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

DRANK

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…