5 ms·
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 achiev
by QuantumNoodle 2mo ago
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.
- 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!
- Aurornis 2mo ago> 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"
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- enraged_camel 2mo ago>> 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.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ac29 2mo agoOne can piss away a lot of money gardening with little to show for it, especially if you buy bagged soil. Buy a raised planter, some soil, some fertilizer, some seedlings, a couple garden tools and you can easily be in for $150+ which is definitely more than you'll get out of a season worth of growth even if nothing fails. On the other end of the spectrum, if you grow in fertile native soil from seed your costs can be close to zero
- _carbyau_ 2mo ago> 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.
- LAC-Tech 2mo agoLLMs let you generate code quickly. This seems to have very little relevance to the end result.
- happytoexplain 2mo agoIf we accept a very simplistic view of how people think and feel, then sure.
- zapataband1 2mo ago[flagged]
- zapataband1 2mo ago[flagged]
- minimaxir 2mo agoYour entire commenting history is about how much you dislike LLMs (with the high likelihood that you would not accept any evidence about agentic productivity), which does not lead to good discourse on Hacker News.
- rsoto2 2mo agolol "my girlfriend doesn't go here but you wouldn't even believe me if i lied about it" disliking LLMs is just an opinion. Refusing to engage with an argument and instead defaulting to downvotes when you can't supply a reasonable argument or proof is just ai/corporate-fanaticism and self-delusion enhanced by LLM-dependence.
- deterministic 2mo agoWow, those are some very strong claims, yet you haven't provided any evidence or argument to support them. If I understand you correctly, you're arguing that anyone who disagrees with you is: 1. An AI/corporate fascist. 2. Self-deluded. 3. Dependent on LLMs. Could you now provide what you yourself called a "reasonable argument or proof" that these claims are actually true?
- KingMob 2mo agoWhat argument was there to engage with? I just see a single, unsourced opinion.
- shevy-java 2mo agoI 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.
- bawolff 2mo agoI 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.
- LPisGood 2mo agoIt is probably a good trade off if you sell cookies or if you vastly prefer eating cookies to making cookies.
- cocoa19 2mo agoFor the owner/shareholders yes. The workers will see the fun evaporate but now they have to clean 10x cookie trays in the same 8 hours.
- bawolff 2mo agoSure, and that probably explains why companies (who sell software) love AI while hobbyists who just like to program hate it.
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoIt is, although in this case the cookie-making robot also makes 10% of its cookies with sand instead of flour. So it's still not a very good trade if you have any pride in your business or consequences for bad product.
- acdha 2mo agoI think that also hits what you see universally with every AI product trying to pass worse results off as a benefit: if you’re a business, the prospect of cutting your cost per cookie is really attractive as long as the decline in quality doesn’t cause people to stop buying and that’s going to get the focus of everyone who sees the financial reports more than they talk with customers. Anyone who’s going it because they care about cookies or take pride in your craft will have the opposite weighting. We’re kind of at the fast food point: before LLMs, bring successful at all in software required some level of skill (witness all of the companies getting very expensive write-offs from off-shoring or big consultancies trying to save on payroll vs. staff), kind of like how the small cafe/bakery model needed to have at least some level of craft to have something people would buy before the option of making food at a factory and shipping it became an option.
- otabdeveloper4 2mo ago> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ryandvm 2mo agoYeah, 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.
- orsorna 2mo agoReally 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.
- lelanthran 2mo ago> 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.
- ASalazarMX 2mo ago> 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. The value of an engineer is not what task they work on, but what problems they can solve. To this teen, the code is a black box, the LLM has most of the value in their pairing, and another random teen will replace easily them. LLMs were trained on the work of engineers, not prompting teens. The profession will continue to evolve, and the LLMs will improve along, thanks to professional, manual code still being written, not to vibe-coders.
- Aurornis 2mo ago> 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.
- anematode 2mo ago> 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.
- janalsncm 2mo agoNow that we can mass produce tables and chairs I would imagine there are far fewer people whose career is hand crafting tables and chairs. So machines literally did out compete them. In fact handicraft people were out competed so hard many people forget that used to be a respectable career.
- hombre_fatal 2mo agoI 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.
- hectdev 2mo agoI 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.
- epiccoleman 2mo ago> 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!
- QuantumNoodle 2mo ago> 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.
- unsigner 2mo agoThis 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.
- markus_zhang 2mo agoI 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).
- archagon 2mo agoLLMs expedite achieving AN end result.
- janalsncm 2mo agoAnd 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.
- socalgal2 2mo agoMy 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.
- fithisux 2mo agoFor 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.