and punchy, mic-dropping text.
Maybe you're including that under 5), ship/deploy/publish, but I read that as being more about scaling, marketing, and making things robust. Even before you reach that stage there's always a bunch of bullshit to work through before you can even reach 4), seeing the solution work for yourself.
There are more than two types. Or, at least, more than one way to tinker with the code.
Just like aleph_minus_one, I like to tinker at a higher level: find a more general way to solve things, find a new way to structure abstractions, etc.
> "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".
If you're interested in abstractions, you need to understand the problem space itself, not just a specific instance of the problem.
Nice analysis. I really love diving into 2 and 3, but I also notice I'm pretty good at 1; at several companies I kept identifying problems we should address, and also how to address them, though quite often they just wanted me to focus on 3 and 4.
Currently I'm in the process of starting my own business solving a problem my last employer underestimated, and I find myself focusing much more on 1 and 5, which I also enjoy, and I use LLMs a lot for 3 and parts of 2. The LLM and I often disagree about 2, but that often results in a better solution than if I'd just trusted either myself or the LLM. I iterate a lot between 2 and 4, letting the LLM do almost the entirety of 3, and advising on 2.
That's not a bad model to view it through, but I would say calling them "phases" instead of something like "activities" creates a false reliance on ordering. In many successful programming projects/products, those five activities occurred simultaneously, or out of order, or in waves of progress along all or some activities. Seldom has it ever been a clean single waterfall pass.
> 3) You actually implement the solution.
even for an entrepreneur type - you need to understand the technology to get to good enough solution e.g if you don't know shit & just accepted what the llm gave you - u might end up with an unmaintainable mess. the llm might recommend you use some proprietary solution when an open source solution exists that works well for your use case.
plus llms tend to be wordy or make things complex more than necessary.
Many entrepreneurial types will just market the shit out of unmaintainable messes fast enough to IPO so they can get their bag all the same.
The thing with programming a computer is that the computer does exactly what you tell it to, so in order to implement something well you need to have a very deep understanding of the problem. And it's that understanding that is valuable.
This is a really useful framing. I also love step 3 and when I delegate it to an LLM it takes the joy out of my work. But where I've found LLMs most useful is steps 1 and 2. They are terrible at steps 1 and 2 on their own, but they have a massive amount of knowledge that can help. I think a human and an LLM working together here is the best scenario.
That's actually a great classification and I've never seen it being laid out like that. I guess it can be useful to know "what kind" of programmer one is.
You are obviously missing the GOTO statement in your list but the other part is hobby projects tend to be architecturally small.
The moment you have more devs architecture becomes the overwhelming concern, and this is why professionally LLM usage explodes since the LLMs can implement bits while the humans work on the actual hard work of making sure they fit together properly in the intended way.
I have encountered a lot of people that view coding as a therapeutic exercise, and they were already a problem pre AI wave, now they are only going to be a hobby at least.
Best explanation I’ve seen. I’m an entrepreneur type. I would fall asleep after two hours of coding to solve a problem. I still remember 100 hours of coding to facilitate a data import into a new application only to realize half my time was wasted because the import library we were using back then didn’t support UTF data (this was a SQL-92 database). I love using an LLM to do the coding.
Personally I think I'm a 1-4 type, and I enjoy 2 but 3 is mostly annoying. LLMs are good at 3 and 3 is the worst part of programming. I don't think that's "manager type". 2 is also what LLMs tend to be bad at, especially the small ones, so there's a lot of value I still add to the process.
3.5) You decide what evidence you need to see to convince yourself it works
6) You maintain the program with architectural gymnastics as time eats away at the utility and relevance and user base of what you originally built
Both of these activities cause a night-and-day perspective change the next time through the loop
Nice analysis! I would perhaps add that LLMs are pretty helpful at (2) in my experience, as long as you don't turn your brain off. (As a Google/SO replacement, mainly.)
I have about three modes, working with LLMs:
A) Just use them for (2), do (3) and (4) myself.
B) Just use them for (2) and (3), but with very fine grained instructions - to the point where it barely saves me time.
C) Use them for (2), (3) and (4), but with this workflow, it quickly degrades into slop for me.
I still get the best results with (A), but for a quick PoC, (C) is hard to beat.
What's hilarious (or sad) is that I see a lot of people throw them at (1) as well, which seems to have a high chance of inducing AI psychosis and creating software nobody understands, let alone needs.
I agree. If you use the AI for (4), it's pretty much guaranteed to hallucinate whatever it wants and then approve it. For small projects, it might be good enough. For anything serious, it's not.
I find I get the best results when I just use it for (3), and sometimes a bit for (2). Going in with at least an idea of how to make it work has the best chance of ending up with a good changeset. And if you already know how to make it work, don't leave it to chance. Tell the LLM what to do, then let it do it.
Regarding (2) figuring out how to do things at a higher level (e.g. the general architecture of an application) is pretty different from figuring out things at a lower level (e.g. how to fill text with a certain gradient in CSS - the stuff where years ago you would have spent hours reading documentation or browsing StackOverflow until you figured it out, if you weren't familiar with the topic). So you could use an LLM just for (2b) and (3) and do the rest yourself.
2 replies →
Haha Yeah if you do step 1 with AI you risk creating "an AI powered marijuana platform for global AI solutions" (The inevitable South park Reference).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8fapIDnrMI
I enjoy 2 and 4 the most. I do a lot more hobby projects now that LLMs can automate 3.
i would call myself a tinkerer but still don’t have a necessity for 3)
it’s more akin to 3d printing to me, i get the design all setup and let the machine do 3) and then get to play with it in 4)
Most software work is job related and business related. You are paid to work not to enjoy.
Because of this the future of software will most likely be overtaken by AI because the business aspect of it will overtake the enjoyment aspect of it. Why? Because business pays bills, enjoyment does not.
The fact that you are talking about lack of enjoyment on the job is a luxury not many employees can afford.
I might be weird, but I love phases 2 to 5 and I hate phase 1 with a passion. I hate speaking with people to see what their problems are. I want to solve problems, not user surveys. And all the itches I have are either already solved, not itchy enough or too wide / ambitious to approach them solo. If LLMs solved exclusively 1 and told me "this problem is actually valuable, go and solve it", I would be the happiest person in the world. It's not true that ideas are cheap. Or better: ideas themselves are dirty cheap, good ideas are invaluable.
Even if you're entreprenurial, LLMs are useless for this.
You can't go really hard unless you can come up with something people weren't expecting, but when they discover it they want it. You can't just sit around waiting for people to want things properly. That's extremely passive.
The point being, the idea of using LLMs to find what people already passively want is itself flawed, even if you like marketing and selling to people. It's a really fundamental problem with the idea.
> Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.
I'd sharpen this to: it's 3 layers of software engineering (2, 3, 4), and 1 layer of programming (3).
While I agree with the premise that there are Thinkers and Shippers, I reject labeling of tinkerers and entrepreneurial. There's nothing entrepreneurial about working for a big business and shipping cool things.
But you're ultimately right, some people want to solve sudokus and some people want to change the world, and the sudoku solvers are really upset that a Sudoku Solver and World Changer 9000 device is widely available, because it spoils the fun they have with sudoku.
[flagged]
Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight faster. People that enjoy chess don't allow you to bring a computer to the chess table. The list is endless and the people that enjoy programming will create rules that force you to program, why shouldn't they? It's their hobby.
Writing code without an LLM is akin to cooking a meal yourself, as opposed to something in between hiring a private chef and pulling a slot machine lever. When I cook a meal for myself or my loved ones, I become deeply familiar with the ingredients and the recipe. I am a good cook. Every decision, small and large, I make myself. Using feedback, I can tweak the components and the process. However, if I order food and call it my own creation, I’ll be speechless when my nut-allergic friend asks me if I used peanut oil or olive oil. And does it taste good? The end result is subjective, not binary, like your three similes. What if the food sucks? Must I now micromanage the chef? I don’t want to make them cook it again and again, hoping each time it’ll taste little more like how I want it to. I’d rather just cook it myself; I am a good cook, afterall.
This is actually a great analogy. And I think it works very well. Because what llms deliver is not the exquisite dish, the carefully crafted solution.
It’s just a solution that might scratch the itch but never fully blow you away. One time use software essentially.
If that is good or bad remains to be seen.
Well to me using an LLM is akin to using microwave for food, and programming is getting your hands dirty in the art of cooking. I used to do the latter but the pace is too much, so I'm forced to go for the former. I still miss the days where I can cook myself
This is a good analogy. Also I hate cooking; it feels like a chore and waste of time. Given the means, I prefer to have someone else do it for me so I can focus on more interesting things.
3 replies →
I don't see it the same way. I see it as akin to building a machine which can do the cooking for you. There is a lot of experimentation in terms of how you can construct that machine and how you can set it up, and for some people the payoff is in exactly this process.
2 replies →
My boss tried to make me interested in agentic programming by showing me how "productive" the creator of OpenClaw is.
All I see is a fast food factory. Sure it's interesting that you can produce so much so quickly. But what is produced is endlessly uninteresting to me. It doesn't help that all the harness building is just SEO in disguise. Trial and error.
I don't doubt that agentic programming makes it possible to produce faster, but it also comes at a great cost for me, which is that I largely don't enjoy my job anymore. If I was given the choice between that and halving my salary I would have chosen the latter.
Yes. And (too) many people focus on the effort, or the LOC produced. Completely ignoring the value the thing produced actually brings.
Yeah exactly. My go-to example is that if you enjoy playing guitar, you're not going to stop doing it because Suno exists now.
In addition, say if you had like a guitar-playing forum, where people share recordings of their practice. People would likely not appreciate it to share AI-generated audio of guitar-practicing there, either.
And while there are various reasons for a guitar forum that might not hold for a programming forum, one of them remains: There's nothing to talk about when it's AI-generated. What scale did you use and how did you tune it? "I dunno, AI did it"
All you can talk about is to say "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine you're paying subscription to access made you that thing, nice"
Or for example, even when a friend of mine vibe-coded a "synthesizer" app and he wanted to show me cause he knows I like that kind of thing. And I do, I love digging into and experimenting with DSP algorithms, but also the user interfaces and all sorts of things digital audio related. And I love talking about it, or explaining stuff. But my friend couldn't tell me anything (not even that it was using WebAudio, but also how). Anyway it made me a bit sad, and I felt like something is lost here. Something worthwhile. And I explained it to him that then all I could really say was "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine made you that thing, nice", and we talked it over, and it was alright. But still, it seems something is lost.
This is true, but as usual nobody can agree on what "doing it yourself" means.
Few cars are manual steering, manual brakes, manual transmission.
Few grappling bodies go all Greek-naked.
Few chess bodies forbid researching previous games or your opponent.
The list is indeed endless, and every single person thinks they are using just the right amount of assistance; anything less is pointlessly difficult, anything more is cheating that takes the sport out.
Me, I've been a hobbyist programmer since youth (6502 assembly, represent). I'm having a blast "writing" software without touching a line of code. Sure, I'm old, and maybe I'm like those guys blasting Veyrons through highways, relying on traction control and all the computers to let me drive beyond my abilities. And... ok? I'm having fun, even if I'm not doing it right, by random anonymous peoples' views.
> I'm having a blast "writing" software without touching a line of code.
And that’s totally fine, enjoy your hobby however you enjoy it best. Most people programming by hand for fun don’t care that you program with an LLM for fun. The problems come when those two worlds collide, like in the linked GitHub issue, in chess engine leaderboards. In the long run for both groups to have their fun and friendly competition you’ll need two separate leaderboards. This is also very common in other hobbies. In racing there are car classes so that your Veyron and someone’s old Miata don’t go head to head. In combat sports there’s weight classes. Most sports separate amateurs and pros. Usually there is respect across the group boundaries and appreciation for the other groups deeply specialized skill. There’s even the concept of cross training to get better in your flavor of a sport. This will be figured out with programming as well.
2 replies →
One of the great things about hobbies is that you can enjoy them whatever way you want. But honestly is it not more accurate to say that you are now a hobbyist prompter, rather than a hobbyist programmer? I get the "its just a tool" mentality and I guess LLMs can be used that way, but if you are not touching a line of code yourself then it seems less analogous to using power steering and more analogous to just taking a taxi.
6 replies →
> This is true, but as usual nobody can agree on what "doing it yourself" means.
Not everyone has to agree. Just everyone in a particular group at a particular time. Grappling competitions exist and so do MMA competitions, and both of them will expect you to follow their own rules.
But LLM usage isn’t equivalent to power steering, it’s what a full kitchen is to a microwave. You can sure put effort into a microwave meal but it’ll always work against you and much of the time you’re better off just picking up a pan.
Not to diminish your enjoyment, you’re completely entitled to it, I just think this is a bit of a false equivalence
4 replies →
Fully agree with this. Also did lots of 6502 assembly, and also love doing agent-driven development. I also still like writing code manually and tweaking everything for myself, but those serve two different purposes.
Sometimes I'm having fun getting to the output I want and otherwise wouldn't have had time to. Sometimes I'm having fun exploring the code.
I don't care if someone don't see the value in one or the other of those, and to me they stand on equal footing as things I find both fun and valuable for different reasons.
> anything less is pointlessly difficult, anything more is cheating that takes the sport out.
https://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BlubParadox
> Few cars are manual steering, manual brakes, manual transmission.
Tell me you are not in European or African continent without telling me.
12 replies →
I used to write code all day, solving maths and logic problems which is what my brain loves to do, and so I loved my job.
Now I talk to a robot all day, trying to figure out how best to tell it whats in my brain. I no longer do maths and logic and instead I think about language and questions all day, holding in depth conversations and thinking up responses. This is something my brain naturally doesnt like to do and so I fatigue quickly in the day compared to my old job.
I want to do maths and logic again :(
I enjoy programming a lot, but still made the transition to using AI for my programming. It is a new tool that makes me much more efficient, I finally could continue working on my many open source projects that I couldn't touch for many years due to lack of time. My productivity is up, I'm pretty sure the code quality has improved, and I'm learning more than ever before; just in a different way.
for me its that software, wrought by hand is "bespoke". Yes, there is a loooooot of software that is just commercial, quickly vomited by hands that are just in it for the money. On the other hand there are open source projects who might have a miss guided design philosophy (Darktable comes to mind) but are otherwise build from people that care. There was an "artisan" at work, someone who cared.
When I see all those "show HN" projects that are slot level code it feels like they dont care about the result that much and just want to showcase their idea in a more tactile way, but there is no actual proper execution to make the thought into matter so to speak
True, but it sounded a bit paradoxical to me that the people who work on engines designed to beat humans at chess were themselves opposed to using engines that (arguably) beat humans at programming...
Exactly one of them threatens their lifestyle.
It can also be a personal preference for minimalism vs. maximalism. Or many other things.
Or Warhammer figurines painting, let’s buy them already painted
If you don't want to paint, and also don't want to pay somebody else to paint them, there's always various alternatives like printed out papercraft stands. Fold them, stick them on the base and you are ready to roll.
There's also a myriad of other creative ways to proxy your way out of the general costs (time, space and money) if you check out the term "poorhammer".
You can take already painted warhammer figurines, pose them, take a photo, prompt an AI to make that your first scene, and generate a hollywood level scene in about a minute or two.
Yes, sure, you can buy the figurine and get the joy of painting it. But there's new things you can do now too, things you couldn't dream about before.
But I'll grant you this, the AI coding extinction event is so severe that I do believe we need to support anyone trying to preserve any memory of it. Like, we need to build entire museums, one for each programming language.
4 replies →
People programme for 2 reasons:
1. Some programme because it’s the one of 2 ways to get the things they want (another way is hiring a team to code for them). Now that they have vibe coding, they’d happily never touch a line of code again. 2. Other people programmes because they just enjoy it. Vibe coding ruins the best part for them. Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."
Most people getting paid to code are probably somewhere in the middle?
But nowadays hand-writing code at work is starting to feel kinda 'illegal'. The manager is gonna ping you just because you fall behind on the company's token waste leaderboard.
Maybe it's just another "hobby should never become job" story?
> Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."
Also like building a robot to cook food for you. Sure, it's fine for mass produced meals, but it won't replace a top-notch chef.
Hobby should only become job if you enjoy the craft of it and if the profession / job rewards craftsmanship.
People in it just for the money won't care about craft - you see the same thing in plumbing. And when there's enough money and scale on the line, craft becomes progressively more niche - that is why Ikea furniture is a thing. And you can even say that there is craft in Ikea, just not along the axes a traditional furniture maker or user would consider.
3 replies →
"Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? "
How do we filter out these people during an interview?
why would you want to filter these people out? surely those that consider programming more than just a "means to an end" are going to be much more valuable employees, consider they are much more likely to be skilled at their craft? im genuinely interested in why you'd want to filter these people out!
2 replies →
Offer low pay and start using lines of code as a metric. Not only will you not hire such people, you'll also filter out any who might already be on your team!
(Assuming "these people" is a euphemism for "skilled engineers")
[dead]
The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.
"Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."
The README (https://github.com/adamtwiss/coda#license) addresses concerns about copyright in good faith and better than most agentic-driven repos:
> After our initial 0.9.0 pre-release (July 2026), community feedback raised that Coda contained AGPL-licensed code. This prompted a full audit of our codebase and dependencies, and steps to correct what it found. We now believe Coda complies with all applicable licenses. If you have any concern, please open a GitHub issue with the details and we'll happily investigate.
The debate is about whether or not the new code qualifies as derived.
They can remove all of the literal code matches from the codebase, but if it was written by having an LLM study the original code and then write something similar, it's hard to argue it's not a derivative work.
16 replies →
Is the bank lending you money "in good faith"?
It's so weird that they think they have to comply with copyright in this case, but not in the case of any other license
"We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing"
Imo without the sign off from Reckless it's suspicious
> lifting ideas
It's not like ideas are protected by copyright though. Copyright protects the specific expression of the idea, not the idea itself. Anyone can "lift ideas" from anyone else, including proprietary software.
You're attacking his word choice, but the context is clear that it would be protected.
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/projects/lpf/Patents/patent...
[dead]
Except "Claude, take this code and change the variable names up a bit" is not lifting ideas, and you would not get away with doing that to software belonging to a company with a competent legal department.
2 replies →
> lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.
You cannot copyright ideas. And that's a good thing. Remember the "one click checkout patent" saga? That is bad for everyone involved. We don't want that, as an industry.
You’re mixing patent and copyright. You can patent an innovative algorithm in the US. And the implementation is of course protected by copyright
That comment is not posted yet in the github thread when the article is published
Keeping in mind that I'm going strictly off the commit[0], a bit-packing layout is very much the kind of thing which is not subject to copyright in the first place. Neither are algorithms. Ideas, in general, are not subject to copyright: expression is.
So "lifting ideas from other engines", as you yourself put it, is entirely licit, no matter how you do it. _Should_ you credit others when so doing? I err on the side of yes, on that question. _Must_ you? No, there is no such requirement, this is not academic publishing. Does it constitute violation of license? Absolutely not. Straightforwardly, no. Furthermore, it _should not_, we would not like the result of that.
Think: SCO suing Linus Torvalds over his use of a.out: and winning. It would be bad. Even though I understand the reasons for it, it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of.
As I lead this post with: maybe there's something in the repo which is infringing, it's quite possible that commit doesn't tell the whole story. If so, keep in mind that I don't know that, and am able to change my opinion in the face of new evidence.
Based on what I _have_ seen, no: you do not get to lock down a bit-packing pattern just because you're the first to come up with it. Nor should you have that right.
[0]: https://github.com/adamtwiss/coda/commit/cd170a4ea9993cf8246...
You'll notice I didn't mention copyright, and that's because I don't think it's relevant. I think your analysis is correct. Keep in mind too that Stockfish – the engine I work on, although I wasn't at the time – was the subject of a high-profile defense of the GPL in Germany: https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che.... That case was different as it involved wholesale copying of the source code, rather than porting ideas. Ideas shouldn't be copyrightable.
But copyright and plagiarism are orthogonal, and questions of morality are much more tied to the latter. It would be illegal (in the United States) for me to publish a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but not immoral. It was not immoral, in my view, for Aaron Swartz to try to liberate JSTor articles.
That doesn't make plagiarism acceptable, either. And therefore, I'm willing to call it out when I see it.
2 replies →
No idea why you're getting downvoted. You're right.
> it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of
Yeah, it's surreal. It's not just intellectual property either, Hackers have already started complaining about automation now too.
Computers must have replaced tens of millions of jobs. It's the ultimate job destroyer, since it allows capital to do more with less. Automating me, a doctor, out of his job is essentially the holy grail of Hacker News.
But when hackers are automated away, then suddenly it's a crime against humanity.
I think that's true, but I'm not sure if this would characterize itself as "lifting ideas". I mean, it's one thing to personally take the idea and re-implement it yourself elsewhere. But I have to believe there could be an argument, that having an inference algorithm take the original source and re-implement it in the context of your engine might count as derivative work.
A particular work is deliberately supplied at inference time so the system can recreate or adapt it for another environment. It resembles commissioning a translation, port, or derivative adaptation through an automated tool, even where the output is not verbatim, so it seems it could hold a candle in court.
You have a few scenarios now up for legal debate:
I think #1 and #2 have open legal battles on it, but #3, which seems to be this scenario, is new to me, and I feel it could have legal ground for being considered infringing on the copyright.
Sidenote: how is your account "samatman" and created "April 24, 2010", that's a really funny coincidence
1 reply →
Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together. You see it improving over time as a result of your efforts. You also build your skills and learn. It’s really a nice activity.
AI systems basically change that whole formula. I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows. I feel like there’s no material value in my 50th vibecoded demo since everyone in this world can vibecode now. Sure I’ve got my custom todo app which is nice, and my custom game plug-in with some neat features for the game I like, and a few other custom apps. Those are mildly useful to me. But every second I spend vibe coding something that’s supposed to be a success for others is just invaded by the thought that even if this thing is any good, someone with real capital can just direct a future AI at it to take it from me, so I’m not really gaining.
So I think I’ll just stick to using AI occasionally, without letting it ruin the programming activity I love by spoiling it. Due solely to AI, I don’t expect I’ll ever do anything in my life which will impact another person. That’s a personal tragedy, but in a sense I was going to die anyways and so will everyone else, so it doesn’t really matter.
>I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows.
It's just power fantasy. It's amazing the first couple of times but as it wears off and becomes the new norm you forgot how being the one who decides which thing does what feels like.
Luckily (or unluckily?) the industry only cares about the end result, and flushes out people who used to reward for their passion and dedication naturally.
A lot of this is from non-tech workers wanting to expand their repertoire as well.
They have no clue what they're doing programming-wise, and in some cases this is perfectly fine, but after years of SaaS, some people are taking it to extremes, and spending millions of tokens on things that could be a spreadsheet or a note in the calendar.
Just recently we had someone deliver a report in the format of a 200.000 LOC application that requires several clusters to run, for example. It does all querying in real time from clandestine APIs, or by crawling existing systems. The person who asked for the report asked for it not to be deployed.
I get nothing of the power fantasy, of it, but I do get joy out of vibe coding.
As I've gotten older, the amount of ideas I have here and there has remained constant, while the time I have, or brain power at the end of the day when I can work on my passion projects, has diminished. What was once basically a second day job at night became family time, baths, dinner, etc. So while I may be too exhausted to sit and code, I am not too tired to sit and type my ideas, or discuss a single feature I want to see, or review what's there. I get joy that ideas are getting out of my head faster despite less brainpower to get them there. I can always grab the reigns and take over myself, but that's not the kind of thing that wins against going to bed.
> I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows.
I get joy out of it because it solves actual problems I have that I don't have time to solve manually, or don't want to. E.g. I just recently had Codex add a mechanism for two-level virtual desktops because I wanted groups of them. An hour later I had two-level virtual desktops in my wm that worked exactly how I wanted it, with support for it in my desktop switcher. I could write it myself, but why would I? I love writing code for various projects, but sometimes I just want the outcome.
For me that’s a slippery slope. It’s not really clear what parts of my hobby project are the good parts and what parts are unfulfilling. When I start including AI too much I end up feeling that none of it is fulfilling. When I do things manually I feel pride in the details however, even though those same details on another day would make me feel like I’m wasting my precious life.
I spent 2 months having Opus build a demo for a project I dreamt of for 15 years, but somehow now I can’t feel interested in it. I’m trying to avoid this. A good use case for me has been using AI to help me acquire all primary source documentation on a topic and then prepare a curated sequence of study based on a small demo I’d like to build.
Keep in mind I’m talking about how I’m approaching creative programming in my personal free time.
2 replies →
This. And the AI detractors in this thread are the same I think, and are virtue signalling.
3 replies →
In the past I’ve experimented with many different programming paradigms. I think my AI coding benefits from that experience. I want to find new paradigms to write extensible, modular systems with AI, a problem that is still open. One thing I’ve learned is that when implementing a complex system, no paradigm eliminates the need to write lots code (covering many ugly edge-cases) tests, which previously required lots of boring, slow work, but AI is very good at that so maybe can make it less boring and faster.
> I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects.
What? It's the simplest thing in the world. You get the product. Isn't that the point of all programming? You want a thing and you speak a magic incantation and then you have the thing, to keep and use.
> even if this thing is any good, someone with real capital can just direct a future AI at it to take it from me, so I’m not really gaining.
This kind of sounds like you're writing code for social credit. Like, you don't actually want the thing, you want to be "the person who made the thing". If you want the thing for its own sake, nobody can take it from you and what somebody with capital does on their own services does not harm your use one whit.
Well I used to imagine I’d make a business out of the thing. I also would sometimes think the thing could give me professional opportunities.
6 replies →
> Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together.
Programming is nice cause of this for you. Other people have other preferences. When I got my first LED to blink, I wasn't thinking about the elegance of my code. Same for when moved sprites or made a async stateless compute system for MATLAB analysis. There are people who are driven by the artifacts they produce. That's just how our brains are wired I guess, outcome oriented. I see nothing wrong in that.
Btw, I feel like there is this view that all people using agents are the apocryphal "vibe coders". That is just not true. The process of creation remains the same. Break it down into smaller pieces. Work those pieces till a piece it done. Make sure it all comes together. People seriously using these agents are not writing "implement gta6. Make no mistakes".
Programming has a lot of nice features and accurately capturing them all in a hacker news comment isn’t that easy, so maybe you could have some consideration for that in the future. I also want effects to happen in the world. I also like the slow process of craft.
I’m anticipating not a very far away future when “implement gta 6” will not be that different from torrenting gta 3 in the 2000s. The current agent era feels very ephemeral. You’re choosing to interpret some version of AI based programming that you enjoy with what I think is the common interpretation of vibe coding. If you like your process then go ahead with it. I’m not stopping you.
You seem to want the AI supported gratification and the feeling of process and craft. So make your process and think of it however you like. There’s literally nothing I can or would do to get in your way.
2 replies →
Have you seen what most people do for jobs all day? They do repetitive brainless things, not always new and interesting work. For all of those people, doing this is at least something you do sitting down alone in an office and so they will be queueing to do this.
I’ve also had menial jobs, like most people.
And LLMs are what make so many jobs feel repetitive and brainless. Jobs that were engaging, interesting, from which people were learning, developing expertise over time, are now prompting + babysitting agents
4 replies →
A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
I think part of it though is that LLMs (especially in novice hands) create code that is more difficult to review and has subtler bugs. Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.
Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.
Or imagine a club where everyone cooks together and then cleans dishes together. Then one day some people show up at a club meeting with cooking robots that create 10x the amount of dirty dishes and then don’t help clean up at all. I bet the other members wouldn’t be happy, even if the robots mostly cooked decent food.
1 reply →
It is probably a good trade off if you sell cookies or if you vastly prefer eating cookies to making cookies.
4 replies →
> Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.
I'm lurking around the OpenBSD mailing list and it seems that code review is where collaboration starts. You send a patch, explain its purpose, people try it out and comment. If it's OK (various factors decide that), it's imported inside the codebase.
The main issue in corporate settings is that the author of the PR wants to browbeat you into accepting his/her changes. Either directly or by appealing to the manager. They don't want collaboration, they just see you as the blocker between them and the "Done" status on the ticket.
1 reply →
What you need from LLM is recipe making.
Main course is this this and this, 1. Do this 2. Plug this 3. Run this.. step by step plan.
So you get a precise top down construction plan. Then it’s easy to split the parts where the coding needs to be manual (smoothing walls) vs where it can be whateverz (laying concrete).
LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.
Good luck making a grand strategy game in two months holidays without an LLM. Now you can.
People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Yes manual touch is still needed in some parts of the construction process but architecting the whole thing is the most important in 2026.
⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣦⠀⠀⣠⣿⣿⣦⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠒⣿⣿⣿⠓⠀⠀⠻⣿⣿⠀⢀⣴⣿⣦⡀⠀⢀⣾⣦⠘⢿⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⢀⣴⣿⡿⠃⡄⠈⠻⣿⣟⣉⣀⠉⣽⡿⠋⠡⠴⣿⣿⣿⠓⠀⠙⢇⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠿⣿⠟⢁⣾⣿⣦⣀⠘⠿⠟⢁⣼⣿⣿⣷⠂⣴⣿⣿⣿⣆⠘⢶⣶⣿⠶⠤⠀ ⠀⣀⣀⡀⢉⣿⣿⣿⡍⠀⢀⣀⠙⢻⠿⢋⣤⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⠙⢿⣦⡀⠀ ⠀⠟⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣌⠉⠠⣤⣤⣤⡌⢙⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠛⠛⠂⢈⣙⠀ ⠀⠀⣉⡉⣹⣿⣿⣿⣿⣏⠉⣉⣀⣈⠙⠋⣠⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣆⠙⠛⠛⠛⠀ ⠀⠀⠋⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣌⠉⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠴⢾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠦⠈⣙⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⣉⣉⠁⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⣦⣤⡄⢉⣉⣉⣉⠉⣡⣤⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣷⠀⢰⣿⣿⡇⢸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⣿⣿⡇⣸⣿⣿⣿⡄⢻⣿⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⠀⢸⣿⣿⡇⢸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⣿⣿⠁⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠸⠿⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⠀⢸⣿⣿⣇⠸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠛⠛⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠉⠉⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⠀⠿⠿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠛⠛⠛⠛⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠉⠉⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.
Specialists will be fed to the model weights, generalists will inherit the world.
17 replies →
Exactly. I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables), but because I enjoy gardening. Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point.
I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.
These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.
All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.
These are not completely different things, but maybe different sides of the same coin.
You enjoy the act of gardening, so you do not automate it away.
You enjoy the clean home, not the act of cleaning, so you may be interested in automating it away.
It seems you enjoy designing or using software, as opposed to programming/building software. So you automate the programming/building away.
1 reply →
> Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point.
Unless your hobby is backyard robotic gardening.
Which is my way of saying that people have different reasons for enjoying a hobby.
Like most hobby debates, this one comes down to "Let people enjoy things"
1 reply →
> Buying a robot to do it
It depends what you value. There's "zoning out going through the motions" for mindfulness and then there's "building stuff!" for interest, learning and fun.
And you can have any combination of the two. Like maybe doing the same planting routine but with different details for a different plant or experimenting if a new layout works better.
I don't care to do the labour of gardening. But if I had time, I'd spend it bikeshedding optimisations. IE what about grow lights? Is it worth having a greenhouse in my climate? etc etc. And all the little details about building stuff.
Aside: I too want a robot. One for lawn mowing (they exist but expensive) and one for spraying the little lawn weeds that pop up.
How much of coding is weeding?
3 replies →
>> I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables)
...cheaper how? My partner and I grow most of our veggies and, based on our calculations (including fixed costs that have gone into the garden, as well as e.g. water, fertilizer, etc.) we save a non-negligible amount of money every month.
2 replies →
Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.
If I'm any example, I'm on the other side. I got into computers in the '70s: plotter art, BASIC, then Z-80s, forth, PDP11s, Amigas and so to now with GPUs and supercomputers and visualization. I'm recently retired and having enormous fun plowing through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't that be a cool tool" (https://pcons.org) or a climate visualization (https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com) or a travel packing list app (packzen) or a bunch of 3d printer tools... so on and so on. Totally co-engineered with Claude. What we're doing together, and getting out to the world as useful open source projects, is easily 10x what I could've done on my own, in the limited time available to me in this life.
1 reply →
> Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.
At least those who really are into development to the point of writing their own OS, Language, etc can still enjoy it as a hobby.
1 reply →
I don't think that's quite fair. Computers have been my hobby since I was 4, I'm having a blast, this is so much fun. I've always had way more ideas I wanted to try than I've had time/energy to implement, especially true since having kids, now the implementation can almost keep up.
Computers were on a trajectory of becoming more consumption oriented, and this has shifted it strongly back towards creation. Normal people can make their own custom software again. This is awesome.
Really hate this characterization, although to be fair I love the ops/infra side of things more. I've used to set up so many parts of my homelab manually, but now I can just get it all done. I've spent countless hours maintaining a Rpi server at the infancy of my interest in computing. Truly a lot of it is maintenance and busywork tasks. I am having more fun than ever. Perhaps some people like those busywork sysadmin tasks and gain enjoyment of the homelab hobby just from that...honestly I can't say I really understand it.
That attitude isn’t universal to everyone who enjoys tinkering and making computers do interesting things. I just had lunch yesterday with one of the most tinkering people I know, who as a side hobby teaches kids to program using robotics etc. to make it interesting for them. Like me, he’s having a blast using LLMs.
LLMs are amazing tools for learning new skills and technology. I’ve recently moved into an ML adjacent role, am learning tons that I never knew before, and I’m delivering working systems more quickly.
One thing that’s been an eye-opener is how many details I miss in the code I write. LLMs can almost always suggest improvements, and usually, it’s quite obvious that they’re right. But this is making me a better developer, even though I already have decades of experience.
LLMs don’t force you to vibe code everything. You can use them as precisely or as vibe-ishly as you want. They can be a skill amplifier rather than a skill replacer, if you use them as such.
I'm the same way. The "grind" makes the successes all the sweeter.
Not my experience at all. I taught myself assembly language when I was 11 just for fun, and I'm still programming as a hobby more than 40 years later, even though I also do it professionally.
And I love using LLMs. They take care of all the boring boilerplate, letting me focus on the parts I actually enjoy.
This is not strictly true.
I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it
This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.
My hobby is making things. I used to make them with a screwdriver and a hammer and a handsaw. Then I bought a drill and got some screwdriving bits, an a pneumatic hammer and an arm saw. Now I can build things much much faster.
Similarly I've made lots of software projects. Over the last 15+ years I have over 250 github repos, the majority of them no one but me will be interested in but I had fun making stuff. LLMs let me make stuff faster just like the power tools. I'm still enjoying making stuff. I still direct, I still decide what to make, I still decide features, iterate on UX, etc, but at several X the speed of before. Loving it.
I think for those of us who got into software initially for the end result -- being the only way for the thing in your head to ever exist -- enjoying the engineering part was a nice, incidental surprise.
So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.
Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.
I enjoy molding hyper specific software across my whole eco system of tech through prose with LLMs. Iterating over time to hone the right solutions based on very abstract reactions to the results I get. I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
I also woodwork and I remember this discussion there between hand tools, power tools, and CNCs. It's all the same hobby just different entry points and doing it the least automated way doesn't make your work more or less than anyone else's.
> I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
I LOLd very hard at that one, thanks. Very relatable.
A hobby of mine is also woodworking. I can make jigs, I can buy jigs. I can use hand tools, I can use power tools. I can use screws I can use joints. I can even buy made furniture and just assemble it. Though the latter is more of interior designing. But the point is it is a spectrum and everyone has their own niche. SDLC are not the same and there is different value to be derived. But the process of woodworking makes me handy. The experience allows me to elegantly and cost efficiently fix broken things. It enables me to do interesting things in interesting ways and there is more of a community around that. If I automated away all the woodworking and just bought the furniture... Well there isn't much of a community around that except flexing who has more cash. Idk, I'm trying to have empathy for both those who are for and against it.
> I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
Boy isn't that the truth haha, I feel like my previous phase of dotfile ricing has become "LLM ricing."
Not complaining though, it is genuinely fun!
> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
It's an age-old debate in every hobby.
Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result, which is what they want to use or play with.
In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.
Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.
> Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something.
Indeed, and this is the problem: unlike woodworking, where my power-assisted creation is independent of, or complements, your handcraft, this engine is directly competing with other engines. Twiss is being disingenuous when he says he has no interest in submitting it to competitions; it plays on a rated account on Lichess, for example.
1 reply →
And to extend the analogy, before there were house cleaning machines the people who enjoyed cleaning were lumped in with the people who like having a clean house.
I will say that there are a lot of parts of programming I enjoy, but I used to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down obscure errors or learning arcane systems just to get to the parts I personally enjoy: the feedback loop of making a thing, seeing the result, and improving it.
There is a reason stack overflow is dead. LLMs are a strictly better product.
I think this is why that I limit the use of LLM in my hobbyist project, but not in my work. I found LLM particularly useful of generating say VSCode configuration JSON files and it saved me a lot of headaches. It is also very good at finding the right tool for the job (e.g. which binary to use to write a floppy image).
LLMs expedite achieving AN end result.
For this specific example, cleaning your home counts as exercise and you are proud you put effort and got a good result.
It is an example of something that has hobby-like characteristics.
LLMs let you generate code quickly. This seems to have very little relevance to the end result.
If we accept a very simplistic view of how people think and feel, then sure.
I don't think this is correct.
What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.
> LLMs expedite achieving the end result.
Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)
[flagged]
[flagged]
4 replies →
What’s missing here is an understanding of the negative effect the rise of AI has had on programming communities overall: both the decrease in positive engagement as people have moved from discussing things and helping one another online to chatting with AI, and the increase in negative engagement. The amount of low-energy abandonware being “shared” into these communities makes it really hard to filter out the signal from the noise.
So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community.
To be fair, the decrease in discussion and helping one another online has also decreased some significant amount of negative engagement in the form of nonsensical arguments and frustrating ways of responding to questions (e.g. the biggest complaints with stackoverflow).
It was like this with cryptocurrency to a lesser extent too. Suddenly lots of people pretending to have technical background and explaining what a Merkle tree is.
And telling everyone if they don’t embrace cryptocurrency right away they will be left behind, how you are all limiting human flourishing by refusing to embrace the future, excusing every single negative side effect of the technology — because we have to move as fast as possible. And of course no words on how unsustainable the businesses are, how corrupt it is to have so much power and control into a few really shady individuals
> So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community.
Keeping the experience bearable BY gatekeeping. That is the point, gatekeeping is not inherently a bad thing. It's a required thing in many circles.
Is it gatekeeping in this case? Would they not allow beginners to join and learn? Are they not fully sharing the knowledge to anyone who's interested to learn it?
To me, it amounts more to disapproving showing up to a handmade sweater community and showing off your machine made sweaters, or maybe a machine made sweater you added a handful of stitches too yourself. It's like not realizing that the community wasn't about cool looking sweaters, but about hand-made cool looking sweaters.
Having said that, there might be another community that's more about cool looking sweaters, and new machine techniques that deliver really nice looking sweaters would be of interest to them. I actually think it's what is happening a bit in programming, there are niche that remain more about the manual programming, and others that are about any process that can lead to better outcomes.
1 reply →
Yep, gatekeep your hobbies! Just not too much. Programming/CS have been good about that so far.
The entire AI-pilled side-software development has a single goal: shipping as fast and as much as possible. The problem is that it’s not better code or a better product—it's just more
I can understand why people who aren't interested in "shipping daily" and are more interested in figuring things out are kinda annoyed by all the LLM noise
Imagine, if you will, wanting a narrow application to assist you personally in some side hobby, that is data driven but would take weeks or months to set up. Now imagine it's done in hours (and not even purely focused hours) and does everything you need it to do in an instantly verifiable and rewarding way. Imagine doing this on the regular for all of your various use cases. And then imagine not trying to sell or market that tool, as you dont care about that, you only care about solving problems and empowering yourself.
The vast majority of developers are like this, and as such, are silent about it. They aren't making production applications. They're making bespoke solutions and iterating upon them over time.
Somehow purists think there's something wrong with the process of that. I say there's something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. With a tinge of arrogance or narcissism thinking their applications are all of the purest order and construction, testaments to architectural beauty and edge case handling. With a tinge of fear and cope as so much of their identity is caught up in being a smart coder rather than a smart engineer.
If you are a software developer and don't see the value in and heavily utilize agentic tools, you are a poor engineer. Not every coder has the mindset of an engineer, but a coder should be able to recognize and understand a powerful tool when they see one instead of letting their emotions and irrationality take the wheel
Nothing says engineer mindset like calling people "something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. With a tinge of arrogance or narcissism" and "emotions and irrationality"
I think you missed the entire point of this discussion, but you also have a very gross view of the world!
> Somehow purists think there's something wrong with the process of that. I say there's something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. Are you really saying it is a sign of serious mental illness because programmers want to enjoy their craft? You do realize our entire industry exists because of the passion of programmers years prior, right? I genuinely think you should be ashamed of what you wrote here.
1 reply →
Well of course, if you enjoy writing software as a hobby then you value the experience of doing it, and you value the skill involved. You probably want a community of like minded individuals who all write code by hand, and where LLM use would be considered cheating.
That seems as natural as being against doping in sports or marking cards in poker.
None of this is anything against LLMs or AI assisted coding in general, even though the people involved probably have strong feelings about it given their preferences. It’s just the preferences of particular people and communities. Seems reasonable to me.
Yeah, it's just how you see programming in your perspective.
It's like lifting weight. Obviously, machines lift weight much better than human for a long time. But people still trains for strength or aesthetics. Even if machine can lift much larger weight and more efficiently, some people still care about how strong they are.
A machine can lift much more weight obviously is not the excuse for them to stop training.
Programming is just the weight lifting for your brain/mind. Even if LLMs can solve all coding problems perfectly, there will be people who still want to program all by hands, for training their mind, or simply enjoying the process. And there will be people care about how good you are at solving a problem with programming.
LLMs being able to code does not mean you no longer need the ability to code.
Cars do not mean you no longer need the ability to walk.
I don't exactly disagree, but I don't think your analogies work.
Machines can lift more weight than humans, but we all encounter situations where strength is useful and machines aren't available or wouldn't be suited to the task.
Cars are faster and easier than walking, but they require roads and are not a possible substitute for all of the walking we do.
But "if LLMs can solve all coding problems perfectly", and assuming that's sufficiently true of cheap/free models, there will be no practical need to code by hand; it'll be something we do purely for the joy of it and/or as brain training (but a niche form of brain training, probably practically inferior to other forms that target skills we still need).
> these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works.
not literally true, and I doubt the author meant to say this. The communities do not only care about if your code works at all, but also that you know why and how.
It's sort of like in math classes where you need to show the work, not just the answer. Surely the answer being correct, while not being sufficient, is still necessary.
Right. The answer is necessary but not sufficient.
I was somewhat conflicted seeing the way the OSdev community responds to LLM usage.
I understand the conflict: the point of doing OSdev is that you're learning the low level hardware details and directly commanding the machine from the lowest level accessible. LLM usage is at odds with this.
But, on the other hand, the primary issue with OSdev on modern hardware is the complete lack of documentation for most hardware. A lone developer simply does not have enough time to reverse engineer from Linux or BSD drivers to achieve much hardware support. Plus, often you run into hardware quirks that are incredibly painful to debug and offer no real learning opportunity.
Recently I revived a ~8 year old modular kernel project I had written. It was at the point of being able to setup an x86_64 CPU, load some drivers and enter usermode. Using an ESP8266 board I setup a little debugging harness for a AtomicPi devboard I had laying around, and set it all up so Claude could control and upload code to it. It could read the serial port, ping the board over ethernet and power cycle it. From that point I let it work almost autonomously to implement a USB stack, finish the network stack, implement drivers etc.
It worked well, and for the most part I didn't care about the results. I don't have the time to commit to such a big project now and of course, the satisfaction of doing something myself (besides building the harness) was gone.
But a thing that stood out to me was, when trying to implement the ethernet driver, the chip in question did not have documentation, but it was known to be similar to another well documented chip. Claude was able to spend a few hours just trying different things, rebooting the board as needed until the differences were sorted out and it was able to ping the board. I feel this kind of application would be pretty relevant for even hobbyist communities like OSdev.
We all have limited time, and while LLM usage for everything certainly defeats the point, targeted usage for tedium that has very little value overall, should be acceptable, and I can't help but think lesser of devs I otherwise respect, when they insist on being dogmatic even when it doesn't contribute to the hobby.
> targeted usage for tedium that has very little value overall
The entire point of the article was the hobby is ascribing value to that tedium that the LLM is removing.
There are different kinds of tedium that LLMs automate, being a hobbyist doesn't mean you see value in all of them. Removing tedium that you personally find uninteresting or boring actually accelerates the hobby because now you're able to get past the tedious parts instead of giving up or delaying doing them. That does not mean that everyone finds those parts boring.
Even before LLMs came along a lot of hobbyists were using high level languages, linters, IDEs etc. instead of handcrafting assembly or machine language. Those tools increased the capability of hobbyists to build what they find interesting.
1 reply →
Isn’t that the point of a hobby? To enjoy the path and not the result? To learn something new.
I understand using LLMs as tools to help you with your hobby, but I think when “Claude spends hours debugging it” it probably is no longer a hobby, but an outsourced job.
That's why I was trying to make the distinction between stuff that actually pushes your understanding forward and teaches helpful information, and stuff that does not.
Isn't it more in the spirit of osdev to spend your effort implementing/working on the things that actually further your OS meaningfully? Discovering that a specific version of an obsolete undocumented chip has a quirk where one register doesn't reset in the expected way isn't really useful information and doesn't contribute to building new skills.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that not everyone enjoys every piece of the hobby, and I don't think it's reasonable to exclude people who do not enjoy some of the pieces that aren't even core to the hobby.
1 reply →
You can summarize this roughly by comparing art for its own sake versus art for a purpose. If I need software for a purpose, I don't care how it is crafted, only that it is crafted well. But if I care about the art of code done well, then obviously the means matter.
I find that a lot of "pro-AI" folks are very much doing software for the ends (myself included) and in the past, we were happy with the "means" primarily because there was no other way. The "anti-AI" folks are, as mentioned, mostly in the camp of caring about the means equally with the ends.
Lots of nuance here, but those buckets seem to generalize pretty well (so far) in my experience.
Very interesting stuff, and I believe the prejeduce against AI tools for use to code stems from the way they are currently package. The tools default out of the box are designed to throw away the most valuable process humans go through while learning, FAILURE!
If a human is never able to work through or process failures themselves they are bypassing one of the most important steps in the learning journey
More AI tools need to be made the opposite of this, humans should be able to achieve great learning USING AI.
The important message also remains, understand your code! It might just save you one day ;)
>even in the instances where there was earnest early engagement with LLMs in some of these niche communities, the well was quickly poisoned by a combination of a lack of a deep understanding by the LLM practitioners, and a vitriolic subset of those communities that view the LLM enterprise as a form of cheating
Yeah, the whole point is the street cred of doing something really hard.
Whether that chess repo is genuine or not genuine, legal or illegal, tasteful or tasteless, vibed or not vibed, stolen or copied, the signal to open source maintainers is clear: get off GitHub.
All I can hear is the nihilistic AI generated song at the end of the Malus talk. (https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...)
When you take away the cost people will treat the result worthless.
For example if you hiking in the mountains, reaching the summit and enjoying the views are valuable experiences to you because it had an associated coast, i.e the physical act of hiking up the mountain. If you take the ski lift to the top it's almost worthless and you have very little appreciation for the views.
I don't see software being any different to this.
Very apt comparison! This is how I feel too. In the sense that when I’m coding as a hobby, especially something like advent of code, using an LLM would defeat the purpose for me. A bit how I don’t double check my moves with an engine when playing chess online.
On the other hand though, if I’m being paid to build, say, the top station of a ski lift on a peak, I wouldn’t be surprised if the contractee would prefer I don’t try hiking up the building materials and used a helicopter instead.
I disagree with the conclusion. I think this is only half of the story, and I can say so as one of the people in question who is largely against LLM code (despite finding LLMs to be very useful tools). While I do care about genuine care in one's craft, I also am a free software advocate and fundamentalist, and I find non-trivial LLM code is too legally and ethically dangerous to be included in software that is distributed to other people (do whatever you want if it's just personal use).
"Aggressively Against LLM Usage" is the wrong way to think of it.
If my hobby is running, I would refuse to use a car to do my morning loop. Not because I have anything against automobiles, but because that's not my hobby.
Also, the issue linked to isn't really about LLMs. It's about someone being a dick in an online community and being called out for it. They just happen to be using LLMs to be a dick, but that's not the main issue.
I've found myself with this problem, as I've used LLMs to accelerate solving problems I've wanted to solve, only to find myself unable to share them back, because LLM usage has "polluted" my effort in the eyes of maintainers, even if the result has been something I've re-implemented by hand after learning from the agent-driven development what the issue is and how to reproduce it.
What's the solution, to just disengage entirely and not share back issues I find or features I'd like to see?
I get the negativity, because I enjoy hobby programming too, so I also enjoy the process sometimes. But then sometimes there's a problem and the fastest way to isolate the core of that issue is to use claude.
[flagged]
A long time ago, I had to take an ethics class to get my Computer Science degree. One of the things that came up in the papers about calculating the statistical value of a life was that people care more about being more prosperous than their peers than absolute material wealth.
I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.
I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.
Well yes. That's why you see many westerners complaining about the cost of living even though all things told they have a good life.
I would modify this slightly though. I think there's an expectation of things getting better, and expecting to do better than your parents. I think that's where many of the modern issues around living standards come from. They aren't getting better (quickly enough).
look I enjoyed reading the status game too but it's really not rocket science that a fish will flounder when taken out of the water
Not quite the full truth:
In my free time; I'm iterating on programming ideas using coding agents.
For example a testing framework that separates test case definitions from instrumentation...
And the recent post on bento.page sent me down a path exploring different ideas around "X as standalone HTML+JS"...
And I don't care about shipping this; It's just for me.
I'm a hobbyist, what am I missing? LLM gave me a new spark. I never managed to get a SE job so some weekends I tinker around with LLM for small personal projects and it helps me learn more.
I think that’s the difference. Using LLMs to learn how to write interesting code, I hope, would be welcomed. I’m not confident that’s true though, reading some of these comments.
I don't think anyone is learning to code by using LLMs.
We learn a craft in two ways: by watching other people do something, and by doing it ourselves. I've learnt many crafts in my life, to the extent that I've produced useful or enjoyable output: programming, wood working, gardening, cooking, baking. I read loads of books, but nothing you read in a book makes much sense until you do it yourself. If you read a book on wood but never pick up a saw then you might as well be reading fiction.
Programming has always been a bit more difficult because we can't really watch someone else do it. Sure, you can watch someone use their tools, but programming really happens in the head, and you can't watch that. So you very much have to just do it yourself, and read.
When you use an LLM you're not watching it do anything, except output text at a very high words per minute. And you're certainly not doing it yourself. So how can you be learning? I actually don't think I've learnt a single thing since starting to use LLMs and it seems that way for colleagues too. They're producing code they never could have written before, but they don't understand it. They aren't learning.
2 replies →
Yes, hobbyists are less interested than businesses in automating their own hobby.
[flagged]
I'm against LLM usage in conversation, e.g. when discussing issues in open-source. It's like half-hearing a conversation, I'm missing the context that the other person has with their robot. Second, the person has usually at best half-understood the issue.
Provided the code does the job, it seems immaterial whether it was hand-written or LLM generated, provided it does the job and isn't straight-up plagiarism. The latter is admittedly a hard thing to judge.
Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonder if I could write a program to automate this" is when I quit the pursuit. After figuring out the basic tricks to sudoku, it turned into busywork. (Or trying to micromanage StarCraft)
(Tagentially, if you want to automate programming, then I'm going to find myself a different field, because I have no interest in the results of sudoku puzzles. I especially have no interest in managing agents, which I see as junior-dev bullshitters, and would not enjoy managing such a team in real life)
> Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
(I absolutely relate to your experience with sudoku etc. Of course, writing a basic sudoku solver is also interesting.)
The thing is, software architecture and systems design can also get the hobby treatment. I've found that I'm happy to have a short discussion with ChatGPT and have it barf out a few hundred lines of a concept, then refactor and maintain it myself. Or come up with a few different pieces that can be written fairly easily, let the machine skip over most of that tedium, make sure they conform to the interfaces I had in mind, and then verify for myself that the system actually comes together the way I imagined.
Of course, it does help a lot that I can understand the code, and work with it line by line if necessary. But SICP teaches us that it's abstraction and composition all the way down. So I feel like I'm exercising the same skills while not letting myself get intimidated by the sheer amount of initial typing or the self-doubt (instinctive immediate review of the code, you know) that creeps in when I try.
> The whole point is to do it yourself.
I think if that were always true, calculators would be banned in schools.
Surely the "point" might be different things to different people depending on their exact situation/context.
Programming generates programmers, and programs are a side-effect.
Fantastic news! … for AI companies. These projects will continuously produce high quality, novel training data for free! Amazing deal.
One factor is that we struggled for a long time under proprietary tooling, and don't want to go back there.
Irrelevant. Open models are competent code generators. No you don't need millions of H100 hours to build them.
Not for everyone. Not all of us (especially unemployed) have the big bucks to buy the machines required.
But you can download gcc in a cheap laptop and create a theorem prover e.g.
Don't tell me how to do my hobby.
That's the core of it - hobbies are doing what makes you happy - if that's LLMs great, if not, great.
The interactive fiction community seems to have a subset of hardcore anti AI hobbyists. Partly at stolen artistic IP, but also the coding half of text adventures is viewed as art just as much as the story and writing.
I’ve selected a path where I think building tools with AI is fine. But I want people to play my games knowing I created all of it.
For me, domain discoveries and elegant solutions arise out of periods of deep befuddlement, and are often a saving grace that can avoid lots of code.
I'm lucky I guess that I've had enough time in this career to experience these moments, and enough experience to know which code I should write and which code really is rote and can be generated (most of the time). Hopefully it keeps the loss of enlightenment to a minimum.
I'm the OP of the cited thread, ask me anything :P
?
wtf the emoji didn't show up
2 replies →
> In these communities (keep in mind that there is an implicit “not all…” throughout) the process of mastering a difficult field itself is the product, and something that runs is generally a nice-to-have.
Most hobby fandoms have a dedicated core group who think like this: The end result is only an artifact or social proof to them. The real product is their own prestige of having built it and attracted an audience. There's always an IRC channel or Discord somewhere where there's a social hierarchy of who should be respected for their work.
Outside of those inner circles, most people don't care. The average emulator user doesn't care about the details about who wrote their emulator or the history behind it all the forks. They want to play a game and the emulator core that gets the job done, because the emulator is the product to them. The mastery of the author is not a product to them.
This has happened in multiple technical hobby communities I've been in. With 3D printing I even remember communities where Prusa was looked down upon for making 3D printers too accessible. The argument was that now anyone could buy a 3D printer without really understanding the pain of mastering calibration, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting. That debate exploded to another level when Bambu came along and made 3D printing even more mainstream.
Now it's happening with programming communities. There are some where hand-written code is truly the actual product: Competitive programming, code golf, and obfuscated programming competitions come to mind. Using an LLM here is about as appropriate as submitting LLM generated art to an art contest, which is to say it's not.
There are a lot of other domains where the mastery of the craft isn't interesting outside of a small social circle. It's interesting that they mentioned emulators, because emu communities are famous for having a ton of strange drama that most emulator users don't care about. If you're inside of the small community and spend every day on their Discord, it might be the only thing you care about, but you don't realize that you're a minority because everyone else in the Discord thinks the same way.
OSDev is another interesting one to mention, because even Linus Torvalds had to make a big post telling the anti-LLM people to chill out. There seems to be a split between the purists who think the primary value is their own mastery of being able to write the code, and the pragmatists who are adapting to use new tools in conjunction with their knowledge. If you find yourself in one of the purist camps you might think everyone feels the same way, but outside of that, the world is moving on.
I usually feel turned off by communities where social status is the primary currency. There's always a hidden social hierarchy that feels threatened whenever it feels like the rules my start changing. They react by trying to force the social currency back to the system where they spent years investing their time. Nobody wants to feel like you're losing a foothold because the rules are changing. I got a strong feeling from this article that this author feels they've developed some level of respect in some forum and they dislike the idea of that investment being devalued by a changing landscape
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora,
Blimey, it’s a mystery why they don’t let me take my jigsaw to the “community of hand saw enthusiasts”.
I can't relate. It's so nice for quickly going deep on a subject you're interested in. Who cares if you typed the code in plain English?
This site is an example why I am against dark mode.
> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all...
I think the key word to all this is "communities." If you can make something alone, just do it. If you enjoy gathering together to build a bigger thing, often the bigger thing is 1/3 an excuse to gather together. In that way, the LLM is like revealing the answer to a murder mystery game too early and expecting it still to be fun for everyone.
I'm particularly annoyed with the complaint in the linked thread about the agentic-developed chess engine.
> Moreover, you are giving absolutely nothing back to the community, which is central to open-source engine dev. You are only taking.
What would that user prefer? That the developer push a PR upstream...that presumably would be shot down and the user subject to further harrassment because it would be LLM derived at minimum? It seems like a catch-22 where the only winning move is not to play.
That thread also highlights the overlap between "people who are against LLM usage for coding" and "people who are very particular about AGPL."
> the only winning move is not to play
Presumably no one is forcing the maintainer at gunpoint to have an LLM slightly shake up other people's code, relicense it under an incompatible license and then claim that "every single line of code is written by Claude Code", so I don't see the issue with not playing if that's the only option.
If you can't make contributions that anyone finds interesting enough to include upstream and have no plans to publish your AGPL derived code under a compatible license, you can keep your changes to yourself. Nothing lost, nothing gained, license honored.
[flagged]
This repo is all "stolen code regurgitated by an LLM" so that is an impossible task and therefore makes the request performative.
3 replies →
Is this novel? Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers to accomplish what the skill allows. Not every individual of that group but the group as a whole. It’s just that devaluation of one’s skill capital sucks.
I happen to think the alternative world where no one’s skill capital can be devalued sucks more, but it’s hard to build a community around that because the same hours that build skill also build taste, and when you remove the former you remove the latter.
So you get a community with garbage in it. Haha!
> Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers.
I'm not sure of the truthiness there wrt LLMs: using an LLM to code your hobby OS doesn't actually gain you the skills of the existing members of that niche. Maybe those existing members are just annoyed at posers, not at newcomers?
Sorry, I didn’t complete the thought well. Amended. I meant that the skill allows for some things and newcomers no longer require that investment to get the outcome.
Or it’s really just plain old gate keeping maybe.
We programmers had it good for a long time. Paid well, exercised the brain, creators.
I always thought that when I retired I’d do woodworking. But perhaps I’ll also code - to remember what it was like when I was young.
I think another reason to write code by hand is that you want to know what you get. If you have an idea, then you can implement it better than an LLM, just like you can implement it better than another person, because you are the only one who understands what you mean exactly. Details are always lost and misunderstood in communication; this is a weakness of LLMs.
Similarly, even if I don't write the code but I let someone else who I trust do it for me, there is value for me in that person not using LLMs, because only if they don't, I can know that the only spirit that lives in the code is of the person of my choice. It's like a social thing; I can know and trust a human, but I'm not sure I can do that with an LLM.
It's similar to how you wouldn't want to use LLMs in politics: the whole point of expressing your ideas is that they are your ideas and if you let someone (or something) else do it for you, details will be missed and misunderstood.
So this is one reason that I think hobby communities don't like LLMs; they care too much about what they build.
Depending what you are making; coding slows you down and think as you build stuff step by step. Its kind of like speaking vs writing. Generating code through LLM for me is like talking -- I love talking, but when I write something down, I'm more structured, think more about things etc etc.
People say, if you you write elaborate well spec'ed prompts, it will do the right thing. Coding in a way is doing that.
All of this is exactly why I started Slow Code. I like programming. Lots of people like programming. I don't want to stop doing that. So we meet up once a month to practice that.
https://slowcode.dev
to someone hobby programming using LLM seems like running a marathon using a bicycle, you cross the finish, but at the end is not the same as running only by your only forces.
Others look only at the results, so LLM are only a tool (actually without a clearly instruction manual i suspect).
But programming (and so many others works) is not only about making, but learning and developping skills. When an LLM is not available? i think differences will be evident.
And roughly speaking: to check the result of LLM you have to be more capable than the bot, otherwise, who is the boss? And to develop those skills, you have to do it yourself.
I enjoy programming as a hobby and have done it for many years. I also enjoy building stuff with LLMs. Why is one pure and sanctioned and the other one is bad? Why do I need other people to decide this for me?
if is good/bad for you is only to you, nobody else decide for you, but reasoning about general consequences adopting this thech is to everyone
> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works.
This is not mutually exclusive with LLM usage. It's only prerequisite is that the human cares enough to learn.
I'm in an _extremely_ niche hobby programming community of Scrabble engine developers. There are single digits of us, but we're building the best engines and methodology out there and have all embraced LLMs to help us do it. There's a lot of experimentation that goes into it and LLMs certainly make it easier to iterate and try new ideas. So at least for our community, I don't think the points here hold.
That's awesome :) Do you have any links to your guys' work that I could check out?
This is a case of an SV-brained person stepping outside the bubble and realizing that LLMs are not the universal savior they think it is.
AI isn't well liked in a lot of places. I agree with the communities - make something yourself, don't ask a robot to do it for you. If you vibe slop something into existence, I'm never going to look at it. Something you made yourself though? Hell yeah I want to see it.
Another example is the art community - use AI/LLMs there, you'll be excommunicated.
I think, without knowing, that art often is similar to the hobby programming communities the thread leads with: the end result is interesting not by itself, but through the process that made it. We have feelings about art pieces because we feel with and through the artist. Can't do that with silicon. The Mona Lisa, even if the end result were exactly the same, would be dead boring had it been produced by the hand of a machine. My take
Totally disagree. I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall. If they’re totally unique and nobody else has them, even better. I can have a mounted picture of me on a horse like the famous Napoleon painting. I don’t care at all about the dude who painted it, I don’t even know his name.
The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the backdrop of the sun. Amazing photo.
I feel like obsessing over some artist I’ll never be friends with and the story behind their art is just another way to have a parasocial relationship, and the new tools allows us to have absolutely bespoke art in every single home. Things like this used to be considered strange and irregular before mass media. Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
5 replies →
Here's my thoughts as a 29 year old: of all the things I've ever made in my personal life, the vast majority have ended up abandoned in barely worked on states, and those I have put varying degrees of significant effort in have gone unnoticed. I've never really been able to "enter" a community in a way that felt meaningful to me, either, when I've tried.
I say this not as a complaint, but to explain my perspective on using LLMs for personal projects. Granted, I'm publishing none of them, and not trying to make anyone care about them, so it's not really a response to the article or general discourse here per se, but I thought it bears mentioning anyway.
I'd like to buy into the idea that "doing it yourself" is more meaningful or personally edifying, but I don't get that feeling. I want to get that feeling, but I don't. I've found my private waste-of-time projects using LLMs have been more gratifying than my private waste-of-time projects that don't, and at the end of the day, neither really substantively matter anyway.
Again, this isn't really related to communities per se, but it is an answer why some folks use LLMs for projects/"hobbies".
I get all the fuzz about only being able to learn if you do the work. But frankly, as a hobby programmer with a rather unusual workflow/toolset and a love for the command-line, it has never been so satifying to scratch a few itches I've always had but apparently never was motivated enough to really follow through. In the past 6 months, I've "written" at least 3 tools which I kind of always wanted, and which I now use on a regular basis. AND, I finally have a peer I can talk to about the code I'm trying to write. Something I basically never had, because all my FLOSS projects were small-very-nieche-one-man-shows. Its nice to be able to pretend to have a coding friend :-)
we don't meet enough people to worry about why or how productive someone is ... productivity is half mania, half obsession and 100 % in vain except in life critical fields where LLM speed doesn't matter because querying DBs is fast and making associations within _contexts that speak the same language_, meaning they use the same register, is trivial.
I use LLMs to build some nice customized and some basically standard tools so I can go from learning about code to learning Rust et al properly ... the next 2 years are scheduled for me. I want code and LLM supply chains as a proper hobby, partially because I find the overall "transformers" approach pretty bad since there is no implicit path towards intelligence and zero chance to build one on top explicitly. it's just a bunch of parrots but parrots are awesome and i'm glad I get to have so many.
Also: I really don't care what the communities think, though ... it's 2026 and all that code, math, science, engineering didn't build any special amount of good, "bad" ( vs ugly personalities ) or cool characters that we didn't have already and it didn't cause any "mutations" in schools of thought either, or drive movements where they were needed.
but I'm a bystander, which wasn't my choice, unfortunately, so y'all know much better what I'm talking about.
most players in the lower leagues won't dope but some do and take bribes anyway, what?
it's a cowardly new world, everybody, happy Esoteric Right Wing Hanukkah!
Model steam enthusiasts have had this for literally decades with a variety of premade parts available, angering those who learned to use a lathe. "Did you really make that" is huge in this.
Not my experience at all. I love using LLM's when hobby programming!
But then again I don't program as a hobby to impress others online. Maybe that's the difference?
The difference is probably that you are not that good at programming, and that the LLMs are better than you.
knitting communities also don't love factory machines too? I'm not sure how this could surprise anyone
Car enthusiasts generally dislike automatic transmissions, despite their ubiquity and clear advantages for the population as a whole.
Relatedly, there needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between types of LLM usage. Nothing more boring -- and often not even favorable or useful to a semi-hobbyist -- than just one-shotting something with Claude;
Vs. what I do. I've always done tons of little quirky automation type things with bash -- that do actually strongly become a part of my life.
Today? Yes, that -- but more and faster. I'm actually typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.
Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.
You're right, there are tons of different workflows you can do. One of the more innocent ones, regardless of you opinions on vibe coding, is just using the LLM to understand the code base better. Even if I'm vibe coding something, I will often start by having the LLM construct documentation for the current code flows. It's a document that is useful to me as a human because it mostly just gives me code pointers and tells me what it does as part of the larger whole. It's useful for the LLM since it saves a ton on time and tokens in the long run.
> Granted these communities have, in general, historically been characterized by feverish gatekeeping and painstakingly slow progress
This hits the nail on the head.
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora
I think the problem goes deeper.
When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few months ago, Michael Niedermayer spam AI slopped a proposal on their mailing list; I don't have the link right now (need to really bookmark all those things) but someone else asked him why he spams other people with unfinished proposals created by AI? I don't know whether Michael understands this as a problem or not, but I think many AI users don't understand the problem when they AI spam slop other people. I think it is a hostile action by those AI users. So I can totally understand communities not wanting that AI spam.
I've also noticed people who have horrible english skills, suddenly have perfect english skills. I suspect AI use, but then I wonder: is that person interacting with me via AI spam slop? I'd much rather deal with broken english if it is autenthic, than people faking it, even IF the produced english may be better than the broken english (but even that is often doubtful, so much AI spam slop is just wasting time and awful to read).
The whole AI trend seems to lead to really dumber people and fewer real interactions. That is sad, even more so as many people lost real social cues these days anyway.
Did you read about the Canadian politician who was making a speech and simply thoughtlessly read out some of the LLM boilerplate prefacing the text some chatbot had written for him?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-...
Are we going to end up a bunch of meatbag puppets of the machines? Makes me wonder.
The problem with politics is it’s not a meritocracy.
You find abdicating your speech to an AI to be disqualifying, but to people who’ve already abdicated everything they do to AI, it’s folksy and relatable.
See also: Why whittlers are against lathes.
It's because they fetishize arcane knowledge and LLMs make all their arcane knowledge easy. That's all it is. If I wanted to go make my own NES game from scratch 2 years ago it would have taken months of full time work, and I would have had to learn a lot of new things, and most likely would have joined and participated in that community. Now I can do it this afternoon. I'm not going to because it's pointless now, you can't show it off, you can't impress anyone with it, and the result is not just economically worthless, it's worthless in every way.
So of course they are upset by it, it's annoying to spend years building up some skill and then end up being less capable at applying that skill than a 12 year old with a claude code subscription who has never even seen a CRT. Their entire hobby community is going to fundamentally change and the people who are influential and knowledgeable now are effectively has-beens who will have to learn totally new skills to stay relevant and most likely won't have the energy, or desire, and lets be frank the aptitude to learn those skills. (I don't mean the skill of using an LLM, they can do that and almost certainly would be great at it, I mean skills like charisma and presentation and promotion.)
If the things you're thinking about are intrinsically so totally worthless outside of impressing people with them, and if that's all there is, please do not attempt to do those things, with or without an LLM.
Heck, if everything is worthless, please, please try not to do anything :)
If it's valuable why do they want to ban people from doing it with help from an LLM. You are just mad, and I understand why you are mad, but you're not right.
The thing I'm saying is worthless is making a game in 2026 for a game system that people literally couldn't give away for free in 1998. Due to nostalgia and the fact so many were thrown in the trash surviving systems now have some limited cash value. Newly made games do not have a nostalgia value. The reason people do it is to prove they can and to show other people. Anyone can now (no proof needed really, it's super easy) and nobody cares. It's like climbing Everest, and Claude is your Sherpa. Nobody is impressed by it anymore.
It's not just the hobby programming community. Professional software developers too.
At least against as it is now, where everyone with Claude suddenly becomes a software engineer.
Software engineering is more than pushing code to main/master.
It's requirements. Acceptance criteria. Design. Documentation written for humans. Reviews. Operations. Maintenance. Understanding the product. Understanding the system you're changing.
Right now, I struggle with PRs being opened by people who don't fully understand the code they're changing, replying to review comments with Claude generated answers pasted back like a meat proxy...
What I see at work is that we're pushing code faster than ever, while losing the big picture of our product, or the architecture of our own network, even faster.
We're also generating documentation at an incredible pace. The problem is that the people writing it often don't understand it either.
Code has become cheap.
Engineering hasn't.
Now more than ever it makes sense to have better programming languages that are more palatable to humans, because people may manually want to tweak LLM output, or other people who don't have access to the original prompts/context.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
I don’t understand the world of people who have this degree of free time (time / energy) given how much everything costs just to be alive. Maybe they live in a different universe where programming for fun and first principals of “learning” matters. But for the other 99% of humans, costs have gone up 40% due to money printing and anything like this looks like a waste of time.
Hobbies are kind of by definition wastes of time. That's what makes them different than work.
If you only want to learn programming for work then you obviously have a different perspective than people writing chess engines from scratch for fun instead of using an existing one, right?
Surely most people in the US have hobbies at least in the minimal sense of downtime activities that they enjoy. It may not be golf or hobby programming, but even laying on the couch watching football is a "hobby" or sorts and takes up just as much time.
I realize there are people with young kids or 2-3 jobs that really have little to no downtime, but it seems that for most people time isn't really the issue - it's just are you more of a passive or active type of personality.
> I don’t understand the world of people who have this degree of free time
You dont understand that people have hobbies they enjoy doing? Because thats the entire point of the article.
There are (very coarsely) two types of people:
- people who like writing code for codes sake
- people who like writing code to build things
In the past, these folks have lived more or less in harmony unified under the common interest of applied maths, engineering and architecture that is necessary to write things that require a lot of vode. Aside for a few classic and very public spats.
Now that community is fractured because llms are increasingly making writing code irrelevant. If that weren't true, we wouldn't be having this convo at all.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to cultivate spaces that preserve that craft, but wish they wouldn't be so obnoxious about it. I imagine that a good handful of these folks in the "no llm ever camp" collectively rolled their eyes at vegans and animal rights advocates at some point, and are now feeling being on the unpopular side of progress.
Personally I think it's a cool prospect to have Trappist Monk-like communities producing hand crafted code. It will probably be really good and sturdy. We'll look at it in 10 years and say, "damn they really don't make it like that anymore!"
I can respect a developer who is still smitten with their craft to feel a bit anxious when the topic of LLM generated code comes up. I have a child who never grows tired of building their next game but first has to build the engine from scratch (needless to say they've built a lot of engines, not so many games). This use to frustrate me but then I realized the joy is in making a concept of a game for them. When I suggest Claude might get the job done faster I get a death glare followed by an eye roll. I get it, I've been in the industry long enough where coding is more of a means to an end and not the same novelty it once was.
More dangerous are communities who shun AI and treat every disclosure like a Scarlett letter. Generally the loudest opinions come from consumers (fan bois) and not creators. I think this will eventually drive new innovators away from these communities. These vocal naysayers have likely never experienced being a project manager, lead developer, and QA for an agent writing code. Instead they think a prompt magically creates software, but without wearing all these hats at once, you get something far worse than 'slop'. Call me crazy, but I think these multi-hat 'developers' using an agent and are dipping their toe into LLM development are going to raise the bar and leave us vim users in the dust.
Hobby programming is not a "community".
LLM-first development is the future. If you don't like it then, yes, you should quit.
Yeah you're right, it IS entirely fair to suddenly and quickly push the group that built your industry out of the industry. They should all just find new jobs, because that's very easy and simple. Thankfully we have bright minds like you to replace the talent lost, because with AI you can truly do anything your heart desires!
Obvious sarcasm aside, these LLMs have been trained (without consent!) on our hard work, on our passion. People have been writing code for years, and many have open-sourced their projects to share their knowledge, to better the world, to provide free solutions to problems. All that hard work, all that effort, has been stolen and used to create a machine that replaces us. And when we complain that quality goes down, that work is no longer enjoyable, that we don't actually see huge noticable productivity improvements across the board, bright minds like you tell us "lol just quit man fuck you". Do you not feel bad that you are actively destroying the livelihood of the very people that made your slop machine viable to build?
>without consent
Don't need it.
>Do you not feel bad
No, of course not. I feel good that technology is getting better and bitter activists are getting replaced.
As was said in that thread: "The age of the glorified individual is over - the collective mind is the future and the now. You will either be consumed by it, or trampled by it. It's time to ant up or fossil out."