One of the first slides clarifies that recreational programming is INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED. I agree with this definition.

So if an external factor like LLM prowess “killed it all” for you, I would suggest you may not have been intrinsically motivated in the first place.

Long live recreational programming. It’s fun and, personally, it’s satisfying building things close to the metal.

I feel you're missing the point. AI has no impact on recreational programming, it's about satisfying your personal curiousities and interests. I'm currently hand rolling a database project in rust because I find writing rust is fun. If you're pausing to ask yourself "what's the use if you can just use AI" then you may not have liked programming intrinsically to begin with, but instead the second order effects it gave you.

You can still write a program even though AI can do it.

You can still build a table from scratch even though you can buy one from Ikea.

etc etc

If anything, I'm having more fun with programming since the lying machine was invented