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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

#161

Post by bilkow »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
ncphillips wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: if a human did this manually would it be considered derived?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code. LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a cle…

Specifically about "humans": my understanding is that Clean-room design is not a requirement and the "Case law" section on your Wikipedia link explains that and has examples.

How and whether the same principles can be applied to LLMs, I have no idea. I imagine it would involve discussions about creativity, for example.

Not a lawyer.

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

#162

Post by drcxd »

Chance-Device wrote: post #8

Well 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…

Yeah, 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.

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

#163

Post by bluefirebrand »

jrapdx3 wrote: post #146
bluefirebrand wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty skeptical of people who are ADHD and claim to be getting boosted by LLMs. It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical…

> ... multi-tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction Interesting point of view from one who's been there. Intuitively the comment makes a lot of sense. In a way human multitasking resembles how single-threaded computer programs work. That is, we focus on one task at a time but tasks can be interleaved to give an illusion of doing several tasks at the same time. Managing several tasks requires remembering…

> That suggests ADHD people lose track of where they left off when performing several tasks

Not quite. At least not for me. My problem is hyperfocus. If I switch tasks I might go down a rabbit hole and forget to change back. It is similar to being distracted, except the distraction can still be legitimate work stuff. My focus is like a freight train, it's hard to change tracks

Which can seem like an attention problem when you're trying to change me from focused code mode to "jump on a call" mode

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

#164

Post by ltbarcly3 »

It'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.)

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

#165

Post by keychera »

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…

That comment is not posted yet in the github thread when the article is published

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

#166

Post by Schnitz »

Because 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.

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

#167

Post by fwip »

hgoel wrote: post #127
fnoef wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’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.

That's why I was trying to make the distinction between stuff that actually pushes your understanding forward and teaches helpful information, and stuff that does not. Isn't it more in the spirit of osdev to spend your effort implementing/working on the things that actually further your OS meaningfully? Discovering that a specific version of an obsolete undocumented chip has a quirk where one register doesn't reset i…

Simply knowing the quirk doesn't improve your skills, but the process of finding it often does.

If Claude shortcuts that, then yeah, the problem might be solved, but you didn't skill up at all. Sometimes that's fine.

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

#169

Post by lowbloodsugar »

fierycatnet wrote: post #120

I'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.

I 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.

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

#170

Post by martheen »

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #157
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code. LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a cle…

would using one LLM to create a spec, and another with only access to the spec doc count as clean enough?

Only if the second LLM can be proven to never got trained/distilled from a model that trained on the original source code.

Probably impossible if the original code is publicly available since most code oriented LLM just gobble them all.

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