Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are against LLM usage
This article examines the growing resistance within niche hobbyist programming communities toward the use of Large Language Models. It argues that these communities value the process of learning and mastery over the final output, viewing LLMs as a shortcut that undermines their core values.
I came across a GH thread related to chess engine development that made me think of why hobby programming communities are increasingly hostile toward LLM development. While the thread doesn’t give a lot of insight into answering the question, it prompted me to think about it a bit. I’ve seen similar sentiments expressed in other niche hobby programming communities like OSDev, LangDev, TxtDev, EmuDev, RLDev, the demoscene, and code golfers. The general consensus seems to be that the knowledge that these communities work in is hard-fought and the use of LLMs is a form of missing the point entirely. 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.
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