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

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), the programmers that (indirectly) helped build it are told they're fools for doing so, and threatened by losing their status if they don't adapt to the "entrepreneurial way" (well, the full promise is "you'll lose it anyway, but if you cooperate in stuffing sama's pockets then maybe you get to keep it a bit longer").

So what really surprises me is not that people are upset but that so few are.

To carry forward the sudoku analogy, I care about figuring out which numbers go where, and whether I was correct, I don't care about the mechanical part of actually penciling-in the answers (coding).

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.

Even if you deeply into tinkering, 1 can be an insanely exciting and rewarding step: for example "how could an abstraction look like in which 2-4 become trivial special cases for many classes of programming problems?".

In my opinion the difference between "entrepreneur type" and "programmer type" (and yes: it can happen that both of these types work in the reciprocal job) is rather:

- People of the programmer type see solving problems as their primary goal. Satisfying customers just serves the purpose that these people pay money so that they can continue working on solving problems.

- People of the entrepreneur see satisfying customers as their primary goal. Programming is just a means to an end.

- Writing my tiny hobby gameboy emulator? Heck, Why I'd let Claude take away the fun part of implementing new features and then see Super Mario Land start and run step by step?

- Debugging why a legacy Wordpress store with more than 50 active plugins is returning an error 500 just to some random customers? Claude can 100% take the wheel, I'm good.

I think most people will come around to this way of thinking once the pro-LLMers stop pretending like the statistics don't exist too (i.e. that ML is the solution to any problem, despite how unreliable it is).

You have to work in design mode and stop it from pissing code. Describe the requirements as detailed as possible and refine them based on the responses. It's quite rewarding and helps structure the way you think about the problem.

So possibly there are other classes of people, not just either enterpreneur or thinkerer. Thou not sure what this combination is, maybe something more like R&D.

And LLMs give a lot of value here. They allow to quickly do steps 2-3 - "hard and tedious" stuff - to confirm that the thing, in fact, became solvable.

For example, you have an idea for a cool and useful app and you want to put it on a website. You need to figure out hosting, you need to write some copy, you need to do some visual design.

Maybe 3a) Yak shaving?

There are various ways to take shortcuts. For hosting, you can use something super easy like GitHub Pages or Netlify or Cloudflare, or maybe piggyback off an existing site that's already deployed. For both copy and visual design, you can just ask Claude or Codex to do it -- but only if you don't mind having that standard vibe-coded look and feel, all glowing gradients and punchy, mic-dropping text.

Maybe you're including that under 5), ship/deploy/publish, but I read that as being more about scaling, marketing, and making things robust. Even before you reach that stage there's always a bunch of bullshit to work through before you can even reach 4), seeing the solution work for yourself.

Currently I'm in the process of starting my own business solving a problem my last employer underestimated, and I find myself focusing much more on 1 and 5, which I also enjoy, and I use LLMs a lot for 3 and parts of 2. The LLM and I often disagree about 2, but that often results in a better solution than if I'd just trusted either myself or the LLM. I iterate a lot between 2 and 4, letting the LLM do almost the entirety of 3, and advising on 2.

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.

even for an entrepreneur type - you need to understand the technology to get to good enough solution e.g if you don't know shit & just accepted what the llm gave you - u might end up with an unmaintainable mess. the llm might recommend you use some proprietary solution when an open source solution exists that works well for your use case.

plus llms tend to be wordy or make things complex more than necessary.

The moment you have more devs architecture becomes the overwhelming concern, and this is why professionally LLM usage explodes since the LLMs can implement bits while the humans work on the actual hard work of making sure they fit together properly in the intended way.

I have encountered a lot of people that view coding as a therapeutic exercise, and they were already a problem pre AI wave, now they are only going to be a hobby at least.

6) You maintain the program with architectural gymnastics as time eats away at the utility and relevance and user base of what you originally built

Both of these activities cause a night-and-day perspective change the next time through the loop

I have about three modes, working with LLMs:

A) Just use them for (2), do (3) and (4) myself.

B) Just use them for (2) and (3), but with very fine grained instructions - to the point where it barely saves me time.

C) Use them for (2), (3) and (4), but with this workflow, it quickly degrades into slop for me.

I still get the best results with (A), but for a quick PoC, (C) is hard to beat.

What's hilarious (or sad) is that I see a lot of people throw them at (1) as well, which seems to have a high chance of inducing AI psychosis and creating software nobody understands, let alone needs.

it’s more akin to 3d printing to me, i get the design all setup and let the machine do 3) and then get to play with it in 4)

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.

But you're ultimately right, some people want to solve sudokus and some people want to change the world, and the sudoku solvers are really upset that a Sudoku Solver and World Changer 9000 device is widely available, because it spoils the fun they have with sudoku.

I'd sharpen this to: it's 3 layers of software engineering (2, 3, 4), and 1 layer of programming (3).

All I see is a fast food factory. Sure it's interesting that you can produce so much so quickly. But what is produced is endlessly uninteresting to me. It doesn't help that all the harness building is just SEO in disguise. Trial and error.

I don't doubt that agentic programming makes it possible to produce faster, but it also comes at a great cost for me, which is that I largely don't enjoy my job anymore. If I was given the choice between that and halving my salary I would have chosen the latter.

Few cars are manual steering, manual brakes, manual transmission.

Few grappling bodies go all Greek-naked.

Few chess bodies forbid researching previous games or your opponent.

The list is indeed endless, and every single person thinks they are using just the right amount of assistance; anything less is pointlessly difficult, anything more is cheating that takes the sport out.

Me, I've been a hobbyist programmer since youth (6502 assembly, represent). I'm having a blast "writing" software without touching a line of code. Sure, I'm old, and maybe I'm like those guys blasting Veyrons through highways, relying on traction control and all the computers to let me drive beyond my abilities. And... ok? I'm having fun, even if I'm not doing it right, by random anonymous peoples' views.

In addition, say if you had like a guitar-playing forum, where people share recordings of their practice. People would likely not appreciate it to share AI-generated audio of guitar-practicing there, either.

And while there are various reasons for a guitar forum that might not hold for a programming forum, one of them remains: There's nothing to talk about when it's AI-generated. What scale did you use and how did you tune it? "I dunno, AI did it"

All you can talk about is to say "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine you're paying subscription to access made you that thing, nice"

Or for example, even when a friend of mine vibe-coded a "synthesizer" app and he wanted to show me cause he knows I like that kind of thing. And I do, I love digging into and experimenting with DSP algorithms, but also the user interfaces and all sorts of things digital audio related. And I love talking about it, or explaining stuff. But my friend couldn't tell me anything (not even that it was using WebAudio, but also how). Anyway it made me a bit sad, and I felt like something is lost here. Something worthwhile. And I explained it to him that then all I could really say was "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine made you that thing, nice", and we talked it over, and it was alright. But still, it seems something is lost.

Now I talk to a robot all day, trying to figure out how best to tell it whats in my brain. I no longer do maths and logic and instead I think about language and questions all day, holding in depth conversations and thinking up responses. This is something my brain naturally doesnt like to do and so I fatigue quickly in the day compared to my old job.

I want to do maths and logic again :(

When I see all those "show HN" projects that are slot level code it feels like they dont care about the result that much and just want to showcase their idea in a more tactile way, but there is no actual proper execution to make the thought into matter so to speak

1. Some programme because it’s the one of 2 ways to get the things they want (another way is hiring a team to code for them). Now that they have vibe coding, they’d happily never touch a line of code again. 2. Other people programmes because they just enjoy it. Vibe coding ruins the best part for them. Like telling a foodie, "Good news! I built a robot to eat your food for you."

Most people getting paid to code are probably somewhere in the middle?

But nowadays hand-writing code at work is starting to feel kinda 'illegal'. The manager is gonna ping you just because you fall behind on the company's token waste leaderboard.

Maybe it's just another "hobby should never become job" story?

How do we filter out these people during an interview?

> 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. If you have any concern, please open a GitHub issue with the details and we'll happily investigate.

It's not like ideas are protected by copyright though. Copyright protects the specific expression of the idea, not the idea itself. Anyone can "lift ideas" from anyone else, including proprietary software.

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.

So "lifting ideas from other engines", as you yourself put it, is entirely licit, no matter how you do it. _Should_ you credit others when so doing? I err on the side of yes, on that question. _Must_ you? No, there is no such requirement, this is not academic publishing. Does it constitute violation of license? Absolutely not. Straightforwardly, no. Furthermore, it _should not_, we would not like the result of that.

Think: SCO suing Linus Torvalds over his use of a.out: and winning. It would be bad. Even though I understand the reasons for it, it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of.

As I lead this post with: maybe there's something in the repo which is infringing, it's quite possible that commit doesn't tell the whole story. If so, keep in mind that I don't know that, and am able to change my opinion in the face of new evidence.

Based on what I _have_ seen, no: you do not get to lock down a bit-packing pattern just because you're the first to come up with it. Nor should you have that right.

[0]: https://github.com/adamtwiss/coda/commit/cd170a4ea9993cf8246...

It's just power fantasy. It's amazing the first couple of times but as it wears off and becomes the new norm you forgot how being the one who decides which thing does what feels like.

Luckily (or unluckily?) the industry only cares about the end result, and flushes out people who used to reward for their passion and dedication naturally.

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 worked exactly how I wanted it, with support for it in my desktop switcher. I could write it myself, but why would I? I love writing code for various projects, but sometimes I just want the outcome.

What? It's the simplest thing in the world. You get the product. Isn't that the point of all programming? You want a thing and you speak a magic incantation and then you have the thing, to keep and use.

> even if this thing is any good, someone with real capital can just direct a future AI at it to take it from me, so I’m not really gaining.

This kind of sounds like you're writing code for social credit. Like, you don't actually want the thing, you want to be "the person who made the thing". If you want the thing for its own sake, nobody can take it from you and what somebody with capital does on their own services does not harm your use one whit.

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 the artifacts they produce. That's just how our brains are wired I guess, outcome oriented. I see nothing wrong in that.

Btw, I feel like there is this view that all people using agents are the apocryphal "vibe coders". That is just not true. The process of creation remains the same. Break it down into smaller pieces. Work those pieces till a piece it done. Make sure it all comes together. People seriously using these agents are not writing "implement gta6. Make no mistakes".

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 with.

I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.

These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.

All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.

The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.

I enjoy optimizing code to the point of obsession, but I can't find economic (daily-job) justification to spend time on this. Lately I've had several extremely productive and enjoyable sessions that go like this: - I run Claude on my desktop PC, explain the problem, and let it explore the code around the problem and build a test harness so it can run experiments - I ask it to run experiments and try things; at that point I can leave my PC and continue over my phone in brief stolen moments here and there, over the course of many hours - it comes back with results; I ask it to try new things based on those results - after multiple rounds of this, I have explored a vast search space I could have never had time to do myself - I ask it for an implementation of the most promising path; this is usually something simpl-ish (on the order of 50-100 LOC, not huge new systems) - I return to the PC and do something between polish the implementation and redo it fully manually - partly because I enjoy it

This is something I can see myself do for fun in areas I care about, not for money and reasonable business objectives for my day job.

So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.

Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.

I also woodwork and I remember this discussion there between hand tools, power tools, and CNCs. It's all the same hobby just different entry points and doing it the least automated way doesn't make your work more or less than anyone else's.

Similarly I've made lots of software projects. Over the last 15+ years I have over 250 github repos, the majority of them no one but me will be interested in but I had fun making stuff. LLMs let me make stuff faster just like the power tools. I'm still enjoying making stuff. I still direct, I still decide what to make, I still decide features, iterate on UX, etc, but at several X the speed of before. Loving it.

It's an age-old debate in every hobby.

Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result, which is what they want to use or play with.

In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.

Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.

I will say that there are a lot of parts of programming I enjoy, but I used to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down obscure errors or learning arcane systems just to get to the parts I personally enjoy: the feedback loop of making a thing, seeing the result, and improving it.

There is a reason stack overflow is dead. LLMs are a strictly better product.

It is an example of something that has hobby-like characteristics.

What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.

Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)

Keeping the experience bearable BY gatekeeping. That is the point, gatekeeping is not inherently a bad thing. It's a required thing in many circles.

The vast majority of developers are like this, and as such, are silent about it. They aren't making production applications. They're making bespoke solutions and iterating upon them over time.

Somehow purists think there's something wrong with the process of that. I say there's something wrong with them, perhaps on the spectrum of OCD. With a tinge of arrogance or narcissism thinking their applications are all of the purest order and construction, testaments to architectural beauty and edge case handling. With a tinge of fear and cope as so much of their identity is caught up in being a smart coder rather than a smart engineer.

If you are a software developer and don't see the value in and heavily utilize agentic tools, you are a poor engineer. Not every coder has the mindset of an engineer, but a coder should be able to recognize and understand a powerful tool when they see one instead of letting their emotions and irrationality take the wheel

It's like lifting weight. Obviously, machines lift weight much better than human for a long time. But people still trains for strength or aesthetics. Even if machine can lift much larger weight and more efficiently, some people still care about how strong they are.

A machine can lift much more weight obviously is not the excuse for them to stop training.

Programming is just the weight lifting for your brain/mind. Even if LLMs can solve all coding problems perfectly, there will be people who still want to program all by hands, for training their mind, or simply enjoying the process. And there will be people care about how good you are at solving a problem with programming.

LLMs being able to code does not mean you no longer need the ability to code.

Cars do not mean you no longer need the ability to walk.

The entire point of the article was the hobby is ascribing value to that tedium that the LLM is removing.

I understand using LLMs as tools to help you with your hobby, but I think when “Claude spends hours debugging it” it probably is no longer a hobby, but an outsourced job.

On the other hand though, if I’m being paid to build, say, the top station of a ski lift on a peak, I wouldn’t be surprised if the contractee would prefer I don’t try hiking up the building materials and used a helicopter instead.

I would modify this slightly though. I think there's an expectation of things getting better, and expecting to do better than your parents. I think that's where many of the modern issues around living standards come from. They aren't getting better (quickly enough).

(I absolutely relate to your experience with sudoku etc. Of course, writing a basic sudoku solver is also interesting.)

The thing is, software architecture and systems design can also get the hobby treatment. I've found that I'm happy to have a short discussion with ChatGPT and have it barf out a few hundred lines of a concept, then refactor and maintain it myself. Or come up with a few different pieces that can be written fairly easily, let the machine skip over most of that tedium, make sure they conform to the interfaces I had in mind, and then verify for myself that the system actually comes together the way I imagined.

Of course, it does help a lot that I can understand the code, and work with it line by line if necessary. But SICP teaches us that it's abstraction and composition all the way down. So I feel like I'm exercising the same skills while not letting myself get intimidated by the sheer amount of initial typing or the self-doubt (instinctive immediate review of the code, you know) that creeps in when I try.

I think if that were always true, calculators would be banned in schools.

Surely the "point" might be different things to different people depending on their exact situation/context.

Presumably no one is forcing the maintainer at gunpoint to have an LLM slightly shake up other people's code, relicense it under an incompatible license and then claim that "every single line of code is written by Claude Code", so I don't see the issue with not playing if that's the only option.

If you can't make contributions that anyone finds interesting enough to include upstream and have no plans to publish your AGPL derived code under a compatible license, you can keep your changes to yourself. Nothing lost, nothing gained, license honored.

I'm not sure of the truthiness there wrt LLMs: using an LLM to code your hobby OS doesn't actually gain you the skills of the existing members of that niche. Maybe those existing members are just annoyed at posers, not at newcomers?

People say, if you you write elaborate well spec'ed prompts, it will do the right thing. Coding in a way is doing that.

I say this not as a complaint, but to explain my perspective on using LLMs for personal projects. Granted, I'm publishing none of them, and not trying to make anyone care about them, so it's not really a response to the article or general discourse here per se, but I thought it bears mentioning anyway.

I'd like to buy into the idea that "doing it yourself" is more meaningful or personally edifying, but I don't get that feeling. I want to get that feeling, but I don't. I've found my private waste-of-time projects using LLMs have been more gratifying than my private waste-of-time projects that don't, and at the end of the day, neither really substantively matter anyway.

Again, this isn't really related to communities per se, but it is an answer why some folks use LLMs for projects/"hobbies".

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bill-oliver-ai-...

Are we going to end up a bunch of meatbag puppets of the machines? Makes me wonder.

Obvious sarcasm aside, these LLMs have been trained (without consent!) on our hard work, on our passion. People have been writing code for years, and many have open-sourced their projects to share their knowledge, to better the world, to provide free solutions to problems. All that hard work, all that effort, has been stolen and used to create a machine that replaces us. And when we complain that quality goes down, that work is no longer enjoyable, that we don't actually see huge noticable productivity improvements across the board, bright minds like you tell us "lol just quit man fuck you". Do you not feel bad that you are actively destroying the livelihood of the very people that made your slop machine viable to build?

If you only want to learn programming for work then you obviously have a different perspective than people writing chess engines from scratch for fun instead of using an existing one, right?

I realize there are people with young kids or 2-3 jobs that really have little to no downtime, but it seems that for most people time isn't really the issue - it's just are you more of a passive or active type of personality.

You dont understand that people have hobbies they enjoy doing? Because thats the entire point of the article.

Heck, if everything is worthless, please, please try not to do anything :)