alt Hacker NewsBorn Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
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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.
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.
Is this novel? Every group that spent some large number of hours gaining some skill hates when that duration is not required for newcomers. 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.
So you get a community with garbage in it. Haha!
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.
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.
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."
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.
Yes, hobbyists are less interested than businesses in automating their own hobby.
One factor is that we struggled for a long time under proprietary tooling, and don't want to go back there.
Programming generates programmers, and programs are a side-effect.
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.
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.
> 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,
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.
> At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works.
This is not mutually exclusive with LLM usage. It's only prerequisite is that the human cares enough to learn.
> Granted these communities have, in general, historically been characterized by feverish gatekeeping and painstakingly slow progress
This hits the nail on the head.
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.
knitting communities also don't love factory machines too? I'm not sure how this could surprise anyone
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.
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 :-)
> 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.
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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.
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.
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."