--- title: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are... description: An exploration of why niche hobby programming communities — such as OSDev, EmuDev, the demoscene, and code golfers — are increasingly hostile toward LLM usage.... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/born-against-or-why-hobby-programming-communities-are-aggressively-against-llm-usage-t66a4nao4 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are aggressively against LLM usage | daily.dev og:description: An exploration of why niche hobby programming communities — such as OSDev, EmuDev, the demoscene, and code golfers — are increasingly hostile toward LLM usage.... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/born-against-or-why-hobby-programming-communities-are-aggressively-against-llm-usage-t66a4nao4 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/t66a4nao4.png og:image:alt: Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are aggressively against LLM usage og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are aggressively against LLM usage **[Lobsters](https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters)** · 2 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary An exploration of why niche hobby programming communities — such as OSDev, EmuDev, the demoscene, and code golfers — are increasingly hostile toward LLM usage. In these communities, the process of mastering a difficult domain is itself the goal, not just producing working code. LLMs are seen as a form of cheating that bypasses the hard-won knowledge and craft that define membership and respect. The author argues that LLMs work best as a force multiplier for existing experts, not as a surrogate for learning, and that using them to generate finished work robs practitioners of the craft itself. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 3 discussions and 59 comments across hackernews, lobsters (as of 2026-08-05). **TL;DR:** Commenters broadly agree that hobby programming communities value the learning process over outputs, making LLM use feel like cheating — but several push back on the post's framing, questioning whether these communities are actually as welcoming or craft-focused as portrayed, and others note LLMs can genuinely serve hobbyists who want outcomes rather than process. **Sentiment:** 15% positive · 35% mixed · 50% skeptical **The case for** - LLMs can serve as a non-judgmental 'coding friend' for solo hobbyists who lack peers to discuss their work with. - For hobbyists who care about the end product rather than the process, LLMs are a legitimate tool to get things built that otherwise wouldn't exist. - Expert practitioners can use LLMs as a force multiplier to do the same quality work faster without sacrificing craft. **The pushback** - LLM-generated contributions flood open-source projects with low-quality PRs that drain maintainer time and goodwill. - Some communities use LLM hostility as cover for pre-existing gatekeeping and in-group politics rather than genuine craft preservation. - LLM use in hobby spaces shifts community gatherings from knowledge-sharing to sales pitches, eroding the culture of mutual learning. - Agentic LLM engines in niche domains (e.g. chess engines) often produce cookie-cutter, subpar work that contributes nothing new to the frontier. - Widespread LLM use raises concerns about plagiarism and license violations when code is 'washed' through models to obscure its origins. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters largely accept the core premise — hobby coding is about process, not output — but several challenge the framing around gatekeeping, note the chess-engine copyright controversy the post glosses over, and others share positive personal experiences using LLMs for hobby projects. - lobsters (skeptical): Discussion is lively and critical: top comments affirm the value of mastery and warn that LLM hype is eroding learning communities, but others dispute the post's romanticized portrait of niche communities as genuinely welcoming, and one detailed account from the homebrew scene describes those communities as already exclusionary long before LLMs arrived. **Hottest debate:** Whether niche hobby communities are genuinely craft-focused and welcoming or have always been gatekeeping and exclusionary — with LLM hostility serving as a convenient new justification for old behavior. **Open questions** - How should communities distinguish between LLM use as a learning aid versus LLM use to generate finished contributions? - Does the chess-engine 'Coda' situation represent a genuine copyright violation, and what does it mean for LLM-assisted open-source development more broadly? - Can hobby communities design norms that welcome newcomers using LLMs for learning while still preserving the craft culture insiders value? **Highlights** > Speaking from the Emu/Homebrew development scene (as a *very* former homebrew dev, although at least to my knowledge, the emulation scene is better about this), I can recognize a lot of these community traits. A lot of those communities tend to guard their research obsessively; what's publicly available as documentation is kinda the equivalent of a giant reference dump at the end of the process. Basically you're meant to gawk and be in awe of the hard work the developers are putting in, not actually understand the specifics of how they did that. (Pretty obviously, discord made this issue worse although I'd say the only difference between discord and irc was that the irc channel wasn't archived, so a lot more details could be kept hidden from newcomers.) Trying to learn from public documentation is pretty much impossible; it's pretty much a function dump without any context whatsoever. (Both in RE work and most homebrew libraries.) The developers of these things tend to deal with so many unskilled users that, rather than pointing people to resources of what they'd need to know, they instead rely on shorthand dismissals meant to dissuade people from working on these projects to begin with. "I want to write a basic program for my 3DS" is met with the "you should learn how to program in C on the desktop first and become experienced in that" response, which is by design very dismissive (because the barrier isn't "learn C", it's "learn C to the point you can use it on a desktop", which is a much higher barrier). Learning how to reverse engineer is given similar barriers. It creates communities that rely on in-groups and access to those in-groups isn't really by technical skills (again, it's a shorthand dismissals, not a genuine assessment of people's skills) but rather by politics/how much you are willing to put up with people being assholes to you in your free time. Like to give a pretty extreme instance of this; almost none of the c3 talks about the Switch or 3DS led to useful exploits in and of themselves, the ones shown off were just tech demos with the details omitted. The entire reason we had public 3DS homebrew that goes beyond "it can run doom!" was because a different group of people was effectively able to poke through one of the presentations and was able to assemble the incomplete toolchain into a full one with their own research. It took a lot of arguing over the years for transparency to the point where I think the 3DS scene's documentation is now at the point where someone fresh from following a basic C manual can figure out how to write homebrew. (And that's before we get into things like how a lack of backwards compatibility in a lot of central libraries is used to exclude older projects, which is it's whole other can of worms.) As for LLMs making those scenes more accessible; I'm ambivalent to it. I obviously don't want to see more AI slop, but I also don't fault people for reaching to the machine that won't permanently judge them as a stupid idiot not worth looking at further, solely because they couldn't figure out the equivalent of learning how the 80 year war worked by only looking at the casualty list. > — [noirscape on lobsters · 1 points](https://lobste.rs/s/3d3wbr/born_against_why_hobby_programming#c_pufwuc) > I stopped going to some groups because LLMs converted a bazaar of knowledge gift-giving into a cathedral of "You didn't pray fervently enough or properly to the machine spirit." It converted meetings from a learning community into faith and sales pitches. I got my career started by going to a Python user group where folks encouraged me, and showed me neat stuff every time. They helped me when I struggled. That's what I don't see anymore at meetups. Instead of it being folks sharing and learning, it's about selling "Look what $AI built for me!" > — [pyj on lobsters · 6 points](https://lobste.rs/s/3d3wbr/born_against_why_hobby_programming#c_80u4l6) > Since chess engine programming is being mentioned on Lobsters, I think I should comment. I'm an active chess developer. I have my own engine, have patches in several top engines, including Stockfish, Reckless, and Stormphrax. I have been involved in the development of recent new techniques in the space. (Yes, new techniques to improve chess engines are still actively being discovered after 60+ years!) **1. The (Unintentional?) DoSing of Online Chess Engine Resources** I suspect a lot of the online resources for chess programming are being heavily scraped by bots, because they have gotten significantly less stable and less online over the last couple of years. This includes: * The Chess Programming Wiki (https://www.chessprogramming.org/) which - while out of date - is a reasonable historical reference * The Talk Chess forum which is where the old chess engine guard lives, and while out of date, is also a historical reference. The new guard and most active chess engine development lives on Discord. While we have felt that this is a negative because it makes modern engine techniques less searchable and we are at the mercy of a corporate entity, the unintentional benefit for us is that this has been a more stable platform for documentation and communication in recent years. **2. The Use of LLMs in Chess Engines** For completeness, I should mention that there have been less controversial experiments of LLMs in engine development. An active and prominent engine developer (tsoj) used LLMs for the automatic generation of new Stockfish search patches. The failure rate of these patches was quite high, but this has resulted in a handful of LLM patches in Stockfish. That said several Stockfish *is* the strongest engine. I have felt thus has often meant any possible method ones to improve its Elo of SF has been generally felt to be acceptable in the community given this status; so perhaps this acceptance in SF is not surprising. **3. One Shot LLM Engines** Every one and then pops into an engine discord with a chess engine generated one-shot by an LLM. We do not find this exciting. Personally I feel such engines do not contribute anything new or exciting to the space. Very often these have most of the common search techniques implemented from the "current engine meta" and thus are fairly cookie cutter, and often their performance is also subpar compared to expected. I think this is my primary issue with LLMs. Their use by non-experts are often uninteresting and results in subpar work. I personally enjoy living on the frontier. I have [inventing new methods](https://87flowers.com/byteboard-attack-tables-1/) or [found novel new ways of accelerating things](https://87flowers.com/chess-leaper-indexing/). I feel that my joy of doing so would be sapped by AI, because the joy is in the discovery of the unknown. **4. Coda** Coda was mentioned in the above blogpost. It is an engine that uses current methods for verifying and testing new patches (sequential probability ratio testing) in a framework that is commonly used by engine developers, but new patches are actively scraped from open source engines and fed them into LLMs. I am just going to copy-and-paste a Discord message I wrote about Coda here: > IANAL but my position is similar to the following: > > i think there's both a legal and a moral angle to this: > > * the legality of strip-mining other engines for ideas and then proceed to copy them, verbatim or otherwise, through a mechanical process > * some of the verbatim examples are quite blatant copying without respect to the license some of them have been LLM-washed in some fashion, however i feel this would would make those patches at minimum derivative works > * i feel passing code through an LLM to be rewritten is a mechanical process, and it is up to the courts as to whether that extent of transformation is sufficient for it to be considered derivative > * the morality of strip-mining other engines for ideas > * i p > — [87flowers on lobsters · 2 points](https://lobste.rs/s/3d3wbr/born_against_why_hobby_programming#c_dxh99b) > LLM dev is in its "3D Printed Dragon" era. Let me explain: Anyone can buy a 3D printer, it's just money. Then they go online and download cool ready made STL models, print a few and go "hmm, these are cool. I'm now the CEO of a 3D printing startup!". Then they order a bunch of fancy filaments and print a massive pile of generic plastic crap and start selling it in every fair and con that they can get a table at. Meanwhile actual professionals are printing replacement parts for planned obsolesence -inflicted or enshittified equipment or just better versions of existing ones. The same is happening with LLM dev. The newcomers are SUPER EXCITED that they can HELP by generating a bunch of code (generic plastic dagons) for their favourite projects. Not understanding that it's just shit and nobody really wants it. It's cool if they do it for themselves, but it's not something sustainable. Meanwhile professionals are using LLMs to enhance their skills, doing the same thing and same quality as before, just a bit faster. > — [shrike on lobsters · 3 points](https://lobste.rs/s/3d3wbr/born_against_why_hobby_programming#c_prz7ha) > What’s missing here is an understanding of the negative effect the rise of AI has had on programming communities overall: both the decrease in positive engagement as people have moved from discussing things and helping one another online to chatting with AI, and the increase in negative engagement. The amount of low-energy abandonware being “shared” into these communities makes it really hard to filter out the signal from the noise. So at least in my experience, it’s not about gatekeeping as much as it’s about keeping the experience bearable for the existing hobbyist community. > — [gbjcantab on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187593) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49174553) · 4 points · 2 comments - [lobsters](https://lobste.rs/s/3d3wbr/born_against_why_hobby_programming) · 66 points · 17 comments - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49187061) · 26 points · 40 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [The analogue programmer in the land of LLMs](https://daily.dev/posts/the-analogue-programmer-in-the-land-of-llms-fupyefolu) · Ruby Flow · 2 upvotes · 1 comments - [graydon2](https://daily.dev/posts/graydon2-bkpbl0wj4) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#llm](https://daily.dev/tags/llm), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/born-against-or-why-hobby-programming-communities-are-aggressively-against-llm-usage-t66a4nao4) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are aggressively against LLM usage","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/born-against-or-why-hobby-programming-communities-are-aggressively-against-llm-usage-t66a4nao4","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/born-against-or-why-hobby-programming-communities-are-aggressively-against-llm-usage-t66a4nao4"},"datePublished":"2026-08-05T04:37:43.673Z","dateModified":"2026-08-05T19:31:13.207Z","description":"An exploration of why niche hobby programming communities — such as OSDev, EmuDev, the demoscene, and code golfers — are increasingly hostile toward LLM usage....","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0_ODbtD2--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2008","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--0_ODbtD2--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2008","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Lobsters","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Lobsters","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--tl8v_Fku--/f_auto,t_logo/v1698841318/logos/lobste.jpg","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/born-against-or-why-hobby-programming-communities-are-aggressively-against-llm-usage-t66a4nao4","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"llm,ai-coding","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Lobsters","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/lobsters"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Born Against, or why hobby programming communities are aggressively against LLM usage"}]} ```