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

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.

Further, I’ve noticed that even in the instances where there was
earnest early engagement with LLMs in some of these niche communities,
the well was quickly poisoned by a combination of a lack of a deep
understanding by the LLM practitioners, and a vitriolic subset of those
communities that view the LLM enterprise as a form of cheating. Granted
these communities have, in general, historically been characterized by
feverish gatekeeping and painstakingly slow progress, so it makes sense
that there might be a desire to grab some easy cachet by bursting onto
the scene like the Kool-Aid man. OH YEAH…. OH NO!

In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through
years of activity in their respective fora, sharing elegant code,
displays of genuine curiosity, and through sharing deep domain knowledge
along the way. At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if
your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it
works. To me, an LLM functions best as a force multiplier, not a
surrogate. In the hands of an expert who already understands a domain
deeply, it could act like a lever. But in these niche
communities, the entire exercise is in the learning. Using an LLM to
generate the finished piece doesn’t make us craftsmen; it just robs us
of the craft.

:F

This is the latest in my evolving thoughts on LLMs. Also see: LLMe and Mind the van
Emden Gap