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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bigfishrunning 2mo agoProgramming generates programmers, and programs are a side-effect.
- analog31 2mo agoOne factor is that we struggled for a long time under proprietary tooling, and don't want to go back there.
- bird0861 2mo agoIrrelevant. Open models are competent code generators. No you don't need millions of H100 hours to build them.
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- fithisux 2mo agoNot 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.
- QuantumNoodle 2mo agoA 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.
- MostlyStable 2mo agoExactly. 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.
- jmaw 2mo agoThese 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.
- MostlyStable 2mo agoSure, that's fair. I enjoy the process of figuring out ways software can solve some (usually quite trivial) problem for myself, but then I'm very happy to hand the act of making it to a robot.
- bee_rider 2mo agoHow much of coding is weeding?
- _superposition_ 2mo agoProbably a similar ratio!
- jmaw 2mo ago
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- happytoexplain 2mo agoYes, hobbyists are less interested than businesses in automating their own hobby.
- zapataband1 2mo ago[flagged]
- virgil_disgr4ce 2mo agoAll 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 https://slowcode.dev
- Chance-Device 2mo agoWell 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.
- drcxd 2mo agoYeah, 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.
- retsibsi 2mo agoI 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).
- nemomarx 2mo agoknitting communities also don't love factory machines too? I'm not sure how this could surprise anyone
- ninjalanternshk 2mo agoCar enthusiasts generally dislike automatic transmissions, despite their ubiquity and clear advantages for the population as a whole.
- lynx97 2mo agoI 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 :-)
- whalesalad 2mo ago> Granted these communities have, in general, historically been characterized by feverish gatekeeping and painstakingly slow progress This hits the nail on the head.
- podgietaru 2mo agoThe 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."
- minimaxir 2mo agoThe README (https://github.com/adamtwiss/coda#license 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.
- slopinthebag 2mo ago"We investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing"
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoImo without the sign off from Reckless it's suspicious
- Aurornis 2mo agoThe 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.
- minimaxir 2mo agoI'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."
- zapataband1 2mo ago[flagged]
- minimaxir 2mo agoThis repo is all "stolen code regurgitated by an LLM" so that is an impossible task and therefore makes the request performative.
- anematode 2mo agoMy implicit request, which I should have made clearer, was for him to delete (or make private) the repository and move on to greater ideals.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoThis 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.
- thunfischtoast 2mo agoI 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
- wincy 2mo agoTotally 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.
- thunfischtoast 2mo agoIf it suits you, good for you. I said often, not all of it, of course.
- jrm4 2mo agoRelatedly, 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.
- slaymaker1907 2mo agoYou'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.
- gbjcantab 2mo agoWhat’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.
- acedTrex 2mo ago> 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.
- frollogaston 2mo agoYep, gatekeep your hobbies! Just not too much. Programming/CS have been good about that so far.
- didibus 2mo agoIs 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.
- anematode 2mo agoI'm the OP of the cited thread, ask me anything :P
- ahalbert4 2mo agoA 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.
- benj111 2mo agoWell 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).
- thin_carapace 2mo agolook 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
- shevy-java 2mo ago> 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.
- FeteCommuniste 2mo agoDid 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-legislature-reaction-9.7296118 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.
- ninjalanternshk 2mo agoThe 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.
- Aurornis 2mo ago> 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,
- eterm 2mo agoI'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.
- killix 2mo ago[flagged]
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago> 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.
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- anonreeeeplor 2mo agoI 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.
- nemomarx 2mo agoHobbies 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?
- acedTrex 2mo ago> 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.
- HarHarVeryFunny 2mo agoSurely 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.
- hgoel 2mo agoI 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.
- fnoef 2mo agoIsn’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.
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- adamtaylor_13 2mo agoYou 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.
- arjie 2mo agoIs 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!
- lelanthran 2mo ago> 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?
- arjie 2mo agoSorry, 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.
- ephimetheus 2mo agoOr it’s really just plain old gate keeping maybe.
- sandoze 2mo agoI 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.
- BedVibe_Studios 2mo ago[flagged]
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- prewett 2mo agoUsing 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)
- zahlman 2mo ago> 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.
- ranger_danger 2mo ago> 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.
- effed3 2mo agoto 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.
- ephimetheus 2mo agoI 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?
- effed3 2mo agoif 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
- wewewedxfgdf 2mo agoDon'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.
- fierycatnet 2mo agoI'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.
- lowbloodsugar 2mo agoI 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.
- globular-toast 2mo agoI 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.
- antonvs 2mo agoI’ve learned tons since I started using LLMs. They’re an amazing tool for learning as long as you use them like that. Ask it questions about things you don’t understand. Verify the answers. Don’t have them do everything for you. Figure out where to push back on what they’re producing. When I learned to code, learning from existing code was a big part of it. One difference now is you can produce custom code to learn from. I’m starting to think the biggest skill we need to teach people in this new age is how to learn and how to research. If you already know how to do that well, LLMs are a fantastic addition to the toolbox. If you don’t, then you’re stuck with a tool that’s going to replace your skill instead of augment it.
- jmull 2mo ago"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.
- liampulles 2mo agoFor 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.
- deterministic 2mo agoNot 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?
- dosisking 2mo agoThe difference is probably that you are not that good at programming, and that the LLMs are better than you.
- deterministic 2mo agoIf that kind of comment makes you feel better about yourself that's fine by me :)
- ggm 2mo agoModel 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.
- carlosjobim 2mo agoHobby programming is not a "community".
- quirkot 2mo ago> 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.
- cdelsolar 2mo agoI'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.
- anematode 2mo agoThat's awesome :) Do you have any links to your guys' work that I could check out?
- cdelsolar 2mo agoYes, you can see the following: - https://domino14.github.io/macondo/ https://domino14.github.io/macondo/ - my AI, written in Go. Mostly meant as a "research" tool and doesn't have a proper GUI yet. - https://github.com/andy-k/wolges https://github.com/andy-k/wolges - an implementation of a Scrabble AI from scratch in Rust. Andy is very smart and came up with his own algorithm and data structure that we now use throughout our projects - https://github.com/jvc56/MAGPIE https://github.com/jvc56/MAGPIE - a friend started this as a rewrite of Macondo, but in C. A lot of new development has gone into this and I've contributed a bit as well. Also no official GUI, but it is _absurdly_ fast, so fast that we can do nested Monte Carlo simulations. Some algorithms have been backported to Macondo with the help of AI. These are the main 3, but there are people contributing in other ways, someone else has made a CNN and it has good results (I built a CNN as well in the Macondo source, and it has decent results). We're slowly going to continue to improve this until we can use it in real-time for Monte Carlo evaluations, maybe by translating it into a NNUE architecture. Currently on Macondo I've been working on AI explainability (it's quite good already) and Bayesian inference with a stats PhD candidate. We are likely going to publish a paper on the latter. It's very mathy but it ends up beating the best bot we have so far around 52% of the time (that's actually a pretty significant edge). You can read about some algorithms on my blog here: https://cesardelsolar.com https://cesardelsolar.com (very in-depth discussions on inference, CNN, and my exhaustive endgame/pre-endgame algorithm)
- potsandpans 2mo agoThere 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!"
- ltbarcly3 2mo agoIt'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.)
- Applejinx 2mo agoIf 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 :)
- ltbarcly3 2mo agoIf 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.
- Schnitz 2mo agoBecause 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.
- croes 2mo agoOr Warhammer figurines painting, let’s buy them already painted
- senor_digimon 2mo agoYou 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.
- croes 2mo agoBut would you blame the figurine painting community for not wanting that? If you want to do AI movies, join the AI movie community. The hobby programming community isn't about vibe coding, that's what the vibe coding community is for.
- r_lee 2mo ago> 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. if that's so awesome then why isn't everybody doing it? I never dreamt about stuff like that, but are there actually people who are like "oh thank God I can finally make my AI movies with my figurines and other stuff I have laying around" honestly you sound too enthusiastic about this, like Sam Altman "AI podcast about your kids" tier enthusiastic
- catfood 2mo agoI 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?
- robalni 2mo agoI 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.
- truncate 2mo agoDepending 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.
- fhub 2mo agoWe 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.
- GPerson 2mo agoProgramming 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.
- vasco 2mo agoHave 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.
- xakpc 2mo agoThe 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
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- jatora 2mo agoImagine, 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
- _luci_ 2mo agoI 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.
- Razengan 2mo agoNow 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.
- alkonaut 2mo agoProgramming 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.
- fhd2 2mo agoNice 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.
- pelasaco 2mo agoIt'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.
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- reformd 2mo agowe 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!
- geraneum 2mo agoBlimey, it’s a mystery why they don’t let me take my jigsaw to the “community of hand saw enthusiasts”.
- samiv 2mo agoWhen 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.
- jgilias 2mo agoVery 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.
- adithyassekhar 2mo agoThis site is an example why I am against dark mode.
- ForHackernews 2mo agoSee also: Why whittlers are against lathes.
- xdavidliu 2mo ago> 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.
- antonvs 2mo agoRight. The answer is necessary but not sufficient.
- ChicagoDave 2mo agoThe 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.
- frozenseven 2mo agoLLM-first development is the future. If you don't like it then, yes, you should quit.
- _luci_ 2mo agoYeah 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?
- frozenseven 2mo ago[flagged]
- jujube3 2mo agoMaking your code open source was consenting to have people (and AIs) read it and learn from it. As an open source developer myself, I always understood that.
- _luci_ 2mo agoI consented to PEOPLE reading it. How could I have predicted that AI would take off so rapidly and get trained on my repos? How could I have predicted that AI would be trained on code without a license attached, or on code with strict licenses attached that do not allow for such use? A silly response if you ask me
- KoleSeise1277 2mo ago[dead]
- eayomi 2mo ago[dead]
- MattyRad 2mo agoWhether 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_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/ https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...)
- willtemperley 2mo agoI'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.
- galgantar 2mo ago[dead]
- Magicrafter13 2mo agoI 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).
- Garlef 2mo agoNot 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.
- wbolt 2mo agoFantastic news! … for AI companies. These projects will continuously produce high quality, novel training data for free! Amazing deal.
- inferhaven 2mo agoVery 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 ;)
- andai 2mo ago>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.
- geldedus 2mo agoBecause hobby programming doesn't have time and budget constraints like professional programming.
- a34729t 2mo agoIm just not convinced that prompting is faster for many programming tasks than writing it myself, when considering the downstream effect on the next task on the same codebase. If I write it myself, I know the interfaces will be solid and duplication will be the minimum necessary. Ill know why i did everything and there will be comments that explain anything tricky. The next time i need to work on this particular code, Ill have a good idea of where to start and I can similarly produce high quality code that is easy to read. The way I see many "engineers" at work use LLMs is as an interface on top of anything, copy and pasting log lines into it, task descriptions, and yanking (as someone else put it) on the slot machine lever until they have something that works. It seems faster in the moment, but there is no understanding being built, which is as important as the code being produced. Next time the engineer is asked about the code, they just ask the LLM. So what exactly does this person do then to bring value to their job? The LLMs can produce tight code if held on a tight leash, but they encourage the slot machine model. So maybe a harness that encourages starting from interfaces/etc? Either way the long term code quality and system functionality seem to favor a strong engineering team vs LLMs and some prompters.
- Whitespace 2mo agoI have a large CNC router. I can throw a whole sheet of plywood on it and program it to cut it with a level of precision and repeatability that I am physically unable to do with my hands/eyes. In addition to the knowledge necessary to operate the machine, there's a lot of engineering knowledge necessary to design something to be manufactured by a CNC. A lot of woodworkers scoff at the use of CNC routers; there's a lot that scoff at the use of any power tools at all! I don't really understand though why folks have this *need* to assert that there is only One True Way to do something and to poo-poo on someone else's interests. It all seems like straw man arguments to me. Even the title of TFA BORN AGAINST, OR WHY HOBBY PROGRAMMING COMMUNITIES ARE AGGRESSIVELY AGAINST LLM USAGE seems like ragebait.
- dexterlagan 2mo agoI consider using LLMs to generate code akin to metaprogramming. We created these programs to write programs, which, if it was seen as such, would be considered the highest form of technical achievement. Instead some people consider it the lowest form, cheating etc. Let them talk, and we'll see who comes up with the most useful programs. I loved programming for the 30+ past years, in many different languages. But in the end what I love most is creating useful programs. So I use LLMs to take care of the nitty gritty, pushing my creative vision through, iterating until I have something worthy of publishing. Haters will hate. I'll just keep working. I say bring it on.