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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

#361

Post by jckahn »

draftsman wrote: post #196
Schnitz wrote: post #166

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 fa…

Writing code without an LLM is akin to cooking a meal yourself, as opposed to something in between hiring a private chef and pulling a slot machine lever. When I cook a meal for myself or my loved ones, I become deeply familiar with the ingredients and the recipe. I am a good cook. Every decision, small and large, I make myself. Using feedback, I can tweak the components and the process. However, if I order food and…

This is a good analogy. Also I hate cooking; it feels like a chore and waste of time. Given the means, I prefer to have someone else do it for me so I can focus on more interesting things.

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

#362

Post by xdavidliu »

> these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works.

not literally true, and I doubt the author meant to say this. The communities do not only care about if your code works at all, but also that you know why and how.

It's sort of like in math classes where you need to show the work, not just the answer. Surely the answer being correct, while not being sufficient, is still necessary.

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

#363

Post by GPerson »

jatora wrote: post #339
vidarh wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m not sure how people get joy out of constantly vibe coding new projects. It feels like binge watching Netflix shows. I get joy out of it because it solves actual problems I have that I don't have time to solve manually, or don't want to. E.g. I just recently had Codex add a mechanism for two-level virtual desktops because I wanted groups of them. An hour later I had two-level virtual desktops in my wm that worke…

This. And the AI detractors in this thread are the same I think, and are virtue signalling.

I’m not virtue signaling? I’ve shared exactly my experience. People experience reality differently and that’s not some affront on you.

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

#364

Post by stevefan1999 »

juleiie wrote: post #52
bawolff wrote: 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]

> This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.

I still do start from bottom up to refactor everything into workspace members and this way, parallelism is way easier

> LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.

Not just forest. LLMs reward seeing structures and designs, and it still requires a lot of creativity to design it well. I have to do a lot of architect works for that, like package layout, testing strategies (BDD vs TDD vs E2E), setting up access to platforms and digging out what strategies to apply...etc.

> People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.

Trees like demonstrations and example code are even more important. This is because those are literally post-training materials for the LLMs

> Specialists will be fed to the model weights

I don't think so. New labor laws are certainly going to be introduced by the politicans to tackle this.

> generalists will inherit the world.

Now the problem is how far do you want to stretch the systemic thinking, and you also get burned out quicker.

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

#365

Post by orangedog »

r_lee wrote: post #289
senor_digimon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. if that's so awesome then why isn't everybody doing it? I never dreamt about stuff like that, but are there actually people who are like "oh thank God I can finally make my AI movies with my figurines and other stuff I have laying aroun…

What's the point of being this rude? People are doing things like this, you just have to look around YouTube.

This is what I don't like about the anti stance, it's just so often dismissive when people are excited about something.

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

#366

Post by killerstorm »

alkonaut wrote: post #224

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 s…

There are more than two types. Or, at least, more than one way to tinker with the code.

Just like aleph_minus_one, I like to tinker at a higher level: find a more general way to solve things, find a new way to structure abstractions, etc.

> "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".

If you're interested in abstractions, you need to understand the problem space itself, not just a specific instance of the problem.

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

#367

Post by ChicagoDave »

The interactive fiction community seems to have a subset of hardcore anti AI hobbyists. Partly at stolen artistic IP, but also the coding half of text adventures is viewed as art just as much as the story and writing.

I’ve selected a path where I think building tools with AI is fine. But I want people to play my games knowing I created all of it.

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

#368

Post by _luci_ »

ransom1538 wrote: post #321
Schnitz wrote: post #166

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 fa…

"Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? " How do we filter out these people during an interview?

why would you want to filter these people out? surely those that consider programming more than just a "means to an end" are going to be much more valuable employees, consider they are much more likely to be skilled at their craft? im genuinely interested in why you'd want to filter these people out!

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

#369

Post by slaymaker1907 »

jrm4 wrote: post #18

Relatedly, 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 typin…

You're right, there are tons of different workflows you can do. One of the more innocent ones, regardless of you opinions on vibe coding, is just using the LLM to understand the code base better. Even if I'm vibe coding something, I will often start by having the LLM construct documentation for the current code flows. It's a document that is useful to me as a human because it mostly just gives me code pointers and tells me what it does as part of the larger whole. It's useful for the LLM since it saves a ton on time and tokens in the long run.

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

#370

Post by hastily3114 »

alkonaut wrote: post #224

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 s…

I enjoy 2 and 4 the most. I do a lot more hobby projects now that LLMs can automate 3.
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