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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

#401

Post by pluralmonad »

embedding-shape wrote: post #317
elmer2 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We all should be in the same 'class', but some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study. The older I get, I realize some people never change, will always have the same backwards or harmful thinking, and I avoid them instead of just accepting it.

> some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study. Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.

Maybe no garbage collection is the back pressure missing from the voracious consumption machine.

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

#402

Post by vanviegen »

embedding-shape wrote: post #299
bananaflag wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate? I think back in the 90s when I was a teenager I thought it to be a good thing that there is a rise in status for a class of people characterized by clear thinking.

The older I get, the more I realize how many problems in society is because there are different "classes" of people. The more we can eschew that, the better it becomes for most people. While yes, I also see myself as having "clearer thinking" than many people , maybe because of the thousands of hours building and maintaining software, I'm not of the impression that my life deserves a higher status than others merely…

> "everyone thinks differently, but it's all valid thinking"

I don't agree that all thoughts are created equal.

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

#403

Post by MattyRad »

Whether that chess repo is genuine or not genuine, legal or illegal, tasteful or tasteless, vibed or not vibed, stolen or copied, the signal to open source maintainers is clear: get off GitHub.

All I can hear is the nihilistic AI generated song at the end of the Malus talk. (https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_...)

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

#404

Post by trollbridge »

lp4v4n wrote: post #332
gliall_err wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sophomoric oversimplification. The US and Europe might have lost a lot of craftsmanship knowledge at a social level. Yet, what is left is so far ahead of what has ever existed in countries in South America for example. And China has gained a lot. Witness that youtuber trying to make grill brushes in the US. These differences have an impact in terms of opportunities and competition. It's easy to sit at home,…

It certainly doesn't feel like craftsmanship has gained any kind of higher social standing in our time though. The Zeitgeist of the modern times seems to be one of 'try to do the cheapest sellable thing while paying people the least possible'. Real craftsmanship, the kind that leaves you in awe and feels like an exceptional display of human capacity, seems to be relegated, from my point of view, to a minority of well…

Every craftsman I know expresses discomfort that the only way they can turn a profit is to sell goods to wealthy people.

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

#405

Post by trollbridge »

ben_w wrote: post #330
kypro wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look closer and you'll see that what happened in the UK in the 1700s was in fact enabled by a long and deep tradition of craftsmanship that only got enriched by the rise of new power sources. Craftsmanship today is vastly more advanced than it ever was before industry. I suspect the horses are healthier and stronger than in the 1700s too. I'm not sure I understand your point? I'd agree that the niche of extremely h…

> I suspect the horses are healthier and stronger than in the 1700s too. I'm not sure I understand your point? Horses? I doubt it. They're still infamously fragile creatures today, even with penicillin and vaccinations existing; similarly for strength, not much call for shires and they're now on an "at risk" conservation list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_horse -> https://www.rbst.org.uk/watchlist-breed/shire-…

The current breeds of horses the Amish use are far stronger and healthier than they were even 100 years ago. For example, current draft horses are so strong they can outperform mules and oxen, and running horses are absurdly fast. I heard of a guy who regularly zips around at 20 MPH with a buggy or cart. That simply wasn’t possible in the 200s.

Of course the costs are higher too. Good horses in the above category can go for north of $100k.

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

#406

Post by trollbridge »

camgunz wrote: post #359
Nextgrid wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also missing step 6: when your solution breaks in production or needs to be extended. Having done step 2 & 3 by hand is the difference between being able to fix/extend it quickly with no further damage or fumbling around like an idiot and sometimes breaking more stuff in the process.

It's been pretty disheartening to watch SWEs rediscover/reinvent the SDLC.

The most demoralising part of using LLMs is that now I spend most of my day on SDLC - even hobby projects.

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

#407

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

Most software work is job related and business related. You are paid to work not to enjoy.

Because of this the future of software will most likely be overtaken by AI because the business aspect of it will overtake the enjoyment aspect of it. Why? Because business pays bills, enjoyment does not.

The fact that you are talking about lack of enjoyment on the job is a luxury not many employees can afford.

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

#408

Post by pydry »

shiomiru wrote: post #251
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'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 (…

>Now there is a plagiarism machine built on top of decades of this work that seemingly solves 3 and promises to solve 2 (badly, but usually this matters little

I think people underestimate just how much users scorn buggy, flaky technology.

The main issue with solid, reliable technology which Just Works is that users have relatively few reliable cues to distinguish that from vibe coded crap.

A vibe coded piece of shit looks very similar to a well engineered product made with care. That's a problem which needs to be solved.

self hosted communities are reacting to this by trying to detect signals of if a product is vibe coded but that in and of itself is still quite a poor quality cue.

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

#409

Post by GPerson »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #395
GPerson wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that’s a great use of AI, and sounds similar to some of my use cases. “And I think, to be honest, the enjoyment I would have gotten out of the programming part once, was very largely "type-2 fun"- an annoyance followed by a nice reward.” Yea I’ve had similar thoughts. Other thoughts have been something like “I’ll have different types of projects and try to be thoughtful in advance about what this is…

Yeah! And now the mod has fixed input events, I can actually have a proper configuration GUI for this, and I could I suppose write a GUI toolkit for the nth time, but it kind of feels like the sort of thing that's barely cool the first time, lol. And I already know if I let Sonnet or Opus do it, it'll work fine after the third try or so, and what's more it's going to look a lot better. And I'll enjoy using it every t…

Another strict positive I’ve had with AI is having it figure out how to deal with bureaucracy. This is dangerous due to privacy issues, but I was seriously depressed for a period, felt like I could not do it, and the AI figured out which agency I had to contact and how to contact them etc… to do some imminently important thing, and if this thing wasn’t done I would have been in serious trouble. I don’t care to know how to interface with that (and the system was pretty miserable).

In the past I guess it would have overrun and I’d be in trouble. Maybe that would have taught me to handle my affairs though. I doubt it.

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

#410

Post by SoftTalker »

ModernMech wrote: post #340
shiomiru wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant it as an euphemism for "it's universally sought after (i.e., you'll probably find a job)". Few would think being a programmer gives you some kind of special "social status"; it's always been a "nerd" hobby that happened to pay (relatively) well. (I guess by now you have a solid retirement plan; maybe if the field had been burnt to the ground while you were younger, you'd have had a different opinion.)

Being a good programmer gives you special social status amongst people who value programming. You only have to look at how people talk about others as slop coders and seek to expand their coding reputations. Those people are the most threatened by AI because of how it implicates their carefully crafted personas as coding gurus and keepers of knowledge.

It also gives you a special social status amongst people who do not understand programming: nobody wants to talk to you, at least not about your job.
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