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Comment by Hydraulix989 | Hacker News Reader

Too bad it is all over after this year because AI killed it all :(

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 definitely align with a lot of styles 2, 3, and 4

I have many years of expeiments, a selection of just 3

https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/?gist=ad96329670965dc...

https://c50.fingswotidun.com/

https://lerc.neocities.org

But lots of things like evolving pictures, palettes, or little creatures. Fluid simulation, cellular automata. Fluid simulation in cellular automata. Enough game Jams that I no longer know how many games I have made.

I have done all sorts of things, I am undeterred by AI. For some things I will now get AI to explore entire ideas. Other things I will do entirely myself, and many things will be varying degrees of each.

I see more opportunities for exploration. If you can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, why begrudge a personal giant assistant?

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.

It somewhat does have an impact on it, because a cool part of recreational programming for SOME people is to share their hobby with others, but the value that others will place on that sharing is diminishing with AI. It's just human nature to value something less or find it less impressive when it can easily be made with a machine.

This is how I feel, I like to share the cool thing I did and be part of creative spaces with other people, but I feel those spaces have gotten smaller, or changed.

The internet is increasingly full of the types of people it's pointless sharing anything nascent with anyway. I'm sure a local meetup will see your side project very differently than a subreddit or hacker news (the latter will even send armies of bots to take you down).

True! But that doesn't mean we should exacerbate the situation and make it worse....

It seems to me that you are still doing it to showcase it to others. I understand it feels great to talk about it with people understanding the effort you put in, but it really is a personal thing IMO.

No, this is just a fringe perspective based on the hyper-introvert bias in a lot of people on this forum....

I was so pissed when I wrote a cool data visualization tool then some people at work immediately assume Claude did it.

Would you stop swimming just because chlorine started being added to the pool water?

I like to swim.

(Just in case: Above is metaphor attempt.)

Well at least that's different because you have choice to use slop generator to vibe code or not and the chlorine is there no matter if you want it or not.

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

You must be holding it wrong, because I'm using AI to bring lots of old dead code back to life!

https://hyperties.org/databases/playground/sun-founders-big-...

You can look at it one of two ways: either you program recreationally because you love the act of programming, in which case AI´s existence is irrelevant, or you love building things, and AI lets you build bigger things faster than ever before.

If anything AI super charged it. I'm taking on more and more ambitious projects and am able to make tremendous progress in just a weekend.

why? Has AI taken away your permission to create useless things?

you can just not use AI

That's the whole point: they can't, because even in any useless "fun" programming there was motivation that it might be useful to someone in the future, or simply to fill the internet with information. But now there is absolutely no usefulness in creating useless projects.

sounds like a psychological skill issue

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

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