A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
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 with.
I think that also hits what you see universally with every AI product trying to pass worse results off as a benefit: if you’re a business, the prospect of cutting your cost per cookie is really attractive as long as the decline in quality doesn’t cause people to stop buying and that’s going to get the focus of everyone who sees the financial reports more than they talk with customers. Anyone who’s going it because they care about cookies or take pride in your craft will have the opposite weighting.
We’re kind of at the fast food point: before LLMs, bring successful at all in software required some level of skill (witness all of the companies getting very expensive write-offs from off-shoring or big consultancies trying to save on payroll vs. staff), kind of like how the small cafe/bakery model needed to have at least some level of craft to have something people would buy before the option of making food at a factory and shipping it became an option.
It is, although in this case the cookie-making robot also makes 10% of its cookies with sand instead of flour. So it's still not a very good trade if you have any pride in your business or consequences for bad product.
> Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.
I'm lurking around the OpenBSD mailing list and it seems that code review is where collaboration starts. You send a patch, explain its purpose, people try it out and comment. If it's OK (various factors decide that), it's imported inside the codebase.
The main issue in corporate settings is that the author of the PR wants to browbeat you into accepting his/her changes. Either directly or by appealing to the manager. They don't want collaboration, they just see you as the blocker between them and the "Done" status on the ticket.
Main course is this this and this, 1. Do this 2. Plug this 3. Run this.. step by step plan.
So you get a precise top down construction plan. Then it’s easy to split the parts where the coding needs to be manual (smoothing walls) vs where it can be whateverz (laying concrete).
LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.
Good luck making a grand strategy game in two months holidays without an LLM. Now you can.
People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Yes manual touch is still needed in some parts of the construction process but architecting the whole thing is the most important in 2026.
ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.
Specialists will be fed to the model weights, generalists will inherit the world.
I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.
I'm pretty skeptical of people who are ADHD and claim to be getting boosted by LLMs.
It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there
I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical of people who claim to both be good at multi-tasking and also have ADHD. My experience with ADHD is that multi -tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
Exactly. I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables), but because I enjoy gardening. Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point.
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.
Sure, that's fair. I enjoy the process of figuring out ways software can solve some (usually quite trivial) problem for myself, but then I'm very happy to hand the act of making it to a robot.
>> I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables)
...cheaper how? My partner and I grow most of our veggies and, based on our calculations (including fixed costs that have gone into the garden, as well as e.g. water, fertilizer, etc.) we save a non-negligible amount of money every month.
Either they’re including their time at $100/hr for evening/weekends they aren’t working anyways; or they have mechanized gardening equipment. Hopefully the latter since the former is not a disingenuous way to look at things unless you actively replace unpaid work hours with gardening.
It would be very hard to spend more money on manual gardening tools, water, gloves, seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer (and wire cages, trellises etc; I know very little about gardening so if I’m missing items, let me know!) than you would on an equivalent amount of premium priced vegetables from a market/grocer, particularly if you amortize the non-consumable items over a longer period.
Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
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.
> Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.
At least those who really are into development to the point of writing their own OS, Language, etc can still enjoy it as a hobby.
> Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.
The value of an engineer is not what task they work on, but what problems they can solve. To this teen, the code is a black box, the LLM has most of the value in their pairing, and another random teen will replace easily them.
LLMs were trained on the work of engineers, not prompting teens. The profession will continue to evolve, and the LLMs will improve along, thanks to professional, manual code still being written, not to vibe-coders.
If I'm any example, I'm on the other side. I got into computers in the '70s: plotter art, BASIC, then Z-80s, forth, PDP11s, Amigas and so to now with GPUs and supercomputers and visualization. I'm recently retired and having enormous fun plowing through my lifetime backlog of "wouldn't that be a cool tool" (https://pcons.org) or a climate visualization (https://globe-viz.oberbrunner.com) or a travel packing list app (packzen) or a bunch of 3d printer tools... so on and so on. Totally co-engineered with Claude. What we're doing together, and getting out to the world as useful open source projects, is easily 10x what I could've done on my own, in the limited time available to me in this life.
Really hate this characterization, although to be fair I love the ops/infra side of things more. I've used to set up so many parts of my homelab manually, but now I can just get it all done.
I've spent countless hours maintaining a Rpi server at the infancy of my interest in computing.
Truly a lot of it is maintenance and busywork tasks. I am having more fun than ever. Perhaps some people like those busywork sysadmin tasks and gain enjoyment of the homelab hobby just from that...honestly I can't say I really understand it.
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.
I think for those of us who got into software initially for the end result -- being the only way for the thing in your head to ever exist -- enjoying the engineering part was a nice, incidental surprise.
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 enjoy molding hyper specific software across my whole eco system of tech through prose with LLMs. Iterating over time to hone the right solutions based on very abstract reactions to the results I get. I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
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.
> I would consider this a hobby because it costs me money and I get no value out of it outside of the act.
I LOLd very hard at that one, thanks. Very relatable.
A hobby of mine is also woodworking. I can make jigs, I can buy jigs. I can use hand tools, I can use power tools. I can use screws I can use joints. I can even buy made furniture and just assemble it. Though the latter is more of interior designing. But the point is it is a spectrum and everyone has their own niche. SDLC are not the same and there is different value to be derived. But the process of woodworking makes me handy. The experience allows me to elegantly and cost efficiently fix broken things. It enables me to do interesting things in interesting ways and there is more of a community around that. If I automated away all the woodworking and just bought the furniture... Well there isn't much of a community around that except flexing who has more cash. Idk, I'm trying to have empathy for both those who are for and against it.
I think this is why that I limit the use of LLM in my hobbyist project, but not in my work. I found LLM particularly useful of generating say VSCode configuration JSON files and it saved me a lot of headaches. It is also very good at finding the right tool for the job (e.g. which binary to use to write a floppy image).
> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
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.
> Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something.
Indeed, and this is the problem: unlike woodworking, where my power-assisted creation is independent of, or complements, your handcraft, this engine is directly competing with other engines. Twiss is being disingenuous when he says he has no interest in submitting it to competitions; it plays on a rated account on Lichess, for example.
Your entire commenting history is about how much you dislike LLMs (with the high likelihood that you would not accept any evidence about agentic productivity), which does not lead to good discourse on Hacker News.
lol "my girlfriend doesn't go here but you wouldn't even believe me if i lied about it"
disliking LLMs is just an opinion. Refusing to engage with an argument and instead defaulting to downvotes when you can't supply a reasonable argument or proof is just ai/corporate-fanaticism and self-delusion enhanced by LLM-dependence.
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.
The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.
"Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."
> 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.
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.
There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code.
LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a clean-room design. There isn't enough general removal from the original subject matter.
Yeah, absolutely. The defense there is "clean room reimplementation ". If anything, the use of an LLM would be stronger than a human doing the copying. (Assuming American jurisdiction!)
In my opinion yes. Just like if you watch a Bob Ross episode and copy all his brushstrokes, you have made a derivative (in the literal sense of the word) of his painting.
Mechanical transformation is always considered derived.
The difference is that if humans do it, there's plausible deniability that it is derived.
I mean, even when humans do it, we still do clean room engineering.
It goes further though: LLMs are just a tool, and tools don't get rights, humans do.
Humans having the right to learn from a few dozen books and projects is not the same as a tool that infers output using all copyrighted works know to man.
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.
Except "Claude, take this code and change the variable names up a bit" is not lifting ideas, and you would not get away with doing that to software belonging to a company with a competent legal department.
Keeping in mind that I'm going strictly off the commit[0], a bit-packing layout is very much the kind of thing which is not subject to copyright in the first place. Neither are algorithms. Ideas, in general, are not subject to copyright: expression is.
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.
You'll notice I didn't mention copyright, and that's because I don't think it's relevant. I think your analysis is correct. Keep in mind too that Stockfish – the engine I work on, although I wasn't at the time – was the subject of a high-profile defense of the GPL in Germany: https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che.... That case was different as it involved wholesale copying of the source code, rather than porting ideas. Ideas shouldn't be copyrightable.
But copyright and plagiarism are orthogonal, and questions of morality are much more tied to the latter. It would be illegal (in the United States) for me to publish a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but not immoral. It was not immoral, in my view, for Aaron Swartz to try to liberate JSTor articles.
That doesn't make plagiarism acceptable, either. And therefore, I'm willing to call it out when I see it.
Have you contemplated the deep irony that your hobby stole mastery of chess from mankind, forever?
Now you're demoralized because of... artificial intelligence?
Edit: I'll leave the original bon mot in place. Among other things, I'm curious about your answer to the question. But you deserve a more topical reply as well.
My response in this thread was prompted by @Sp00ph's post[0], which is straightforwardly an accusation of infringement.
You seem more interested in credit, which is a third thing aside from infringement or plagiarism. I would not say that infringement and plagiarism are actually 'orthogonal', perfect plagiarism is, after all, infringement.
Credit is the odd one out of the three. I think it's entirely reasonable to want it, and even to open an issue demanding it (kind of).
But what I want to note about your post: it's hostile. It's aggressive. It's mean. It offers the person you're replying to no avenue to remedy your anger.
I think that's shitty behavior and you shouldn't do that.
Anyway, I don't see how this relates to the original discussion. Nor do I think the irony is particularly deep: As far as I'm aware, Deep Blue didn't plagiarize Kasparov, and indeed alpha-beta search is quite different than how humans calculate. But yes, I'd have been very demoralized if I were Kasparov, although he seems to be doing well now.
Edit: Regarding being mean-spirited, sorry to say, but I don't particularly care for the feelings of someone who has been repeatedly dishonest and used LLMs to respond to people engaging in good faith. That latter path has been exhausted now.
To co-opt your conflation of legality and morality: free speech, mf!
No idea why you're getting downvoted. You're right.
> 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
Yeah, it's surreal. It's not just intellectual property either, Hackers have already started complaining about automation now too.
Computers must have replaced tens of millions of jobs. It's the ultimate job destroyer, since it allows capital to do more with less. Automating me, a doctor, out of his job is essentially the holy grail of Hacker News.
But when hackers are automated away, then suddenly it's a crime against humanity.
What’s missing here is an understanding of the negative effect the rise of AI has had on programming communities overall: both the decrease in positive engagement as people have moved from discussing things and helping one another online to chatting with AI, and the increase in negative engagement. The amount of low-energy abandonware being “shared” into these communities makes it really hard to filter out the signal from the noise.
So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community.
It was like this with cryptocurrency to a lesser extent too. Suddenly lots of people pretending to have technical background and explaining what a Merkle tree is.
To be fair, the decrease in discussion and helping one another online has also decreased some significant amount of negative engagement in the form of nonsensical arguments and frustrating ways of responding to questions (e.g. the biggest complaints with stackoverflow).
Well of course, if you enjoy writing software as a hobby then you value the experience of doing it, and you value the skill involved. You probably want a community of like minded individuals who all write code by hand, and where LLM use would be considered cheating.
That seems as natural as being against doping in sports or marking cards in poker.
None of this is anything against LLMs or AI assisted coding in general, even though the people involved probably have strong feelings about it given their preferences. It’s just the preferences of particular people and communities. Seems reasonable to me.
I was somewhat conflicted seeing the way the OSdev community responds to LLM usage.
I understand the conflict: the point of doing OSdev is that you're learning the low level hardware details and directly commanding the machine from the lowest level accessible. LLM usage is at odds with this.
But, on the other hand, the primary issue with OSdev on modern hardware is the complete lack of documentation for most hardware. A lone developer simply does not have enough time to reverse engineer from Linux or BSD drivers to achieve much hardware support. Plus, often you run into hardware quirks that are incredibly painful to debug and offer no real learning opportunity.
Recently I revived a ~8 year old modular kernel project I had written. It was at the point of being able to setup an x86_64 CPU, load some drivers and enter usermode. Using an ESP8266 board I setup a little debugging harness for a AtomicPi devboard I had laying around, and set it all up so Claude could control and upload code to it. It could read the serial port, ping the board over ethernet and power cycle it. From that point I let it work almost autonomously to implement a USB stack, finish the network stack, implement drivers etc.
It worked well, and for the most part I didn't care about the results. I don't have the time to commit to such a big project now and of course, the satisfaction of doing something myself (besides building the harness) was gone.
But a thing that stood out to me was, when trying to implement the ethernet driver, the chip in question did not have documentation, but it was known to be similar to another well documented chip. Claude was able to spend a few hours just trying different things, rebooting the board as needed until the differences were sorted out and it was able to ping the board. I feel this kind of application would be pretty relevant for even hobbyist communities like OSdev.
We all have limited time, and while LLM usage for everything certainly defeats the point, targeted usage for tedium that has very little value overall, should be acceptable, and I can't help but think lesser of devs I otherwise respect, when they insist on being dogmatic even when it doesn't contribute to the hobby.
Isn’t that the point of a hobby? To enjoy the path and not the result? To learn something new.
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.
That's why I was trying to make the distinction between stuff that actually pushes your understanding forward and teaches helpful information, and stuff that does not.
Isn't it more in the spirit of osdev to spend your effort implementing/working on the things that actually further your OS meaningfully? Discovering that a specific version of an obsolete undocumented chip has a quirk where one register doesn't reset in the expected way isn't really useful information and doesn't contribute to building new skills.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that not everyone enjoys every piece of the hobby, and I don't think it's reasonable to exclude people who do not enjoy some of the pieces that aren't even core to the hobby.
I'm particularly annoyed with the complaint in the linked thread about the agentic-developed chess engine.
> Moreover, you are giving absolutely nothing back to the community, which is central to open-source engine dev. You are only taking.
What would that user prefer? That the developer push a PR upstream...that presumably would be shot down and the user subject to further harrassment because it would be LLM derived at minimum? It seems like a catch-22 where the only winning move is not to play.
That thread also highlights the overlap between "people who are against LLM usage for coding" and "people who are very particular about AGPL."
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.
You can summarize this roughly by comparing art for its own sake versus art for a purpose. If I need software for a purpose, I don't care how it is crafted, only that it is crafted well. But if I care about the art of code done well, then obviously the means matter.
I find that a lot of "pro-AI" folks are very much doing software for the ends (myself included) and in the past, we were happy with the "means" primarily because there was no other way. The "anti-AI" folks are, as mentioned, mostly in the camp of caring about the means equally with the ends.
Lots of nuance here, but those buckets seem to generalize pretty well (so far) in my experience.
For me, domain discoveries and elegant solutions arise out of periods of deep befuddlement, and are often a saving grace that can avoid lots of code.
I'm lucky I guess that I've had enough time in this career to experience these moments, and enough experience to know which code I should write and which code really is rote and can be generated (most of the time). Hopefully it keeps the loss of enlightenment to a minimum.
"Aggressively Against LLM Usage" is the wrong way to think of it.
If my hobby is running, I would refuse to use a car to do my morning loop. Not because I have anything against automobiles, but because that's not my hobby.
Also, the issue linked to isn't really about LLMs. It's about someone being a dick in an online community and being called out for it. They just happen to be using LLMs to be a dick, but that's not the main issue.
Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonder if I could write a program to automate this" is when I quit the pursuit. After figuring out the basic tricks to sudoku, it turned into busywork. (Or trying to micromanage StarCraft)
(Tagentially, if you want to automate programming, then I'm going to find myself a different field, because I have no interest in the results of sudoku puzzles. I especially have no interest in managing agents, which I see as junior-dev bullshitters, and would not enjoy managing such a team in real life)
> Using LLMs for hobby programming is like using a computer to solve sudoku puzzles. The whole point is to do it yourself.
(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've found myself with this problem, as I've used LLMs to accelerate solving problems I've wanted to solve, only to find myself unable to share them back, because LLM usage has "polluted" my effort in the eyes of maintainers, even if the result has been something I've re-implemented by hand after learning from the agent-driven development what the issue is and how to reproduce it.
What's the solution, to just disengage entirely and not share back issues I find or features I'd like to see?
I get the negativity, because I enjoy hobby programming too, so I also enjoy the process sometimes. But then sometimes there's a problem and the fastest way to isolate the core of that issue is to use claude.
Is this novel? Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers to accomplish what the skill allows. Not every individual of that group but the group as a whole. It’s just that devaluation of one’s skill capital sucks.
I happen to think the alternative world where no one’s skill capital can be devalued sucks more, but it’s hard to build a community around that because the same hours that build skill also build taste, and when you remove the former you remove the latter.
> Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers.
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?
Sorry, I didn’t complete the thought well. Amended. I meant that the skill allows for some things and newcomers no longer require that investment to get the outcome.
> In these communities (keep in mind that there is an implicit “not all…” throughout) the process of mastering a difficult field itself is the product, and something that runs is generally a nice-to-have.
Most hobby fandoms have a dedicated core group who think like this: The end result is only an artifact or social proof to them. The real product is their own prestige of having built it and attracted an audience. There's always an IRC channel or Discord somewhere where there's a social hierarchy of who should be respected for their work.
Outside of those inner circles, most people don't care. The average emulator user doesn't care about the details about who wrote their emulator or the history behind it all the forks. They want to play a game and the emulator core that gets the job done, because the emulator is the product to them. The mastery of the author is not a product to them.
This has happened in multiple technical hobby communities I've been in. With 3D printing I even remember communities where Prusa was looked down upon for making 3D printers too accessible. The argument was that now anyone could buy a 3D printer without really understanding the pain of mastering calibration, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting. That debate exploded to another level when Bambu came along and made 3D printing even more mainstream.
Now it's happening with programming communities. There are some where hand-written code is truly the actual product: Competitive programming, code golf, and obfuscated programming competitions come to mind. Using an LLM here is about as appropriate as submitting LLM generated art to an art contest, which is to say it's not.
There are a lot of other domains where the mastery of the craft isn't interesting outside of a small social circle. It's interesting that they mentioned emulators, because emu communities are famous for having a ton of strange drama that most emulator users don't care about. If you're inside of the small community and spend every day on their Discord, it might be the only thing you care about, but you don't realize that you're a minority because everyone else in the Discord thinks the same way.
OSDev is another interesting one to mention, because even Linus Torvalds had to make a big post telling the anti-LLM people to chill out. There seems to be a split between the purists who think the primary value is their own mastery of being able to write the code, and the pragmatists who are adapting to use new tools in conjunction with their knowledge. If you find yourself in one of the purist camps you might think everyone feels the same way, but outside of that, the world is moving on.
I usually feel turned off by communities where social status is the primary currency. There's always a hidden social hierarchy that feels threatened whenever it feels like the rules my start changing. They react by trying to force the social currency back to the system where they spent years investing their time. Nobody wants to feel like you're losing a foothold because the rules are changing. I got a strong feeling from this article that this author feels they've developed some level of respect in some forum and they dislike the idea of that investment being devalued by a changing landscape
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora,
A long time ago, I had to take an ethics class to get my Computer Science degree. One of the things that came up in the papers about calculating the statistical value of a life was that people care more about being more prosperous than their peers than absolute material wealth.
I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.
I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.
Well yes. That's why you see many westerners complaining about the cost of living even though all things told they have a good life.
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'm a hobbyist, what am I missing? LLM gave me a new spark. I never managed to get a SE job so some weekends I tinker around with LLM for small personal projects and it helps me learn more.
to someone hobby programming using LLM seems like running a marathon using a bicycle, you cross the finish, but at the end is not the same as running only by your only forces.
Others look only at the results, so LLM are only a tool (actually without a clearly instruction manual i suspect).
But programming (and so many others works) is not only about making, but learning and developping skills. When an LLM is not available? i think differences will be evident.
And roughly speaking: to check the result of LLM you have to be more capable than the bot, otherwise, who is the boss? And to develop those skills, you have to do it yourself.
I enjoy programming as a hobby and have done it for many years. I also enjoy building stuff with LLMs. Why is one pure and sanctioned and the other one is bad? Why do I need other people to decide this for me?
All of this is exactly why I started Slow Code. I like programming. Lots of people like programming. I don't want to stop doing that. So we meet up once a month to practice that.
This is a case of an SV-brained person stepping outside the bubble and realizing that LLMs are not the universal savior they think it is.
AI isn't well liked in a lot of places. I agree with the communities - make something yourself, don't ask a robot to do it for you. If you vibe slop something into existence, I'm never going to look at it. Something you made yourself though? Hell yeah I want to see it.
Another example is the art community - use AI/LLMs there, you'll be excommunicated.
I think, without knowing, that art often is similar to the hobby programming communities the thread leads with: the end result is interesting not by itself, but through the process that made it. We have feelings about art pieces because we feel with and through the artist. Can't do that with silicon. The Mona Lisa, even if the end result were exactly the same, would be dead boring had it been produced by the hand of a machine. My take
Totally disagree. I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall. If they’re totally unique and nobody else has them, even better. I can have a mounted picture of me on a horse like the famous Napoleon painting. I don’t care at all about the dude who painted it, I don’t even know his name.
The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the backdrop of the sun. Amazing photo.
I feel like obsessing over some artist I’ll never be friends with and the story behind their art is just another way to have a parasocial relationship, and the new tools allows us to have absolutely bespoke art in every single home. Things like this used to be considered strange and irregular before mass media. Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
> Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
No one should be celebrating the theft of music from artists. Everyone can participate in making music today just as they always have throughout human history - learn to sing or play an instrument.
Here's my thoughts as a 29 year old: of all the things I've ever made in my personal life, the vast majority have ended up abandoned in barely worked on states, and those I have put varying degrees of significant effort in have gone unnoticed. I've never really been able to "enter" a community in a way that felt meaningful to me, either, when I've tried.
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".
I can respect a developer who is still smitten with their craft to feel a bit anxious when the topic of LLM generated code comes up. I have a child who never grows tired of building their next game but first has to build the engine from scratch (needless to say they've built a lot of engines, not so many games). This use to frustrate me but then I realized the joy is in making a concept of a game for them. When I suggest Claude might get the job done faster I get a death glare followed by an eye roll. I get it, I've been in the industry long enough where coding is more of a means to an end and not the same novelty it once was.
More dangerous are communities who shun AI and treat every disclosure like a Scarlett letter. Generally the loudest opinions come from consumers (fan bois) and not creators. I think this will eventually drive new innovators away from these communities. These vocal naysayers have likely never experienced being a project manager, lead developer, and QA for an agent writing code. Instead they think a prompt magically creates software, but without wearing all these hats at once, you get something far worse than 'slop'. Call me crazy, but I think these multi-hat 'developers' using an agent and are dipping their toe into LLM development are going to raise the bar and leave us vim users in the dust.
I get all the fuzz about only being able to learn if you do the work. But frankly, as a hobby programmer with a rather unusual workflow/toolset and a love for the command-line, it has never been so satifying to scratch a few itches I've always had but apparently never was motivated enough to really follow through. In the past 6 months, I've "written" at least 3 tools which I kind of always wanted, and which I now use on a regular basis. AND, I finally have a peer I can talk to about the code I'm trying to write. Something I basically never had, because all my FLOSS projects were small-very-nieche-one-man-shows. Its nice to be able to pretend to have a coding friend :-)
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 typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.
Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora
I think the problem goes deeper.
When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few months ago, Michael Niedermayer spam AI slopped a proposal on their mailing list; I don't have the link right now (need to really bookmark all those things) but someone else asked him why he spams other people with unfinished proposals created by AI? I don't know whether Michael understands this as a problem or not, but I think many AI users don't understand the problem when they AI spam slop other people. I think it is a hostile action by those AI users. So I can totally understand communities not wanting that AI spam.
I've also noticed people who have horrible english skills, suddenly have perfect english skills. I suspect AI use, but then I wonder: is that person interacting with me via AI spam slop? I'd much rather deal with broken english if it is autenthic, than people faking it, even IF the produced english may be better than the broken english (but even that is often doubtful, so much AI spam slop is just wasting time and awful to read).
The whole AI trend seems to lead to really dumber people and fewer real interactions. That is sad, even more so as many people lost real social cues these days anyway.
Did you read about the Canadian politician who was making a speech and simply thoughtlessly read out some of the LLM boilerplate prefacing the text some chatbot had written for him?
The problem with politics is it’s not a meritocracy.
You find abdicating your speech to an AI to be disqualifying, but to people who’ve already abdicated everything they do to AI, it’s folksy and relatable.
I don’t understand the world of people who have this degree of free time (time / energy) given how much everything costs just to be alive. Maybe they live in a different universe where programming for fun and first principals of “learning” matters. But for the other 99% of humans, costs have gone up 40% due to money printing and anything like this looks like a waste of time.
Surely most people in the US have hobbies at least in the minimal sense of downtime activities that they enjoy. It may not be golf or hobby programming, but even laying on the couch watching football is a "hobby" or sorts and takes up just as much time.
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.
Hobbies are kind of by definition wastes of time. That's what makes them different than work.
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?
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.
We’re kind of at the fast food point: before LLMs, bring successful at all in software required some level of skill (witness all of the companies getting very expensive write-offs from off-shoring or big consultancies trying to save on payroll vs. staff), kind of like how the small cafe/bakery model needed to have at least some level of craft to have something people would buy before the option of making food at a factory and shipping it became an option.
The workers will see the fun evaporate but now they have to clean 10x cookie trays in the same 8 hours.
I'm lurking around the OpenBSD mailing list and it seems that code review is where collaboration starts. You send a patch, explain its purpose, people try it out and comment. If it's OK (various factors decide that), it's imported inside the codebase.
The main issue in corporate settings is that the author of the PR wants to browbeat you into accepting his/her changes. Either directly or by appealing to the manager. They don't want collaboration, they just see you as the blocker between them and the "Done" status on the ticket.
Main course is this this and this, 1. Do this 2. Plug this 3. Run this.. step by step plan.
So you get a precise top down construction plan. Then it’s easy to split the parts where the coding needs to be manual (smoothing walls) vs where it can be whateverz (laying concrete).
LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project instead of only writing a single specialized part in an existing project.
Good luck making a grand strategy game in two months holidays without an LLM. Now you can.
People focused on the trees will however lag behind as implementation details matter less and less.
Yes manual touch is still needed in some parts of the construction process but architecting the whole thing is the most important in 2026.
⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣦⠀⠀⣠⣿⣿⣦⣀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⢀⣼⣆⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠒⣿⣿⣿⠓⠀⠀⠻⣿⣿⠀⢀⣴⣿⣦⡀⠀⢀⣾⣦⠘⢿⣿⣧⡀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⢀⣴⣿⡿⠃⡄⠈⠻⣿⣟⣉⣀⠉⣽⡿⠋⠡⠴⣿⣿⣿⠓⠀⠙⢇⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠿⣿⠟⢁⣾⣿⣦⣀⠘⠿⠟⢁⣼⣿⣿⣷⠂⣴⣿⣿⣿⣆⠘⢶⣶⣿⠶⠤⠀ ⠀⣀⣀⡀⢉⣿⣿⣿⡍⠀⢀⣀⠙⢻⠿⢋⣤⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⠙⢿⣦⡀⠀ ⠀⠟⠋⣠⣾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣦⣌⠉⠠⣤⣤⣤⡌⢙⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠛⠛⠂⢈⣙⠀ ⠀⠀⣉⡉⣹⣿⣿⣿⣿⣏⠉⣉⣀⣈⠙⠋⣠⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣆⠙⠛⠛⠛⠀ ⠀⠀⠋⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣌⠉⢁⣴⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣷⣄⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠴⢾⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⠦⠈⣙⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⠛⣉⣉⠁⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⣦⣤⡄⢉⣉⣉⣉⠉⣡⣤⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣷⠀⢰⣿⣿⡇⢸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⣿⣿⡇⣸⣿⣿⣿⡄⢻⣿⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⠀⢸⣿⣿⡇⢸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⣿⣿⠁⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠸⠿⠀⠀⠀⣿⣿⣿⠀⢸⣿⣿⣇⠸⣿⣿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠛⠛⠀⣿⣿⣿⣿⡇⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠉⠉⠉⠀⢸⣿⣿⣿⠀⠿⠿⠀⠀⠀⠀ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠛⠛⠛⠛⠃⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠈⠉⠉⠉⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ADHD wins over autism in the immediate future. It was balanced in the past for development to need both but now it’s a total hyperactive victory of general knowledge, master of none.
Specialists will be fed to the model weights, generalists will inherit the world.
It's hell for my ADHD, personally. It's an infinite rabbit hole generator and distraction machine. I have to use browser extensions to filter out stuff like Stack Exchange suggestions for interesting topics, too. I have had to block Wikipedia in the past to avoid rabbit holes there
I'm better now than I used to be but I am skeptical of people who claim to both be good at multi-tasking and also have ADHD. My experience with ADHD is that multi -tasking is not a strength, it's a sign of distraction
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.
You enjoy the act of gardening, so you do not automate it away.
You enjoy the clean home, not the act of cleaning, so you may be interested in automating it away.
It seems you enjoy designing or using software, as opposed to programming/building software. So you automate the programming/building away.
Unless your hobby is backyard robotic gardening.
Which is my way of saying that people have different reasons for enjoying a hobby.
Like most hobby debates, this one comes down to "Let people enjoy things"
With roses, a significant % of manual time is spent fighting aphids
...cheaper how? My partner and I grow most of our veggies and, based on our calculations (including fixed costs that have gone into the garden, as well as e.g. water, fertilizer, etc.) we save a non-negligible amount of money every month.
It would be very hard to spend more money on manual gardening tools, water, gloves, seeds, pesticides, and fertilizer (and wire cages, trellises etc; I know very little about gardening so if I’m missing items, let me know!) than you would on an equivalent amount of premium priced vegetables from a market/grocer, particularly if you amortize the non-consumable items over a longer period.
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.
Those people are in for the biggest shock and largest disappointment: when a bright teenager can replicate, with an LLM, what they produced with an LLM the pay is going to fall off a cliff.
At least those who really are into development to the point of writing their own OS, Language, etc can still enjoy it as a hobby.
The value of an engineer is not what task they work on, but what problems they can solve. To this teen, the code is a black box, the LLM has most of the value in their pairing, and another random teen will replace easily them.
LLMs were trained on the work of engineers, not prompting teens. The profession will continue to evolve, and the LLMs will improve along, thanks to professional, manual code still being written, not to vibe-coders.
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.
I LOLd very hard at that one, thanks. Very relatable.
A hobby of mine is also woodworking. I can make jigs, I can buy jigs. I can use hand tools, I can use power tools. I can use screws I can use joints. I can even buy made furniture and just assemble it. Though the latter is more of interior designing. But the point is it is a spectrum and everyone has their own niche. SDLC are not the same and there is different value to be derived. But the process of woodworking makes me handy. The experience allows me to elegantly and cost efficiently fix broken things. It enables me to do interesting things in interesting ways and there is more of a community around that. If I automated away all the woodworking and just bought the furniture... Well there isn't much of a community around that except flexing who has more cash. Idk, I'm trying to have empathy for both those who are for and against it.
Boy isn't that the truth haha, I feel like my previous phase of dotfile ricing has become "LLM ricing."
Not complaining though, it is genuinely fun!
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.
Indeed, and this is the problem: unlike woodworking, where my power-assisted creation is independent of, or complements, your handcraft, this engine is directly competing with other engines. Twiss is being disingenuous when he says he has no interest in submitting it to competitions; it plays on a rated account on Lichess, for example.
LLMs can generate lots of code quickly there's no evidence they actually speed up the dev process e2e.
disliking LLMs is just an opinion. Refusing to engage with an argument and instead defaulting to downvotes when you can't supply a reasonable argument or proof is just ai/corporate-fanaticism and self-delusion enhanced by LLM-dependence.
Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)
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.
"Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."
> 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.
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.
There is a lot of legal history of doing new designs with influence from reverse engineered sources. The basic rule is that you can't have someone familiar with the original code involved with writing the new code.
LLMs are a new area, but I would expect that feeding the original source into an LLM context and saying "Write this, but different" wouldn't qualify as a clean-room design. There isn't enough general removal from the original subject matter.
The difference is that if humans do it, there's plausible deniability that it is derived.
I mean, even when humans do it, we still do clean room engineering.
It goes further though: LLMs are just a tool, and tools don't get rights, humans do.
Humans having the right to learn from a few dozen books and projects is not the same as a tool that infers output using all copyrighted works know to man.
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.
Is it a fact that they did that?
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...
But copyright and plagiarism are orthogonal, and questions of morality are much more tied to the latter. It would be illegal (in the United States) for me to publish a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but not immoral. It was not immoral, in my view, for Aaron Swartz to try to liberate JSTor articles.
That doesn't make plagiarism acceptable, either. And therefore, I'm willing to call it out when I see it.
Now you're demoralized because of... artificial intelligence?
Edit: I'll leave the original bon mot in place. Among other things, I'm curious about your answer to the question. But you deserve a more topical reply as well.
My response in this thread was prompted by @Sp00ph's post[0], which is straightforwardly an accusation of infringement.
You seem more interested in credit, which is a third thing aside from infringement or plagiarism. I would not say that infringement and plagiarism are actually 'orthogonal', perfect plagiarism is, after all, infringement.
Credit is the odd one out of the three. I think it's entirely reasonable to want it, and even to open an issue demanding it (kind of).
But what I want to note about your post: it's hostile. It's aggressive. It's mean. It offers the person you're replying to no avenue to remedy your anger.
I think that's shitty behavior and you shouldn't do that.
https://github.com/adamtwiss/coda/issues/15#issuecomment-519...
Anyway, I don't see how this relates to the original discussion. Nor do I think the irony is particularly deep: As far as I'm aware, Deep Blue didn't plagiarize Kasparov, and indeed alpha-beta search is quite different than how humans calculate. But yes, I'd have been very demoralized if I were Kasparov, although he seems to be doing well now.
Edit: Regarding being mean-spirited, sorry to say, but I don't particularly care for the feelings of someone who has been repeatedly dishonest and used LLMs to respond to people engaging in good faith. That latter path has been exhausted now.
To co-opt your conflation of legality and morality: free speech, mf!
> 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
Yeah, it's surreal. It's not just intellectual property either, Hackers have already started complaining about automation now too.
Computers must have replaced tens of millions of jobs. It's the ultimate job destroyer, since it allows capital to do more with less. Automating me, a doctor, out of his job is essentially the holy grail of Hacker News.
But when hackers are automated away, then suddenly it's a crime against humanity.
So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community.
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.
That seems as natural as being against doping in sports or marking cards in poker.
None of this is anything against LLMs or AI assisted coding in general, even though the people involved probably have strong feelings about it given their preferences. It’s just the preferences of particular people and communities. Seems reasonable to me.
I understand the conflict: the point of doing OSdev is that you're learning the low level hardware details and directly commanding the machine from the lowest level accessible. LLM usage is at odds with this.
But, on the other hand, the primary issue with OSdev on modern hardware is the complete lack of documentation for most hardware. A lone developer simply does not have enough time to reverse engineer from Linux or BSD drivers to achieve much hardware support. Plus, often you run into hardware quirks that are incredibly painful to debug and offer no real learning opportunity.
Recently I revived a ~8 year old modular kernel project I had written. It was at the point of being able to setup an x86_64 CPU, load some drivers and enter usermode. Using an ESP8266 board I setup a little debugging harness for a AtomicPi devboard I had laying around, and set it all up so Claude could control and upload code to it. It could read the serial port, ping the board over ethernet and power cycle it. From that point I let it work almost autonomously to implement a USB stack, finish the network stack, implement drivers etc.
It worked well, and for the most part I didn't care about the results. I don't have the time to commit to such a big project now and of course, the satisfaction of doing something myself (besides building the harness) was gone.
But a thing that stood out to me was, when trying to implement the ethernet driver, the chip in question did not have documentation, but it was known to be similar to another well documented chip. Claude was able to spend a few hours just trying different things, rebooting the board as needed until the differences were sorted out and it was able to ping the board. I feel this kind of application would be pretty relevant for even hobbyist communities like OSdev.
We all have limited time, and while LLM usage for everything certainly defeats the point, targeted usage for tedium that has very little value overall, should be acceptable, and I can't help but think lesser of devs I otherwise respect, when they insist on being dogmatic even when it doesn't contribute to the hobby.
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.
Isn't it more in the spirit of osdev to spend your effort implementing/working on the things that actually further your OS meaningfully? Discovering that a specific version of an obsolete undocumented chip has a quirk where one register doesn't reset in the expected way isn't really useful information and doesn't contribute to building new skills.
Maybe what I'm trying to say is that not everyone enjoys every piece of the hobby, and I don't think it's reasonable to exclude people who do not enjoy some of the pieces that aren't even core to the hobby.
The entire point of the article was the hobby is ascribing value to that tedium that the LLM is removing.
> Moreover, you are giving absolutely nothing back to the community, which is central to open-source engine dev. You are only taking.
What would that user prefer? That the developer push a PR upstream...that presumably would be shot down and the user subject to further harrassment because it would be LLM derived at minimum? It seems like a catch-22 where the only winning move is not to play.
That thread also highlights the overlap between "people who are against LLM usage for coding" and "people who are very particular about AGPL."
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 find that a lot of "pro-AI" folks are very much doing software for the ends (myself included) and in the past, we were happy with the "means" primarily because there was no other way. The "anti-AI" folks are, as mentioned, mostly in the camp of caring about the means equally with the ends.
Lots of nuance here, but those buckets seem to generalize pretty well (so far) in my experience.
I'm lucky I guess that I've had enough time in this career to experience these moments, and enough experience to know which code I should write and which code really is rote and can be generated (most of the time). Hopefully it keeps the loss of enlightenment to a minimum.
If my hobby is running, I would refuse to use a car to do my morning loop. Not because I have anything against automobiles, but because that's not my hobby.
Also, the issue linked to isn't really about LLMs. It's about someone being a dick in an online community and being called out for it. They just happen to be using LLMs to be a dick, but that's not the main issue.
Personally, I find that when I start thinking "hmm, I wonder if I could write a program to automate this" is when I quit the pursuit. After figuring out the basic tricks to sudoku, it turned into busywork. (Or trying to micromanage StarCraft)
(Tagentially, if you want to automate programming, then I'm going to find myself a different field, because I have no interest in the results of sudoku puzzles. I especially have no interest in managing agents, which I see as junior-dev bullshitters, and would not enjoy managing such a team in real life)
(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.
What's the solution, to just disengage entirely and not share back issues I find or features I'd like to see?
I get the negativity, because I enjoy hobby programming too, so I also enjoy the process sometimes. But then sometimes there's a problem and the fastest way to isolate the core of that issue is to use claude.
I happen to think the alternative world where no one’s skill capital can be devalued sucks more, but it’s hard to build a community around that because the same hours that build skill also build taste, and when you remove the former you remove the latter.
So you get a community with garbage in it. Haha!
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?
Most hobby fandoms have a dedicated core group who think like this: The end result is only an artifact or social proof to them. The real product is their own prestige of having built it and attracted an audience. There's always an IRC channel or Discord somewhere where there's a social hierarchy of who should be respected for their work.
Outside of those inner circles, most people don't care. The average emulator user doesn't care about the details about who wrote their emulator or the history behind it all the forks. They want to play a game and the emulator core that gets the job done, because the emulator is the product to them. The mastery of the author is not a product to them.
This has happened in multiple technical hobby communities I've been in. With 3D printing I even remember communities where Prusa was looked down upon for making 3D printers too accessible. The argument was that now anyone could buy a 3D printer without really understanding the pain of mastering calibration, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting. That debate exploded to another level when Bambu came along and made 3D printing even more mainstream.
Now it's happening with programming communities. There are some where hand-written code is truly the actual product: Competitive programming, code golf, and obfuscated programming competitions come to mind. Using an LLM here is about as appropriate as submitting LLM generated art to an art contest, which is to say it's not.
There are a lot of other domains where the mastery of the craft isn't interesting outside of a small social circle. It's interesting that they mentioned emulators, because emu communities are famous for having a ton of strange drama that most emulator users don't care about. If you're inside of the small community and spend every day on their Discord, it might be the only thing you care about, but you don't realize that you're a minority because everyone else in the Discord thinks the same way.
OSDev is another interesting one to mention, because even Linus Torvalds had to make a big post telling the anti-LLM people to chill out. There seems to be a split between the purists who think the primary value is their own mastery of being able to write the code, and the pragmatists who are adapting to use new tools in conjunction with their knowledge. If you find yourself in one of the purist camps you might think everyone feels the same way, but outside of that, the world is moving on.
I usually feel turned off by communities where social status is the primary currency. There's always a hidden social hierarchy that feels threatened whenever it feels like the rules my start changing. They react by trying to force the social currency back to the system where they spent years investing their time. Nobody wants to feel like you're losing a foothold because the rules are changing. I got a strong feeling from this article that this author feels they've developed some level of respect in some forum and they dislike the idea of that investment being devalued by a changing landscape
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora,
That's the core of it - hobbies are doing what makes you happy - if that's LLMs great, if not, great.
I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.
I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.
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).
Others look only at the results, so LLM are only a tool (actually without a clearly instruction manual i suspect).
But programming (and so many others works) is not only about making, but learning and developping skills. When an LLM is not available? i think differences will be evident.
And roughly speaking: to check the result of LLM you have to be more capable than the bot, otherwise, who is the boss? And to develop those skills, you have to do it yourself.
This is not mutually exclusive with LLM usage. It's only prerequisite is that the human cares enough to learn.
https://slowcode.dev
AI isn't well liked in a lot of places. I agree with the communities - make something yourself, don't ask a robot to do it for you. If you vibe slop something into existence, I'm never going to look at it. Something you made yourself though? Hell yeah I want to see it.
Another example is the art community - use AI/LLMs there, you'll be excommunicated.
The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the backdrop of the sun. Amazing photo.
I feel like obsessing over some artist I’ll never be friends with and the story behind their art is just another way to have a parasocial relationship, and the new tools allows us to have absolutely bespoke art in every single home. Things like this used to be considered strange and irregular before mass media. Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
That's decoration, not art.
> Now every person can make satisfying music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
No one should be celebrating the theft of music from artists. Everyone can participate in making music today just as they always have throughout human history - learn to sing or play an instrument.
Thanks to taxis, everyone can drive.
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".
This hits the nail on the head.
More dangerous are communities who shun AI and treat every disclosure like a Scarlett letter. Generally the loudest opinions come from consumers (fan bois) and not creators. I think this will eventually drive new innovators away from these communities. These vocal naysayers have likely never experienced being a project manager, lead developer, and QA for an agent writing code. Instead they think a prompt magically creates software, but without wearing all these hats at once, you get something far worse than 'slop'. Call me crazy, but I think these multi-hat 'developers' using an agent and are dipping their toe into LLM development are going to raise the bar and leave us vim users in the dust.
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 typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.
Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.
I think the problem goes deeper.
When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few months ago, Michael Niedermayer spam AI slopped a proposal on their mailing list; I don't have the link right now (need to really bookmark all those things) but someone else asked him why he spams other people with unfinished proposals created by AI? I don't know whether Michael understands this as a problem or not, but I think many AI users don't understand the problem when they AI spam slop other people. I think it is a hostile action by those AI users. So I can totally understand communities not wanting that AI spam.
I've also noticed people who have horrible english skills, suddenly have perfect english skills. I suspect AI use, but then I wonder: is that person interacting with me via AI spam slop? I'd much rather deal with broken english if it is autenthic, than people faking it, even IF the produced english may be better than the broken english (but even that is often doubtful, so much AI spam slop is just wasting time and awful to read).
The whole AI trend seems to lead to really dumber people and fewer real interactions. That is sad, even more so as many people lost real social cues these days anyway.
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.
You find abdicating your speech to an AI to be disqualifying, but to people who’ve already abdicated everything they do to AI, it’s folksy and relatable.
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.
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?
You dont understand that people have hobbies they enjoy doing? Because thats the entire point of the article.