I wrote a bit about how the kind of tech culture in HACF feels more relevant in light of the LLMs even 2 years back before I heard of mourning a craft. Here's an excerpt:

One thing I liked about HACF is despite using a decent amount of technobable, it plausibly captures the approach and spirit of hacking and coding, like reverse engineering a memoryless chip by rigging up a hex LED system to read out the values for each of the 65536 inputs to a ROM.

The expertise of the coders are demonstrated mainly by others admiring the structural complexity of their code as objects of beauty. This is something that feels extra nostalgic now.

https://michaelchinen.com/2023/12/31/halt-and-catch-fire-pos...