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

391 points · 454 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. _dwt · · focus · HN ↗
          I think we’re on opposite sides but this is the first time I’ve seen someone in the wild share my suspicions that the LLM conflict is part of some vast ADHD vs autism hyperwar. At one point I was collecting posts I found where LLM boosters explicitly mentioned how it interacted with their ADHD.
          1. jrapdx3 · · focus · HN ↗
            The contest you described (people with ADHD vs. autism) would have an enormously negative effect. But there are reasons to think it's unlikely. FWIW at least 25% of ADHD adults manifest autistic traits. Hardly surprising, clinicians regard overlapping neurodevelopmental disorders as the rule and not the exception.

            An online community works when participants learn and share knowledge gained. Contests, with self or others, disrupt learning and sharing, hence by definition constitute "bad behavior". If it exists, the hyperwar you allude to will harm communities more than all LLMs combined could do.

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