Comment by Xirdus

I still don't get where the pressure comes from. Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves. There is never a reason to rush things, because your only stakeholder - yourself - is fine with whatever your only developer - also yourself - does. You always have all the time you'd ever want for the technical puzzles because there are never any deadlines except self-imposed ones.

Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.