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Comment by etra0 | Hacker News Reader

Even if work is not life, hobby programming also has been affected.

I worked hard a couple of years ago to reverse engineer a game to produce a very specific tool. Recently, the game was updated, so I worked on my free time to do a free contribution to the community, and then, a few hours later a tool that does the same thing appeared entirely vibecoded.

Even if some parts of the community care about how a tool was made – Most don't, they just want something that fulfill the goal.

Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.

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I tried to look at it like cooking, or baking: I can make damn good croissants. They'll never be quite as good as someone with a dough sheeter and handmade cultured butter, but my friends and family would never complain.

The problem is, baking something and sharing it with others brings people together, there's smalltalk, catching up, other human stuff. Which in the end is kinda the point of it.

Like your post says, with programming, it's mostly just a race to what achieves the goal, with the exception of demoscene and retro programming, I guess. I started learning ARM assembly so I could make a lisp implementation in it. It will be useless, no one will use it, and an AI could bang one out in a few minutes, but overcoming that struggle to understand things in different ways has to be the goal with hobby programmers like myself, I guess.

Yes, my favourite programming project is a tetris clone my family and one or two friends have played.

The community you share with doesn't need to be online - your croissants aren't going out for delivery but I'm sure your friends and family appreciate them (and you). It can be the same with your software products, if you choose.

While this is very much true, in many countries it may be different. I'll speak for India. I'm a singled out geek, most of my friends have interest in many things but software. I can yap about movies, songs, architecture, etc. but start about software and they say "hey, let's not talk shop". To them it's boring work.

> The problem is, baking something and sharing it with others brings people together ...

Honestly, I don't see how this is a problem.

> Which in the end is kinda the point of it.

Absolutely.

> Like your post says, with programming, it's mostly just a race to what achieves the goal ...

Unless the joy of whatever programming one does is found in the path taken.

> I started learning ARM assembly so I could make a lisp implementation in it. It will be useless, no one will use it, and an AI could bang one out in a few minutes ...

Who cares if anyone uses it or if some other tooling could replicate what you choose to do if, in doing so, you enjoy it.

Much like the "damn good croissants" you make, it doesn't matter what others could make. You make damn good croissants.

Your happiness is yours. Enjoy the path you take to find it.

They’re saying the problem is that programming doesn’t result in bringing people together. The problem is that the value of baking is not easily recreated in all hobbies.

> They’re saying the problem is that programming doesn’t result in bringing people together.

Why can't it?

People get together to do a ton of "worthless" things together for no good reason other than for the enjoyment of it. Like chess, basketball, book clubs, board games, video games, popdarts, etc.

Reverse-engineering was seen as a challenging hobby where people would deeply collaborate to decipher machine language. People got to know each other pretty well like they were good neighbors thanks to the process. Questions would get asked about patterns people couldn’t resolve on their own which gave opportunities for others to pitch in or relay knowledge. A network would get established.

Now a vibecoded tool gets introduced and it eliminates both the challenge and the need to collaborate. There’s no longer any bragging rights, learning hand-in-hand, pride in completing a project started months ago, nor competition to see how fast someone can complete a project. A tool is now available to all and does the work for them.

To your point, there’s no reason the introduction of the new tools won’t bring people together. The reverse-engineering communities will probably undergo an identity crisis with an exodus of participants and the creation of a new type of challenge. Those who were in it for collaborative work will probably leave and not return. Those who just enjoyed witnessing the end results might stay to discuss and learn from what the tools produce. The discussion content would be different and may draw in a completely different crowd.

I mean, if the introduction of Excel made accounting less tedious by completing previously-manual actions and somehow resulted in a massive global community which holds an annual competition for complex workbook design, then perhaps reverse engineering communities won’t vanish overnight as feared. Time will tell.

Well with programming there can be a creative aspect which is more like sharing art/music online... But unfortunately that's still affected. I've been putting out what I think are pretty banger projects, with a good level of polish, but it's like nobody cares anymore. Social media is saturated.

Yes, besides AI upending everything, it's been a long slow decline with internet communities in general for over a decade now. Instead of having to look for what we think is interesting and talking to people about it, an algorithm just decides what we're going to enjoy

I think this analogy breaks down in key areas. Software can be distributed limitlessly unlike a croissant, which can only be enjoyed by one peraon and only within a time period before it goea stale. Like immagine of you spent 100s of hours perfecting your croissant making skills only for others to have a machine look at ypurs and just instant copy it effortlessly.

Because cooking has such intimate benefits not easily replicable I've actually found it a good sink for some of my hobby coding time that I too lost interest in.

> baking something and sharing it with others brings people together, there's smalltalk

I think this is a really good point that is or was also correct for programming.

Yes, maybe no-one was ever going to use my python-clone of grep. But the experiences I made along the way were something I liked to share and when I went online I could see other people making similar experiences and we'd laugh about the silly errors we made and the absurd abstractions we build and whatever else.

I think this experience is under threat.

yeah, but food is very primal, actually the only thing we need to do as humans to survive except sleep, and the act of sharing food is very culturally encoded, the energy you put inside is understood by everyone

coding is very abstract purely human invention to produce desired "result" so as long as the code works people rarely care about how it was made.., that does not diminish coding for fun and art, but we cant expect people to appreciate it as much as cooking

I'd ask - is your hobby programming the tool, or distributing a tool you built for others to enjoy and working with that community?

I'd say the post deals _strictly_ with the former. LLM code generation absolutely changes community dynamics, what other projects are published, etc.

How insightful and concise!

I'd also highlight a third option (really a sub-option of #2) which is competition within the community. One's hobby might be shipping the fastest (such as in cracking communities), and I could very much see this disrupted in today's world.

Part of various communities is _doing_ something of shared interest together and accomplishing something as a group. Sometimes that group is trying to solve a novel problem or push the state of the art forward. When there is no need for a community to serve that purpose, it becomes a group of people who may not otherwise gel. It’s great when it works out otherwise, but I’ve enjoyed working with a lot more people than those who also became a friend outside of that environment.

The other issue I’ve found is that these communities produce novel tools and ideas and AI can iterate on the idea much faster than the original authors. The original author had their own motivations for researching and producing and I can almost guarantee they weren’t reviewing the output of someone’s prompt.

> The original author had their own motivations for researching and producing and I can almost guarantee they weren’t reviewing the output of someone’s prompt.

You see this at work too. If I find a problem I want to solve for some personal motivation, I can no longer share with my coworkers what that problem is. Since when I do, inevitably, senior+ engineers and managers vibe code a solution. Often that solution is hacky and they expect others to fix the fundamental problems that exist.

People will claim that it's fine, because in the end the problem was "solved". But the problem is that the vibe tool is often just 80 % there, and will be abandoned. But it took all the hype and drive and motivation to make another tool. So everyone is worse off.

It's 80% after after a few hours for what might have taken years the old way. Any remaining issues can be fixed as fast as they can be found. Abandonment can and will of course happen, but anybody else can pick it up and continue with ease.

The hard part is really just the coordination, you don't want dozens of repos doing the same thing, but at the same time dealing with random vibe coded PRs is an easy way to overwhelm and burn out any maintainer.

It's 80 % after copying most of the already ongoing project. That's at least what's been going on in the game recomp space recently: AI bro asks an agent to do something, it packages up an existing project, they make a viral video, and get all the mind-share.

At the end of the film "Only Lovers Left Alive", Tom Hiddleston's vampire character comments on an artist they found performing in a bar in Tangier "I hope, for her own sake, she doesn't make it big."

I feel similarly blessed nowadays. I did try to play the fame game with my Github projects but I could never find a problem that enough people cared for to get any kind of traction. Or maybe I really just suck at marketing. Either way, I find myself still fulfilled when doing my personal projects. They are not "side hustles" or a "home lab" or a "software factory". They're really just small projects that solve a problem for me. A lot of it also has to do with my very specific decade-old daily personal driver running Linux; my reticence to guarantee support for Mac and Windows (beyond what Node or Python ships by default) could not be helping my case.

And that's fine! Software with an audience of 1 but really fits in seamlessly with my lifestyle. Plus, if I want to change something, I can do so with zero consideration for other platforms. The reason why I wanted to learn to program in the first place is because I wanted the computer to do what I want it to do. Bend to my will ye golem of bits!

I have a GitHub account with about a dozen repos that I actively develop, and none of them have any stars, forks, issues or pull requests, and as far as I know, nobody has ever downloaded or used my code. And it doesn’t even remotely matter to me. You don’t have to measure your hobby projects by number of users. That’s one of the great things about hobbies and personal programming. You don’t need an audience.

Not to mention the dozens of projects on my PC that I never even bothered to publish. All these things are done for their own sake, and for my own enjoyment, and when I die they will disappear from existence, having never been used by anyone else.

This to me is a sign that you still haven’t quite internalized the zen of hobby programming. You are clinging to an ego. It’s not about being the first or only person who has programmed something, it’s about the satisfaction you get from simply doing it. It is a private victory. You can still find people to share it with, who will feel your enthusiasm for the thing you created.

There is a difference between going to the gym and lifting something heavy, and having your wife or mother or whatever ask you to lift something heavy for them.

Feeling like you are useful to others is a critical part of the human experience.

So, you’d still enjoy it if you were the last person alive?

What would you enjoy if you were the last person alive?

It sounds like what you get out of hobby programming is being useful to others, which AI is taking away to an extent as those others could just roll their own. I understand this, I feel the same way, it is almost like I want some social obligation, but it doesn't take away the other part of what I do it for: personal interest/challenge. If that is not enough then yes, AI has taken over your hobby. Some of my other hobbies are entirely based on the challenge to myself of experiencing/learning something myself:

• I run (well, I did and will again when my current medical issues are finally sorted out!). There is no way I would ever compete and make anything of it, so it is all for me and occasionally (when not going out solo) a social aspect.

• I like to visit places. Nice bits of countryside, different countries/cities, museums, and other such. I often combine it with the running. None of this is going to affect anyone else at all, except on the few occasions it is a group adventure.

I can still enjoy techie tinkering in the same manner, it just being for me. TBH other hobbies (the running, playing with 3D printing though that does have an aspect of doing things for others, etc.) have left little time for that in recent years, even before AI. I'm a bit of (OK, a lot of…) an AI Luddite, I'm refusing to touch it even though that might be career suicide in the not too distant future, but other people using it isn't going to completely remove my enjoyment of any of my hobbies.

Why does someone else/ai doing it make it worse for you? Did you enjoy making it? You know before llms there were always people better looking, richer, smarter,etc. Llms didn't invent this problem.

Many people derive joy and purpose in being useful to others.

This is not a critique of LLMs, it's just the new state of affairs that since people can more easily solve their own problems it has somehow become more difficult to be helpful to others.

For many hobby open source developers the reward and motivation was simply random people saying thank you.

If the point was being useful to others, people can leverage LLMs to be even more useful than before. But I’m getting the sense that more than being useful, people want to feel special. They got this perception the LLM makes them less special, and that’s what killed their interest in the practice.

Not a very charitable viewing of people. It could be that people just liked all aspects of it. They liked the challenging work AND helping others. They liked the community of solving problems together and being useful for each other. They liked the difficult collaborations when trying to find solutions. They liked discussing with people who had this niche interest who also spent time obsessing over it to gain the skills necessary to make an impact.

LLMs have disrupted this. It's much easier for people to silo themselves off and fix any problem that appears, without the need of a community. It's easier for people to discuss topics via copy/pasting from an LLM versus actually having a deep understanding of the material.

I know it's not charitable but I keep seeing people say it, and I'm taking them at their word. FWIW "I did something unique, now lots of people can do it, I don't feel so unique anymore" is a very human thing to feel, it's not a bad thing, and people should be honest about it. Maybe it's not charitable of people, but it's also not realistic to say that this doesn't play a factor in what they're feeling.

> They liked the community of solving problems together and being useful for each other. They liked the difficult collaborations when trying to find solutions. They liked discussing with people who had this niche interest who also spent time obsessing over it to gain the skills necessary to make an impact.

People can still do all that! With or without LLMs. There's still plenty of friction around which to form those kinds of collaborations, it's just at a much higher level than people had been working. It's not like LLMs solved everything, yet people make it out to seem that way. But rather going to where there's still friction -- where the collaboration can thrive -- they lament the existence of the lubricant itself.

> It's easier for people to discuss topics via copy/pasting from an LLM versus actually having a deep understanding of the material.

Maybe online? I just attended a robotics conference where experts in academia and industry spent a week sharing their research and projects. I would say a good 70% of presentations, papers, and posters had a LLM foundation. And yet, people knew what they were talking about very deeply, and were collaborating.

>It's much easier for people to silo themselves off and fix any problem that appears

i fail to realize how is this a negative thing

For the reasons I stated above. Many people like the community aspects, often more than solving the problem itself. It's nice to work with people, the problem is just an excuse to congregate.

>more than being useful, people want to feel special. They got this perception the LLM makes them less special, and that’s what killed their interest in the practice.

pretty much this, i realized it in the comments section of this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKrwhjOI8Nc&t=1216s

At least if someone *else* did it then you could potentially join them or their community. I've done that before. If AI does it then it just doesn't have the same impact, plain and simple and most people just want to do their own thing instead of accept help because they don't *need* help any more.

Is photography an example? The painters (to misappropriate an analogy from Paul Graham [0]) had to content with photos that were as accurate at a fraction of the time. Painting lost much of its so called practical use, and even hobbyists were impacted by a much more efficient tool. And then photography became an art. And digital disrupted analog, and phones disrupted the rest of digital. Professional and hobbyist painters pivoted too, moving from capturing realism to abstract and symbolic styles. And hobbyist art continues in analog and digital photography.

Net - hobbyist programming will change, but not necessarily go away. It will morph into “what doesn’t this linear algebra machine see or know?”

[0] https://paulgraham.com/hp.html

Just because other people don't use your version doesn't mean you can't.

>Even if some parts of the community care about how a tool was made – Most don't, they just want something that fulfill the goal.

Yes, thats the majority of humanity.

>Now even my hobby programming was overtaken by AI, something I did for love and expected no pay out of it whatsoever, which is... depressing, to say the least.

So your hobby was getting adulation and respect or writing software? Only one of those has changed.

I think this misses the author's point. The examples he gave were all related to programming as an act of learning rather than an act of completion. He made no comment wrt programming as a contributor within a larger system (like open source code, community games, etc.). Instead, he argues that it's ok to like programming because it satisfies an intrinsic motivation, not that it satisfies an extrinsic goal more effectively.

I'm not entirely sure I agree.

While doing the whole project, I learned a lot about reverse engineering itself, the tooling, understanding static vs dynamic analysis, etc. Which was the most fun part of the project itself.

The rate at what people are delivering projects removes that opportunity heavily, even in hobby communities, which is part of the point!

I've always enjoyed the process rather than the end-product, which is why this personally affects me more than other folks I guess. Some people are motivated on producing more, I was more motivated by the learning process behind it, and those two things aren't compatible, so speed is winning the race, sadly, even if you're not profit motivated. I admit I'm a bit more of a doomer, I still use AI tools at work, but I guess it was time to search for hobbies that are not related to programming anymore.

But why does someone else delivering faster deprive you of the opportunity to learn these things anyway? Can't you just... not look at what they've done?

It helps to be able to learn as you go, because the end product is motivating, and the learning is fun.

I will corroborate that AI and pressure even in hobby spaces (like game modding) to ship faster if only to preempt a crappier implementation from gaining traction is making it harder to feel motivated to make something because there’s no time to also enjoy the technical puzzle or to really pay attention to excellence in the details.

I’m not really lamenting a bygone era, just saying that the feeling of programming for a hobby has also changed and the parts that are fun don’t line up as well anymore, so I do less of it now.

I still don't get where the pressure comes from. Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves. There is never a reason to rush things, because your only stakeholder - yourself - is fine with whatever your only developer - also yourself - does. You always have all the time you'd ever want for the technical puzzles because there are never any deadlines except self-imposed ones.

Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.

> Ultimately, the only target audience of a hobby programmer is themselves.

This is true when you don't share it with others.

I don't share most things with others anymore, I just make things with LLMs, and then use them for myself. When I make something to share with others, I pay closer attention. But for myself, I don't really appreciate the process of learning so much, because that's how I end up stalling out and never finishing the project. Maybe it resulted in useful skills anyway, but it really sucks for my mental health.

You can share your work with others while still not caring about the others when working. Others using AI to duplicate your work only matters if you care about people actually using your software, as opposed to getting some likes when you publish your project etc.

> Unless you mean your hobby is other people using your software, rather than programming for the sake of programming in the literal sense. In which case, yeah, sucks to be beaten by AI on all fronts at the same time.

For my case (modding games), yes, a big part of my reason for doing it vs. any other software project is experiencing others enjoying my work.

I also have projects I make for myself for personal practical reasons. In those cases very little has changed, because whether or not I use AI only affects me.

I take the parent comment's meaning to be that disentangling the journey from the destination isn't so easy in practice, especially if you're robbed of the community that was journeying alongside you.

If you were running a marathon and, halfway through, everybody just hopped in a cab and drove to the finish line, you'd be disappointed.

Strongly agree. Thinking of music — you reap enjoyment from practicing by yourself, then collaborating with other musicians as craftspeople, then performing for an audience. All three feed into each other.

So when the audience has moved on to synthetic music (stretching the analogy now!), and musicians have as well, it's still possible to continue on your own, for the pure enjoyment of it. But much has been lost with the global transition.

but you should not let other way of doing affect your happiness

You talking like what you doing is happen to appease people

The example came to me because I did indeed go from playing music collaboratively & publicly to largely playing by and for myself. Don't get me wrong, I still find fulfillment this way. I understand both sides here, and I think it's still fair to say that there are dimensions that are lost.

> You talking like what you doing is happen to appease people

What's wrong with that? Appeasing people is part of what being a community is. That's the human element. I could write a grand novel for the fun of it, but I still want people to read it and talk about it. To give me feedback, to discuss its themes. If that's taken away due to technological advancement, it's a sad thing.

It is not a binary between doing what you like because you enjoy the craft or being happy that people engage with your output. Both of those things feed into each other. An old neighbour of mine used to craft bracelets and give them away around the neighborhood. Why would she spend the additional time to walk to my apartment and hand me a bracelet? Did she only make the bracelet to get the neighbourhood's approval and didn't actually enjoy making it? Of course not. She made it cause she likes doing crafts, AND she likes people enjoying what she made.

The unfortunate part is that LLMs are addictive and they remove a lot of the complex thinking one has to do (in many cases), which lowers that community engagement that occurs in software circles.

> If you were running a marathon and, halfway through, everybody just hopped in a cab and drove to the finish line, you'd be disappointed.

Were you running the marathon to beat the competition and win a medal? Or were you running the marathon to improve your personal record?

For coding: Are you writing code to be the first to solve a certain problem and win community recognition? Or are you writing code to solve a problem you personally have?

I think the dichotomy is false.

You could run a marathon because you love running and want to do it with other people who love running. Similarly, you could share code-based projects with a community because you love it and want to do it with people.

The ideas you mention aren't separate from community or from each other. You can have friendly competition within a community that pushes all parties to improve and be their best.

Plus, in the finish line, the attendance is acting like if riding the car and running made no difference. By the time you get there, sweating and exhausted, the organization is already packing and the few remaining in the crowd look at you with puzzling face.

Not everyone can enjoy the process when a comparable outcome already exists. I'm aware the act of learning alone may be fulfilling enough for some, but many (including myself) got into programming to make things. When those things already exist, there's no point to making them anymore. I don't find it fun to make things for nobody.

it's only depressing if you expect life to be static and unchanging. things happen. people adapt.

Lots of things can happen. Usually people can adapt. But some things that happen are disastrous. A natural disaster is one of those things. So is AI. If you were doing research in the 70s, things changed and were exciting. Now things are changing and they're depressing.

I disagree. Especially for programmers that made more money than the vast majority of people. AI came and I'm switching to nursing. Writing code is not part of being a human. I'm glad AI will replace or greater reduce technical jobs and encourage more humanity focused jobs. Not to mention AI makes learning so much easier.

Well, how liberating for you.

Enjoy being overworked I guess

At the end of the day it is probable that we are jockeys after the invention of the motorcycle you can still ride for fun but don't expect it to be the fastest way to go long distances

For what it's worth, the vibecoded one probably used your old version as a base.

So? It’s for your own fun. Who cares if another tool exists? Multiple things that do the same thing exist everywhere.

Honestly pretty weird of you to not vibe code it, if it was recently. I strive to be efficient and effective even in my hobbies. It makes them funner. Hence I don't use a screwdriver where a drill will do. Nor do I hand-sand large flat surfaces when I can use my DeWalt sander. Cry me a river of lament at the art of being bad at your hobbies.

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