> I just don't think there was a great way to make solved problems accessible before LLMs. I mean, these things were on github already, and still got reimplemented over and over again.

I'm not sure people wrote emulators, of all things, because they were trying to solve a problem in the commercial sense, or that they weren't aware of existing github projects and couldn't remember to search for them.

It seems much more a labour of love kind of thing to work on. For something that holds that kind of appeal to you, you don't always want to take the shortcut. It's like solving a puzzle game by reading all the hints on the internet; you got through it but also ruined it for yourself.