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

Whatever the legal outcome, whether it's ultimately decided that people can or can't "get away" with using LLMs to license-launder code, it's undoubtedly a dick move.

Programming has five phases effectively:

1) You figure out what problem to solve.

2) You figure out HOW to solve the problem.

3) You actually implement the solution.

4) You see the solution work, for yourself.

5) You ship/deploy/publish the program. This means you see people be happy users and/or you get paid for it and so on.

If you're an entrepreneur type, you probably enjoy the first and last steps most, and you see steps 2-4 as mostly a chore. If you're a tinkerer, you don't care much for 1 and 5, and you see 2-4 as the whole point of programming. I'm a tinkerer. I'd be happy to just write code and throw it away. Coding is like solving sudokus. I could skip steps 1 and 5 forever. I don't ever need to show any code to anyone. In fact, most of the time when programming I do steps 2 and 3 and even skip 4. I don't even finish! I work weeks on something until I lose interest, and I know that in order to even run it, it would be several more weeks. A PoC is enough. Or just a half one. It's just code-to-structure-thoughts, not to create anything finished.

The 5 phases look kind of symmetric. The outermost layer (1 and 5) are the entrepreneurial steps. If you're a product owner or CEO, you might work strictly at steps 1,5. Then steps 2-4 are the managerial/architectural steps. If you're a very senior IC at a large company, you might work at this level, without actually doing much coding. Only the inner most step (3) is the manual creation of source code. Even though it's 5 different phases, it's just "3 layers" of programming.

The problem as I see it is that I enjoy step 3. And LLMs are good at step 3 almost exclusively. So they just pick the best bit of this dish, and leave me with the rest.

If you're an entrepreneurial type, the LLM appears to take the _worst_ bit of the work from you. Great.

we don't meet enough people to worry about why or how productive someone is ... productivity is half mania, half obsession and 100 % in vain except in life critical fields where LLM speed doesn't matter because querying DBs is fast and making associations within _contexts that speak the same language_, meaning they use the same register, is trivial.

I use LLMs to build some nice customized and some basically standard tools so I can go from learning about code to learning Rust et al properly ... the next 2 years are scheduled for me. I want code and LLM supply chains as a proper hobby, partially because I find the overall "transformers" approach pretty bad since there is no implicit path towards intelligence and zero chance to build one on top explicitly. it's just a bunch of parrots but parrots are awesome and i'm glad I get to have so many.

Also: I really don't care what the communities think, though ... it's 2026 and all that code, math, science, engineering didn't build any special amount of good, "bad" ( vs ugly personalities ) or cool characters that we didn't have already and it didn't cause any "mutations" in schools of thought either, or drive movements where they were needed.

but I'm a bystander, which wasn't my choice, unfortunately, so y'all know much better what I'm talking about.

most players in the lower leagues won't dope but some do and take bribes anyway, what?

it's a cowardly new world, everybody, happy Esoteric Right Wing Hanukkah!

That's actually a great classification and I've never seen it being laid out like that. I guess it can be useful to know "what kind" of programmer one is.