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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

#211
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Warhammer figurines painting, let’s buy them already painted

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. 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…

But 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.

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

#212
The 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

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

#213

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…

> lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them. You cannot copyright ideas. And that's a good thing. Remember the "one click checkout patent" saga? That is bad for everyone involved. We don't want that, as an industry.

You’re mixing patent and copyright. You can patent an innovative algorithm in the US. And the implementation is of course protected by copyright

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

#214
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few cars are manual steering, manual brakes, manual transmission. Tell me you are not in European or African continent without telling me.

I'm in Central Europe and there aren't many manual transmissions around anymore where I am. But if you paint with a brush of two entire continents, you might paint a little too broadly.

I’m in Central Europe too and most cars are manuals. Must be just your neck of the woods. But I agree it’s a pointless debacle.

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

#215
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have 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.

And LLMs are what make so many jobs feel repetitive and brainless. Jobs that were engaging, interesting, from which people were learning, developing expertise over time, are now prompting + babysitting agents

The point is most people's jobs are like that. So it doesn't matter how interesting it was or that who did it before doesn't like it anymore because there's a queue of people lined up to do the brainless new version of the job.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My implicit request, which I should have made clearer, was for him to delete (or make private) the repository and move on to greater ideals.

Why not request that the public chess boards/lists/ranking sites disqualify coda, or break it out into an AI-allowed/only category? That's both more honest, and probably more fruitful.

> That's both more honest

In what way is it more honest?

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The 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.

I still think this question is a future minefield, as well as the question of what happens if an LLM outputs a patented algorithm

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

#218

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…

It was like this with cryptocurrency to a lesser extent too. Suddenly lots of people pretending to have technical background and explaining what a Merkle tree is.

And telling everyone if they don’t embrace cryptocurrency right away they will be left behind, how you are all limiting human flourishing by refusing to embrace the future, excusing every single negative side effect of the technology — because we have to move as fast as possible. And of course no words on how unsustainable the businesses are, how corrupt it is to have so much power and control into a few really shady individuals

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

#219
post #52
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Funny you should mention autism. I'm of the belief that if I really wanted to, my autism could help me become a very effective AI-assisted programmer, because autistic communication traits that actual humans find annoying (and which most people hence train out of themselves), like infodumping and using precise language, are things AI actually loves and produces better results with.

But I don't want to use AI to code, in large part because I iterate on ideas by working directly with code. Attempting to program through an LLM intermediary becomes like attempting to eat using soft silicone chopsticks.

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