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Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage

407 points · 477 comments · lladnar

  1. QuantumNoodle · · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    1. bawolff · · focus · HN ↗
      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.

      1. juleiie · · focus · HN ↗
        What you need from LLM is recipe making.

        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.

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        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.

        1. acdha · · focus · HN ↗
          > 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.

          That’s an interesting framing. I’m not sure I agree with your strong conclusion but that’s mostly because I think there’s a second axis about maintenance – you can make a grand strategy game in a couple months but it’s harder to make it balanced, fun, and to keep shipping updates which players like. A prototype or hobby experiment doesn’t have that problem nearly as much and I think that’s where we see such bimodal reactions where some people think it’s a huge productivity boost and others see modest or even negative results.

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