The article just straight up doesn't mention the context of the Github Thread, which is about the guy lifting ideas from other engines and copy-washing them.
"Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."
> After our initial 0.9.0 pre-release (July 2026), community feedback raised that Coda contained AGPL-licensed code. This prompted a full audit of our codebase and dependencies, and steps to correct what it found. We now believe Coda complies with all applicable licenses. If you have any concern, please open a GitHub issue with the details and we'll happily investigate.
A hobby is something you enjoy the process of doing, not just the end result. Everybody likes a clean home, but cleaning is rarely a hobby. LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
I think part of it though is that LLMs (especially in novice hands) create code that is more difficult to review and has subtler bugs. Code review is (for many) the least fun part of programming.
Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.
What you need from LLM is to make you a recipe step by step.
Main course is this this and this, 1. Do this 2. Plug this 3. Run this
So you get a precise top down construction plan. Then it’s easy to split the parts where the coding needs to be manual (smoothing walls) vs where it can be whateverz (laying concrete).
LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project.
Good luck before AI to make a grand strategy game during holidays.
People focused on the trees will be however behind
Exactly. I have a backyard garden not because I need the food (it would be infinitely cheaper and easier to buy even high end farm-stand vegetables), but because I enjoy gardening. Buying a gardening robot (if such a thing existed) would completely defeat the point.
I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.
These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.
All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.
Sure, that's fair. I enjoy the process of figuring out ways software can solve some (usually quite trivial) problem for myself, but then I'm very happy to hand the act of making it to a robot.
Yeah, in my experience, the people that got into software engineering because of the money are absolutely thrilled with how LLMs are changing the industry. They mostly just liked getting results and LLMs are great for that.
The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.
I think for those of us who got into software initially for the end result -- being the only way for the thing in your head to ever exist -- enjoying the engineering part was a nice, incidental surprise.
So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.
Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.
> LLMs expedite achieving the end result. Take from that what you will.
It's an age-old debate in every hobby.
Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result.
In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.
Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.
What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people
use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning
up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just
one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.
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.
To be fair, the decrease in discussion and helping one another online has also decreased some significant amount of negative engagement in the form of nonsensical arguments and frustrating ways of responding to questions (e.g. the biggest complaints with stackoverflow).
As a hunter-gatherer you had to be either physically fit or dead. Nowadays you can survive without being fit, but a lot of people exercise regardless. The same applies to being smart.
Well of course, if you enjoy writing software as a hobby then you value the experience of doing it, and you value the skill involved. You probably want a community of like minded individuals who all write code by hand, and where LLM use would be considered cheating.
That seems as natural as being against doping in sports or marking cards in poker.
None of this is anything against LLMs or AI assisted coding in general, even though the people involved probably have strong feelings about it given their preferences. It’s just the preferences of particular people and communities. Seems reasonable to me.
I'm particularly annoyed with the complaint in the linked thread about the agentic-developed chess engine.
> Moreover, you are giving absolutely nothing back to the community, which is central to open-source engine dev. You are only taking.
What would that user prefer? That the developer push a PR upstream...that presumably would be shot down and the user subject to further harrassment because it would be LLM derived at minimum? It seems like a catch-22 where the only winning move is not to play.
That thread also highlights the overlap between "people who are against LLM usage for coding" and "people who are very particular about AGPL."
I've found myself with this problem, as I've used LLMs to accelerate solving problems I've wanted to solve, only to find myself unable to share them back, because LLM usage has "polluted" my effort in the eyes of maintainers, even if the result has been something I've re-implemented by hand after learning from the agent-driven development what the issue is and how to reproduce it.
What's the solution, to just disengage entirely and not share back issues I find or features I'd like to see?
I get the negativity, because I enjoy hobby programming too, so I also enjoy the process sometimes. But then sometimes there's a problem and the fastest way to isolate the core of that issue is to use claude.
A long time ago, I had to take an ethics class to get my Computer Science degree. One of the things that came up in the papers about calculating the statistical value of a life was that people care more about being more prosperous than their peers than absolute material wealth.
I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.
I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.
Well yes. That's why you see many westerners complaining about the cost of living even though all things told they have a good life.
I would modify this slightly though. I think there's an expectation of things getting better, and expecting to do better than your parents. I think that's where many of the modern issues around living standards come from. They aren't getting better (quickly enough).
> 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.
Most hobby fandoms have a dedicated core group who think like this: The end result is only an artifact or social proof to them. The real product is their own prestige of having built it and attracted an audience. There's always an IRC channel or Discord somewhere where there's a social hierarchy of who should be respected for their work.
Outside of those inner circles, most people don't care. The average emulator user doesn't care about the details about who wrote their emulator or the history behind it all the forks. They want to play a game and the emulator core that gets the job done, because the emulator is the product to them. The mastery of the author is not a product to them.
This has happened in multiple technical hobby communities I've been in. With 3D printing I even remember communities where Prusa was looked down upon for making 3D printers too accessible. The argument was that now anyone could buy a 3D printer without really understanding the pain of mastering calibration, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting. That debate exploded to another level when Bambu came along and made 3D printing even more mainstream.
Now it's happening with programming communities. There are some where hand-written code is truly the actual product: Competitive programming, code golf, and obfuscated programming competitions come to mind. Using an LLM here is about as appropriate as submitting LLM generated art to an art contest, which is to say it's not.
There are a lot of other domains where the mastery of the craft isn't interesting outside of a small social circle. It's interesting that they mentioned emulators, because emu communities are famous for having a ton of strange drama that most emulator users don't care about. If you're inside of the small community and spend every day on their Discord, it might be the only thing you care about, but you don't realize that you're a minority because everyone else in the Discord thinks the same way.
OSDev is another interesting one to mention, because even Linus Torvalds had to make a big post telling the anti-LLM people to chill out. There seems to be a split between the purists who think the primary value is their own mastery of being able to write the code, and the pragmatists who are adapting to use new tools in conjunction with their knowledge. If you find yourself in one of the purist camps you might think everyone feels the same way, but outside of that, the world is moving on.
I usually feel turned off by communities where social status is the primary currency. There's always a hidden social hierarchy that feels threatened whenever it feels like the rules my start changing. They react by trying to force the social currency back to the system where they spent years investing their time. Nobody wants to feel like you're losing a foothold because the rules are changing. I got a strong feeling from this article that this author feels they've developed some level of respect in some forum and they dislike the idea of that investment being devalued by a changing landscape
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora,
This is a case of an SV-brained person stepping outside the bubble and realizing that LLMs are not the universal savior they think it is.
AI isn't well liked in a lot of places. I agree with the communities - make something yourself, don't ask a robot to do it for you. If you vibe slop something into existence, I'm never going to look at it. Something you made yourself though? Hell yeah I want to see it.
Another example is the art community - use AI/LLMs there, you'll be excommunicated.
Here's my thoughts as a 29 year old: of all the things I've ever made in my personal life, the vast majority have ended up abandoned in barely worked on states, and those I have put varying degrees of significant effort in have gone unnoticed. I've never really been able to "enter" a community in a way that felt meaningful to me, either, when I've tried.
I say this not as a complaint, but to explain my perspective on using LLMs for personal projects. Granted, I'm publishing none of them, and not trying to make anyone care about them, so it's not really a response to the article or general discourse here per se, but I thought it bears mentioning anyway.
I'd like to buy into the idea that "doing it yourself" is more meaningful or personally edifying, but I don't get that feeling. I want to get that feeling, but I don't. I've found my private waste-of-time projects using LLMs have been more gratifying than my private waste-of-time projects that don't, and at the end of the day, neither really substantively matter anyway.
Again, this isn't really related to communities per se, but it is an answer why some folks use LLMs for projects/"hobbies".
I think, without knowing, that art often is similar to the hobby programming communities the thread leads with: the end result is interesting not by itself, but through the process that made it. We have feelings about art pieces because we feel with and through the artist. Can't do that with silicon. The Mona Lisa, even if the end result were exactly the same, would be dead boring had it been produced by the hand of a machine. My take
Totally disagree. I just want cool pictures hanging on my wall. If they’re totally unique and nobody else has them, even better. I can have a mounted picture of me on a horse like the famous Napoleon painting. I don’t care at all about the dude who painted it, I don’t even know his name.
The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the backdrop of the sun. Amazing photo.
I feel like obsessing over and artist and the story behind their art is just another way to have a parasocial relationship, and the new tools allows us to have absolutely bespoke art in every single home. Every person can make music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
Relatedly, there needs to be some kind of way to distinguish between types of LLM usage. Nothing more boring -- and often not even favorable or useful to a semi-hobbyist -- than just one-shotting something with Claude;
Vs. what I do. I've always done tons of little quirky automation type things with bash -- that do actually strongly become a part of my life.
Today? Yes, that -- but more and faster. I'm actually typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.
Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.
All of this is exactly why I started Slow Code. I like programming. Lots of people like programming. I don't want to stop doing that. So we meet up once a month to practice that.
I get all the fuzz about only being able to learn if you do the work. But frankly, as a hobby programmer with a rather unusual workflow/toolset and a love for the command-line, it has never been so satifying to scratch a few itches I've always had but apparently never was motivated enough to really follow through. In the past 6 months, I've "written" at least 3 tools which I kind of always wanted, and which I now use on a regular basis. AND, I finally have a peer I can talk to about the code I'm trying to write. Something I basically never had, because all my FLOSS projects were small-very-nieche-one-man-shows. Its nice to be able to pretend to have a coding friend :-)
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora
I think the problem goes deeper.
When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few months ago, Michael Niedermayer spam AI slopped a proposal on their mailing list; I don't have the link right now (need to really bookmark all those things) but someone else asked him why he spams other people with unfinished proposals created by AI? I don't know whether Michael understands this as a problem or not, but I think many AI users don't understand the problem when they AI spam slop other people. I think it is a hostile action by those AI users. So I can totally understand communities not wanting that AI spam.
I've also noticed people who have horrible english skills, suddenly have perfect english skills. I suspect AI use, but then I wonder: is that person interacting with me via AI spam slop? I'd much rather deal with broken english if it is autenthic, than people faking it, even IF the produced english may be better than the broken english (but even that is often doubtful, so much AI spam slop is just wasting time and awful to read).
The whole AI trend seems to lead to really dumber people and fewer real interactions. That is sad, even more so as many people lost real social cues these days anyway.
"Do you genuinely believe changes like cd170a4 make the code somehow not derived from Reckless anymore? It appears to me like it's just trying to obfuscate its origins, to make it easier to appeal to plausible deniability. The reality is, coda 100% has code derived from AGPL or unlicensed engines in it, and pretending otherwise won't convince anyone other than maybe yourself. This, combined with the fact you conveniently moved the plagiarism roadmaps to a private repo mere days after people started raising concerns about it, reads to me like you're not at all concerned with actually using code fairly, and much more with being able to claim that you are, backed up by these nonsense "cleanup" commits."
> After our initial 0.9.0 pre-release (July 2026), community feedback raised that Coda contained AGPL-licensed code. This prompted a full audit of our codebase and dependencies, and steps to correct what it found. We now believe Coda complies with all applicable licenses. If you have any concern, please open a GitHub issue with the details and we'll happily investigate.
Like imagine if your hobby was cooking, but you hated the cleanup. If you buy a robot that automates the fun part at the cost of making twice the mess, that is not a good trade off no matter how many extra cookies you end up with.
Main course is this this and this, 1. Do this 2. Plug this 3. Run this
So you get a precise top down construction plan. Then it’s easy to split the parts where the coding needs to be manual (smoothing walls) vs where it can be whateverz (laying concrete).
LLMs reward seeing forest instead of trees.
This way one person can implement a whole new hobby project.
Good luck before AI to make a grand strategy game during holidays.
People focused on the trees will be however behind
I use an LLM to make custom software for myself not because I enjoy coding but because I want software that I can't afford to hire a human to make for me. Buying a robot to do it (current agentic coding LLMs) is the only way it gets done at all.
These two things are not the same, and should not be viewed in the same light.
All that being said, I would 100% buy a weeding robot. Weeding sucks.
Unless your hobby is backyard robotic gardening.
Which is my way of saying that people have different reasons for enjoying a hobby.
Like most hobby debates, this one comes down to "Let people enjoy things"
You enjoy the act of gardening, so you do not automate it away.
You enjoy the clean home, not the act of cleaning, so you may be interested in automating it away.
It seems you enjoy designing or using software, as opposed to programming/building software. So you automate the programming/building away.
The people like me that sort of just stumbled into this career as a result of spending the evenings of our youth trying to get the computer to do interesting things don't seem to have as much appreciation now that the LLMs are taking over the fun part.
So while LLMs solve the technical implementation side, there's still upside since now we get to materialize the dang thing we were setting out to build in the first place.
Though there's a huge sense of loss since so much of our skills and identity and time and value were devoted to the engineering side.
It's an age-old debate in every hobby.
Some people are in it for the process. Others are in it for the end result.
In woodworking there are some circles who will sneer at you for using certain power tools instead of hand tools. I do think it's more impressive when someone makes something entirely with hand tools. I don't have all the time in the world to work on a project, so I'm going to use the power tools when I can.
Some people care a lot about impressing others with how they made a thing. Some times that's appropriate, like if there's a competition for hand-made or human-written something. Other times, nobody cares. They're getting together to enjoy the end result, not the artisanal process used to make it.
Yes if your end result is technical debt and endless bullshit. (Some enterprise environments do be like that.)
What is the "end result"? You refer to cleaning here, but many people use AI spam slop to bombard people with garbage text. That is not "cleaning up", that is literally wasting the time of real people here. And that's just one example of many more that can be given of AI slop not being so great.
LLMs can generate lots of code quickly there's no evidence they actually speed up the dev process e2e.
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.
Keeping the experience bearable BY gatekeeping. That is the point, gatekeeping is not inherently a bad thing. It's a required thing in many circles.
That seems as natural as being against doping in sports or marking cards in poker.
None of this is anything against LLMs or AI assisted coding in general, even though the people involved probably have strong feelings about it given their preferences. It’s just the preferences of particular people and communities. Seems reasonable to me.
> Moreover, you are giving absolutely nothing back to the community, which is central to open-source engine dev. You are only taking.
What would that user prefer? That the developer push a PR upstream...that presumably would be shot down and the user subject to further harrassment because it would be LLM derived at minimum? It seems like a catch-22 where the only winning move is not to play.
That thread also highlights the overlap between "people who are against LLM usage for coding" and "people who are very particular about AGPL."
What's the solution, to just disengage entirely and not share back issues I find or features I'd like to see?
I get the negativity, because I enjoy hobby programming too, so I also enjoy the process sometimes. But then sometimes there's a problem and the fastest way to isolate the core of that issue is to use claude.
I think about that a lot: its not about material wealth, but status, something that if someone has more of you have less of. A lot of people are invested in their status in various communities, and are afraid to lose it or have it become meaningless.
I don't know what to do about that; no matter how wealthy we all are people are still going to want status.
I would modify this slightly though. I think there's an expectation of things getting better, and expecting to do better than your parents. I think that's where many of the modern issues around living standards come from. They aren't getting better (quickly enough).
Most hobby fandoms have a dedicated core group who think like this: The end result is only an artifact or social proof to them. The real product is their own prestige of having built it and attracted an audience. There's always an IRC channel or Discord somewhere where there's a social hierarchy of who should be respected for their work.
Outside of those inner circles, most people don't care. The average emulator user doesn't care about the details about who wrote their emulator or the history behind it all the forks. They want to play a game and the emulator core that gets the job done, because the emulator is the product to them. The mastery of the author is not a product to them.
This has happened in multiple technical hobby communities I've been in. With 3D printing I even remember communities where Prusa was looked down upon for making 3D printers too accessible. The argument was that now anyone could buy a 3D printer without really understanding the pain of mastering calibration, fine-tuning, and troubleshooting. That debate exploded to another level when Bambu came along and made 3D printing even more mainstream.
Now it's happening with programming communities. There are some where hand-written code is truly the actual product: Competitive programming, code golf, and obfuscated programming competitions come to mind. Using an LLM here is about as appropriate as submitting LLM generated art to an art contest, which is to say it's not.
There are a lot of other domains where the mastery of the craft isn't interesting outside of a small social circle. It's interesting that they mentioned emulators, because emu communities are famous for having a ton of strange drama that most emulator users don't care about. If you're inside of the small community and spend every day on their Discord, it might be the only thing you care about, but you don't realize that you're a minority because everyone else in the Discord thinks the same way.
OSDev is another interesting one to mention, because even Linus Torvalds had to make a big post telling the anti-LLM people to chill out. There seems to be a split between the purists who think the primary value is their own mastery of being able to write the code, and the pragmatists who are adapting to use new tools in conjunction with their knowledge. If you find yourself in one of the purist camps you might think everyone feels the same way, but outside of that, the world is moving on.
I usually feel turned off by communities where social status is the primary currency. There's always a hidden social hierarchy that feels threatened whenever it feels like the rules my start changing. They react by trying to force the social currency back to the system where they spent years investing their time. Nobody wants to feel like you're losing a foothold because the rules are changing. I got a strong feeling from this article that this author feels they've developed some level of respect in some forum and they dislike the idea of that investment being devalued by a changing landscape
> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora,
This is not mutually exclusive with LLM usage. It's only prerequisite is that the human cares enough to learn.
AI isn't well liked in a lot of places. I agree with the communities - make something yourself, don't ask a robot to do it for you. If you vibe slop something into existence, I'm never going to look at it. Something you made yourself though? Hell yeah I want to see it.
Another example is the art community - use AI/LLMs there, you'll be excommunicated.
I say this not as a complaint, but to explain my perspective on using LLMs for personal projects. Granted, I'm publishing none of them, and not trying to make anyone care about them, so it's not really a response to the article or general discourse here per se, but I thought it bears mentioning anyway.
I'd like to buy into the idea that "doing it yourself" is more meaningful or personally edifying, but I don't get that feeling. I want to get that feeling, but I don't. I've found my private waste-of-time projects using LLMs have been more gratifying than my private waste-of-time projects that don't, and at the end of the day, neither really substantively matter anyway.
Again, this isn't really related to communities per se, but it is an answer why some folks use LLMs for projects/"hobbies".
The only exception is real photographs of some event, like I bought my friend a picture of the Falcon 9 taking off against the backdrop of the sun. Amazing photo.
I feel like obsessing over and artist and the story behind their art is just another way to have a parasocial relationship, and the new tools allows us to have absolutely bespoke art in every single home. Every person can make music. It’s incredible and amazing and should be celebrated because suddenly everyone can participate.
Vs. what I do. I've always done tons of little quirky automation type things with bash -- that do actually strongly become a part of my life.
Today? Yes, that -- but more and faster. I'm actually typing out way less code, but getting more of what I'd like done, and which couldn't be done without some bash (and now python*) knowledge.
Before AI, knew something about python but never typed e.g. more than 20 lines of it myself. I now am able to use it extensively regardless because, like with lots of languages, reading is easier than writing.
This hits the nail on the head.
https://slowcode.dev
I think the problem goes deeper.
When a community becomes addicted to LLM, I feel uncomfortable interacting with it. It feels like mindless robots and drones are now active. But even aside from this, some people don't seem to understand why AI spam slopping real people with their AI spam, is awful. A few months ago, Michael Niedermayer spam AI slopped a proposal on their mailing list; I don't have the link right now (need to really bookmark all those things) but someone else asked him why he spams other people with unfinished proposals created by AI? I don't know whether Michael understands this as a problem or not, but I think many AI users don't understand the problem when they AI spam slop other people. I think it is a hostile action by those AI users. So I can totally understand communities not wanting that AI spam.
I've also noticed people who have horrible english skills, suddenly have perfect english skills. I suspect AI use, but then I wonder: is that person interacting with me via AI spam slop? I'd much rather deal with broken english if it is autenthic, than people faking it, even IF the produced english may be better than the broken english (but even that is often doubtful, so much AI spam slop is just wasting time and awful to read).
The whole AI trend seems to lead to really dumber people and fewer real interactions. That is sad, even more so as many people lost real social cues these days anyway.