> Granted these communities have, in general, historically been characterized by feverish gatekeeping and painstakingly slow progress
This hits the nail on the head.
Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
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Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#12A 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.
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.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#13The 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."
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#14A 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.
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…
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.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#15I'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."
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Sure, 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.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#17This 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.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#18Relatedly, 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.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#19A 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.
LLMs let you generate code quickly. This seems to have very little relevance to the end result.
Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
#20What’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.