Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by phoghed » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

ncphillips wrote: post #63

Aurornis wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Would have to be proven in court. Look up history of cases and settlements for GPL violations and it quickly becomes apparent that it’s relatively toothless and mostly license theater.

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

#462

Post by tines » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

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 have always thought that there are two kinds of programmer, the tinker and the mathematician. The tinker likes to code operating systems and shells, the mathematician likes to code Haskell and Agda. You've updated my belief that there are a third kind, the entrepreneur, which sees programming as a means to an end and would gladly stop programming if possible.

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

#463

Post by newswasboring » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

GPerson wrote: post #432

newswasboring wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming is nice because you have lots of different scales of structure to think about, and your program slowly comes together. Programming is nice cause of this for you. Other people have other preferences. When I got my first LED to blink, I wasn't thinking about the elegance of my code. Same for when moved sprites or made a async stateless compute system for MATLAB analysis. There are people who are driven by…

Programming has a lot of nice features and accurately capturing them all in a hacker news comment isn’t that easy, so maybe you could have some consideration for that in the future. I also want effects to happen in the world. I also like the slow process of craft. I’m anticipating not a very far away future when “implement gta 6” will not be that different from torrenting gta 3 in the 2000s. The current agent era fee…

Your comment seems unnecessary aggressive. Did I offend you in any way? I just gave my perspective.

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

#464

Post by arzig » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

win311fwg wrote: post #433

pigpop wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices. Modern farms are more similar to operating a manufacturing business than they are to a salaried position or profession. They don't earn high incomes compared to white collar professions but they do have high revenues and they pay themselves a reasonable middle class income on average with some added benefits from owning large assets and land. The important…

> Farmers aren't really paid, they sell goods at market prices. "Programmers aren't really paid, they sell services at market prices." — I guess nobody gets paid? As a farmer myself, when I give someone something I produced and they give me back something in return, I consider myself to be paid. If I did not receive much value in return for what I gave, I'd reasonably consider myself to have not been paid well. I hav…

What he means to say is that because you are a farmer you are a member of the capital holding classes rather than the lumpen proletariat.

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

#465

Post by GPerson » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:18 PM UTC

newswasboring wrote: post #463

GPerson wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming has a lot of nice features and accurately capturing them all in a hacker news comment isn’t that easy, so maybe you could have some consideration for that in the future. I also want effects to happen in the world. I also like the slow process of craft. I’m anticipating not a very far away future when “implement gta 6” will not be that different from torrenting gta 3 in the 2000s. The current agent era fee…

Your comment seems unnecessary aggressive. Did I offend you in any way? I just gave my perspective.

Yea the wording that it was some way or another “for you” came across as aggressiveness so I responded in kind.

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

#466

Post by autoexec » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:23 PM UTC

waffletower wrote: post #431

shiomiru wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the economic problem that programmers had until recently been highly regarded because steps 2-3 were hard. "Open source" solved this partially by utilizing the labor such (relatively) well-paid people gave away "for the love of it", but it was not nearly enough to put most out of work. Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (…

It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line? No, we haven't figured out how to fairly compensate everyone -- the frontiers aren't even trying. Spotify does at least try in their domain (and fails badly). Regardless of how the entitled get paid, t…

> It sickens me when people use the word plagiarism to describe LLMs. Particularly when they use words and language that they themselves have plagiarized -- words like "love" and "economic" -- where do you draw the line?

It sickens me when people use the word "piracy" to describe my downloading PDFs of books from torrent sites then printing them out and selling them, particularly when those authors used words and language that they themselves have "pirated" like "love" and "economic".

Call it whatever you want, but LLM companies took from people without compensation, and took from the commons, so that they could rent it out to us in regurgitated ad-infested chunks. That's where the true greed is. If the LLMs and the datasets they trained on were made available to everyone for free I'd be tempted to agree that the benefits to society would be worth it, but instead those creative works and the distillation of all available knowledge are being tightly controlled, censored, and leased out by a small number of corporations only to those who can afford to pay "a significant monthly fee" and many of those people are in turn just trying to profit from their access to the uncompensated work of others.

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

#467

Post by globular-toast » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

antonvs wrote: post #441

globular-toast wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone is learning to code by using LLMs. We learn a craft in two ways: by watching other people do something, and by doing it ourselves. I've learnt many crafts in my life, to the extent that I've produced useful or enjoyable output: programming, wood working, gardening, cooking, baking. I read loads of books, but nothing you read in a book makes much sense until you do it yourself. If you read a book…

I’ve learned tons since I started using LLMs. They’re an amazing tool for learning as long as you use them like that. Ask it questions about things you don’t understand. Verify the answers. Don’t have them do everything for you. Figure out where to push back on what they’re producing. When I learned to code, learning from existing code was a big part of it. One difference now is you can produce custom code to learn f…

Like I said, you can ask an LLM about wood all day but if you don't pick up a saw you won't learn to make anything. I do, of course, use LLMs for research and learning, but I'm specifically talking about learning to program. LLMs can't cut the wood for you, but they can write your program for you. If you can resist and just use them to learn then sure, but you've got to do something yourself.

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

#468

Post by andai » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:26 PM UTC

>even in the instances where there was earnest early engagement with LLMs in some of these niche communities, the well was quickly poisoned by a combination of a lack of a deep understanding by the LLM practitioners, and a vitriolic subset of those communities that view the LLM enterprise as a form of cheating

Yeah, the whole point is the street cred of doing something really hard.

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

#469

Post by boomlinde » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:35 PM UTC

RugnirViking wrote: post #396

boomlinde wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen people here insist that LLMs enable everyone to make music or art. It's diametrically opposed from my own view that making something is the process of making something, neither the result of nor the motivation for that process. My retort is usually a variation of one I've already posted in this thread: they do that to the same extent that taxis enable everyone to drive, which is something most people will i…

isn't this clearly a misunderstanding between you and hypothetical AI art approver? They're talking about the result , one must think. The idea that people who could not have approximate pictures of ideas that lived in their head can now have those things. They didn't create them by an in depth process, of course, and would be wrong to pass it off as though they did. But there is some value to the enjoyment gained fr…

> They're talking about the result, one must think.

Maybe they are, but in that case it's a frequent source of equivocation because people will conflate the process of their making with the result of some other process so as to proclaim themselves artists, musicians, programmers or whatever for writing something that they themselves wouldn't consider art or music unto itself in the first place, and having a machine generate something which they do consider to be art or music based on that.

> Did I make a piece of art if I created a file on a computer in photoshop and then printed it?

Funnily enough people don't usually have a problem with this question when it comes to driving. Your actions' effect on the propulsion of the car are ultimately indirect, and there are many systems which assist the person behind the wheel even when they are engaging directly with all their means of control, e.g. an engine, ABS, EPS, yet no one will immediately feel a need to wax philosophical about whether the driver is actually driving or not because of that. We recognize that in a car which requires a driver at all there is substantial ongoing involvement from the person behind the wheel in making the car go as desired and deciding what means available to apply in order to go about that, without whom there is at best no going anywhere at all, and that involvement is what driving is.

> If I can't drive (perhaps I never learned, or some flaw with my body doesn't let me), a taxi does enable some things I could never do before. I am, of course, not literally the one driving. But if I can get to the shop myself now, there is something there.

Which is not the thing in question. If AI tools have generated something you find beautiful or interesting, by all means enjoy that for what it is. If the taxi takes you to the store, by all means enjoy that.

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

#470

Post by skydhash » Thu, Aug 06, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #457

jckahn wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the analogy is good, does it mean AI boosters hate programming, and feel like it's a chore and waste of time? Yet they keep calling themselves programmers. I dislike cooking; I don't call myself a chef, nor go on cooking forums saying they're all idiots for churning butter as a hobby, and telling them they are luddite dinosaurs just because I bought myself an Instant Pot.

And clamoring that instant pot is capable of doing the job of 10 chefs, while conveniently forgetting that chefs using the instant pot is way more useful. And then congratulating each other on new way of adjusting the temperature and timer of the instant pot.