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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

#41

Post by ryandvm »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#42

Post by eterm »

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.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#43

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

minimaxir wrote: post #23
podgietaru wrote: post #13

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 deri…

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…

Imo without the sign off from Reckless it's suspicious

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#44

Post by matheusmoreira »

> 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.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#45

Post by Aurornis »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

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.

> 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.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#46

Post by Aurornis »

MostlyStable wrote: post #12
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

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.

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 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"

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#47

Post by LPisGood »

bawolff wrote: post #34
QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

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…

It is probably a good trade off if you sell cookies or if you vastly prefer eating cookies to making cookies.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#48

Post by _superposition_ »

bee_rider wrote: post #25
MostlyStable wrote: post #12

Earlier 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…

How much of coding is weeding?

Probably a similar ratio!

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#49

Post by hombre_fatal »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #4

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 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.

Re: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

#50

Post by frollogaston »

acedTrex wrote: post #26
gbjcantab wrote: post #20

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…

> 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.

Yep, gatekeep your hobbies! Just not too much. Programming/CS have been good about that so far.
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