‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

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

406 points · 477 comments · lladnar

  1. Schnitz · · focus · HN ↗
    Because people that enjoy programming for programming's sake don't want an LLM to do the programming for them - isn't it obvious? It's just like with any other hobby, people who like car racing created rules that force you to drive yourself, even though they'd get faster lap times with electronic driver aids. People who enjoy grappling created rules that force you to grapple, even though striking could win a fight faster. People that enjoy chess don't allow you to bring a computer to the chess table. The list is endless and the people that enjoy programming will create rules that force you to program, why shouldn't they? It's their hobby.
    1. tripzilch · · focus · HN ↗
      Yeah exactly. My go-to example is that if you enjoy playing guitar, you're not going to stop doing it because Suno exists now.

      In addition, say if you had like a guitar-playing forum, where people share recordings of their practice. People would likely not appreciate it to share AI-generated audio of guitar-practicing there, either.

      And while there are various reasons for a guitar forum that might not hold for a programming forum, one of them remains: There's nothing to talk about when it's AI-generated. What scale did you use and how did you tune it? "I dunno, AI did it"

      All you can talk about is to say "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine you're paying subscription to access made you that thing, nice"

      Or for example, even when a friend of mine vibe-coded a "synthesizer" app and he wanted to show me cause he knows I like that kind of thing. And I do, I love digging into and experimenting with DSP algorithms, but also the user interfaces and all sorts of things digital audio related. And I love talking about it, or explaining stuff. But my friend couldn't tell me anything (not even that it was using WebAudio, but also how). Anyway it made me a bit sad, and I felt like something is lost here. Something worthwhile. And I explained it to him that then all I could really say was "oh cool that's cool that the algorithm machine made you that thing, nice", and we talked it over, and it was alright. But still, it seems something is lost.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.