Nice presentation, I've been asking myself about exactly this lately. Speaking for myself, I like to build a small copy of some big project, and then I put big hopes on it and start feeling guilty that it's unfinished. It turns into a kind of ban on picking up anything else, while the big one keeps getting put off too. And here there are so many different styles and approaches laid out.
My rule of thumb is that if you've been talking about how cool doing something would be for longer than it would take you to do it, you should "Shut Up 'N Play Yer Guitar".
I saw another guy I'm trying to find, he's Asian, one of the projects he did was make a map from raw OSM nodes I think. But he used a "niche" language like Zed and worked directly with GL idk was trying to find him. One of those really really good programmers. His videos are in English. The map is like Brooklyn or some part of NY.
I was looking for this one. It's far beyond a mere "style". It breaks the entire premise.
Being a "problem solver" means you live with the code you write on a daily basis the same way as anyone with any other skill such as woodworking or sewing/knitting.
For the people who think writing code (without AI) is so hard that they make it a separate "thing" away from their usual life, I have to also wonder whether they can cook their own breakfast.
A Proustian "eating the madeleine" moment occurred when I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode and began typing programs in TI BASIC, redefining characters and drawing little images with them on screen. In the midst of a tech hellscape, I suddenly remembered why I loved programming to begin with.
I did not like how this handled scrolling, made my navigation feel constrained. Maybe I was supposed to use the keyboard to navigate? It doesn't seem particularly clear.
Navigation was easy. What I didn't like was having no idea where I was and how much farther there was to go. It was like the world's least intuitive HyperCard stack.
Like the points in this presentation, recently I kept thinking it seems I need find the joy of fiddling and learning, not build some thing for money but for fun only.
Have been used some spare time to learn common lisp and write a manual project, still use web based AI as a quick search method.
But I managed to learn some common lisp and how to do cffi in common lisp and
- use gtk4 cffi binding to start a GUI app
- write a ghostty cffi to encode/decode terminal escape sequences
- write a libssh2 cffi to communicate with a ssh server
Hope I can build a minimal SSH Terminal using common lisp to keep on experiment and exploration
I’m definitely strong type 2, strong in the sense of I don’t care about activities of other types, not in the sense that I’m very good at programming.
I have a bunch of abandoned repos. I used to want to finish some of them, so perhaps I can show them to some people and get a in-domain job, but recently I realized that it is probably impossible for me to do so. I don’t have success because I don’t chase it. I chase fun and that’s what I should expect, not other things like career switch or monetary rewards.
I, like the author, stopped worrying leaving aside unfinished projects. I cobsider learning or having fun was the project, and that I did finish. And I frequently come back to projects a while after.
The definition perfectly describes how I started out in computers in 1981. Brought home a 4K, 8-bit computer from Radio Shack that I could barely afford and hooked it to the TV. Had never touched a computer before, zero prior knowledge and only had the manual in the box (which was surprisingly good). No one I'd ever met owned a computer at home or used one at work and I'd never really considered that you could make money with computers. I just thought the games seemed fun and the idea of learning about programming seemed cool. Turns out typing in long listings from B&W hobbyist zines and then finding all the typos was a fine way to learn.
Teaching myself assembler was harder because I had no docs. I was so clueless I actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called to ask where I could get a manual. The sales rep who answered the phone must have taken pity on me because he mailed the CPU manual for free. I still have the purple reference card and remember the common opcodes by heart (https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...)
The first time I made money was about 18 months later when I wrote a pretty handy disk utility program. Stayed up all Friday night finishing it. Copied onto floppies I sold for $5 at the local user's group Saturday morning . Made $140 and got my first 28 customers. That was enough to get me hooked on making software and selling it. ~40 years, three startups, over a dozen products, hundreds of people employed, couple million customers and two PC Magazine Product of Year awards later - regret nothing. Started on a lark to learn and have fun. Much was learned, fun was had. Wonderful journey - highly recommend.
This is a great life story. I had similar beginnings as a curious child but no PC Magazine Product of the Year! I'm sure you'll find many people here who also started curious and with no friends who cared or had even seen a computer.
Is there an equivalent to that today? As soon as a cool technology appears, there are startups selling something within a few weeks. What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Well, hitting the first home run took about a decade full of base hits and more than a few strike-outs on the way to figuring out what I needed to know to do a tech startup well.
> What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Over the last decade I've spent increasing pro bono time trying to 'pay it forward' talking to classes and groups of erstwhile entrepreneurs, so I've heard versions of that question a LOT. It actually took me a couple years before I realized there is no 'right' answer because the right thing for each person differs depending their unique personality, skills, interests, context and life journey.
The most helpful thing I can share isn't a guess about which target you should aim for but rather some advice about how to approach your journey. First, I hope you want to be a tech entrepreneur because that's the only thing I know about. I have no idea what skills will be in demand to get a high-paying, secure job or how to get promoted. I had to become an entrepreneur because I was terrible at being an employee.
I never aimed for my guess at what would be "hot" next and I doubt my guess would be right anyway. Every time I found success it was by starting with a real problem some customer actually had. Initially that customer was me or a friend but it doesn't matter. It just has to be a serious enough problem that motivated customers are actively looking for new and better solutions than what exists. Then figure out a way to solve their problem better enough that they'll actually buy it. It doesn't have to be perfect, just better enough. In fact, some of my best products became hits by cleverly solving one part of a problem SUPER well, at the cost of some serious downside in other areas. For example, I desperately wanted a Zig-Zag Widget but good ones were stupid expensive and the ones ordinary schmoes like me could afford Zigged and Zagged like shit. But I figured out I how to make a Zig-Only Widget I could actually afford. No Zag but it Zigged better than the best and I realized, that was a trade-off I'd be okay with, especially after we worked on adding some 'pseudo-Zag' features that blunted the most annoying parts of not Zagging. The world's best Zig (but no Zag) at 1/4th the price of even a half-assed Zig-Zag. Not really new technology, just a very clever mixture of the exact right old tech with a little new stuff, some clever UX innovations and cool workflow integrations. First Product of the Year.
If prototyping dozens of different iterations and trying each one out with real, live problem-having customers and listening empathetically to their constant complaints, ridiculous demands and occasional awesome suggestions sounds like fun, then you may have found your calling. If you just want to write great code for a good paycheck and be left in peace, then run the other way.
> Not really new technology, just a very clever mixture of the exact right old tech with a little new stuff, some clever UX innovations and cool workflow integrations. Blam! First Product of the Year.
To anyone that might listen, I wanna add my own insight on this: it's all about design. Not in any "shapes and colors" way, but in "Notes on the Synthesis of the Artificial", way.
People in tech obsess about, well, tech. While what sells and builds businesses is great design, achieving the right balance of user and developer experience and delivering some abstract shape that fits extraordinarily well with some high-dimensional definition of a problem space.
It's never been about the code, the tools, the tech. It's all about how things fit together. Think about "quality of life" mods in popular games. The more complicated abstract systems our minds engage with, the more opportunities to design something are created. The human cognitive space has a lot, and I mean A LOT of problems waiting to be solved that only need someone to realize how to build some abstract shape that fits better that what is currently available.
> Turns out typing in long listings from B&W hobbyist zines and then finding all the typos was a fine way to learn.
My mom and I used to take turns reading the code from the magazines out loud while the other typed the code into our Commodore 64. She used to say things like "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but thwarted was actually learning something" (no, my mom doesn't call me "thwarted").
1979, 14 years old, my dad brought home a TRS-80 Model 1. I started to learn BASIC by typing in code listings from Byte magazine. Then I started coming up with my own projects. Loved it so much I knew what I wanted to to do for a living and what college program I wanted to get into.
Nearly 40 years post college, I still play with coding and system design on my time and TBH, much more satisfaction and happiness from that than my day job.
Thanks for sharing. This is a great story. You went from zero computer knowledge, maybe a couple of books, to selling a disk utility after barely 18 months. I think you are pretty good comparing to many others who didn't even manage to handle assembly.
Remember when computers came with manuals, good manuals that taught you how to get maximum power out of the machine?
The VIC-20 had a particularly good one. It could be read by children and gradually introduced programming concepts in such a way to ease anxiety. For example by stating that error messages were "your VIC-20's way of helping you". Since BASIC was the only thing the machine could do without an additional purchase, this was incredibly helpful.
I feel you're missing the point. AI has no impact on recreational programming, it's about satisfying your personal curiousities and interests. I'm currently hand rolling a database project in rust because I find writing rust is fun. If you're pausing to ask yourself "what's the use if you can just use AI" then you may not have liked programming intrinsically to begin with, but instead the second order effects it gave you.
Well at least that's different because you have choice to use slop generator to vibe code or not and the chlorine is there no matter if you want it or not.
That's the whole point: they can't, because even in any useless "fun" programming there was motivation that it might be useful to someone in the future, or simply to fill the internet with information.
But now there is absolutely no usefulness in creating useless projects.
Some people aren't into recreational programming, and think it's more fun to complain about AI and post unoriginal comments like "AI Slop" and "Stochastic Parrot" that are even less interesting and original than the AI slop and stochastic parroting that they're criticizing.
If you want to call something AI Slop, and parrot terms from papers you've never read and whose meaning you don't actually understand, then please at least write in complete sentences and explain exactly what it was that made you think it was AI Slop, and what you think of the paper that coined the term "Stochastic Parrot", because your drive-by one-line anti-AI comments are much more tedious and unoriginal than anything an LLM can generate.
I checked it out several months later and the UI issues are still there.
I try to extrude a sketch (you know, a basic and critical feature in a CAD program) and click on add profile and it does nothing, it doesn't even explain what I did wrong.
But lots of things like evolving pictures, palettes, or little creatures. Fluid simulation, cellular automata. Fluid simulation in cellular automata. Enough game Jams that I no longer know how many games I have made.
I have done all sorts of things, I am undeterred by AI. For some things I will now get AI to explore entire ideas. Other things I will do entirely myself, and many things will be varying degrees of each.
I see more opportunities for exploration. If you can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, why begrudge a personal giant assistant?
You can look at it one of two ways: either you program recreationally because you love the act of programming, in which case AI´s existence is irrelevant, or you love building things, and AI lets you build bigger things faster than ever before.
I use AI to program at my job but at home I am trying to keep writing everything by hand. It’s very tempting to just let the AI do stuff for me when it gets tiring, especially when tests are failing and I know the AI could fix it for me in seconds while I have to spend hours figuring it out, but I try my best to do it without AI. I just ask the AI questions sometimes for things I would have used StackOverflow in the dark ages. I feel like people need to do this if they want to keep being programmers in the old fashioned way! Junior programmers especially.
Agreed, though the very existence of these tools changes the feeling of doing the work, which I can only assume changes the result in the brain. I hate the idea that these tools affect what my brain does and the value it attached to an activity even when I choose not to use the tool.
Im very depressed over all this, to me it feels like all the beauty of the world has been sucked out, or at the very least blanketed in so much noise its impossible to discern.
Remember the book _The Never-Ending Story_ by Michael Ende? The Nothing that was consuming the land of Fantasia.
That's our predicament in modern society - and I mean "modern" as in the obsolete value system and culture that produced the shameful century of world wars - that is stealing our dreams and choking the future of humanity. We didn't learn the lesson the last time fascists took over the world.
The message of the story was that imagination is our hope, it has the power to create new futures from the ruins of the old and the past, to bring forth new life from the dead.
I can understand it, but it dawned on me that I needed to figure out some cope for AI's presence in the industry, the upside is that AI is the real deal, this stuff really works, the downside of AI are the fucked up ways its being capitalized and its costs externalized, and the crash and inevitable bailouts I see coming, especially for OpenAI, and lets not even mention the morons who can't control their deployed agents, oh yeah security anyone? (crowd yells no thanks)
Being a now hobbyist programmer, AI is just fun for me chatting with it, throwing structs and snippets at each other, but boy am I reading some horror stories about what it does for jobs, working conditions and code quality. The thing is, its just humans making great inventions and then as usual, fucking everything up with them.
> the upside is that AI is the real deal, this stuff really works
Now imagine how depressing the industry is when you don't actually agree that this stuff really works. People are tripping over themselves to replace human craft with a tool that can't even do the job properly. It's so awful to watch.
I'm not surprised some folks are getting bad results. I was just in /r/openrouter on reddit and even the pro AI folks don't know anything. I also won't deny how messed up some of the external costs are, and the carelessness, nay, complete recklessness of the OpenAI folks and others. Hell there are still folks saying we aren't even paying the actual costs of these things, and certainly we're not adjusting our economic systems in any meaningful way to account for the massive shift in the skills marketplace. And whether it works or not, well it'd be a hell of a hoax if I've spent a dollar and a half and there's some poor thirdworlder somewhere who actually typed code for maybe a quarter hahaha
Thats me!!!! More than 20 years of hobby programming.
It has never been a better time to be a recreational programmer and I have never been more excited with all the changes! As someone that started making html pages with dial-up, I am just gobsmacked with LLM's! Programming has helped me immensely in my career as a professional firefighter and I hope to have a second act in tech... we'll see!
In my professional DevOps role I'm firefighting all the time, and in my professional programmer role I'm arsoning fires all the time, but I'd also love to hear how real firefighters apply programming skills!
I can't speak to firefighting, but in many ways emergency medicine is remarkably similar to debugging software: you're presented with a problem, it's manifesting some symptoms and you have to determine the root cause. Sometimes a clock is ticking.
If you actually enjoy the process of debugging, discovering root causes and fixing things, emergency medicine can be very rewarding & fulfilling on an importantly-human level.
Fair warning: There are also some really bad experiences you will never un-see, if you're not ready for that I would stay away. Seeing death is objectively worse than the most catastrophic datacenter outage.
You're not wrong. I haven't worked in medicine but I've saved a number of lives over the years just being in the right place at the right time, being situationally aware, and thinking quickly.
I administered CPR to a stranger who was overdosing on pills and resuscitated them until emergency services arrived and could take over, after hearing someone screaming for help while I was taking a walk.
I ran into an old high school acquiatance who told me he was on psychedelics, came upstairs for a moment to say hi, another old acquaintance was there, also tripping. I was inside the apartment for maybe 60 seconds before I saw the second person's eyes flick for just a split second toward a pair of sharp scissors on the table. Without hesitation, I lept for the scissors at the same moment as him, we both grabbed onto them and he tried as fast as he could to slice his neck open with them. After a few seconds of struggle I managed to shove him off, hand the scissors to someone else and then restrain him until I felt he was no longer an immediate danger to himself. That's actually not the only person I've been in this exact situation with, another friend was under the influence and tried the same exact thing and I had to literally beat him into submission and keep watch until he came out of it.
One time I heard screaming and came outside to see two neighbors in a domestic incident. The male was trying to kill the female and his mom was preventing her from escaping. I managed to get her off the property, call the police and get him charged. After a summer vacation, I came back home and heard more shouting. I run outside to see the same male wearing heavy boots and an ankle monitor, a few seconds away from kicking in a glass door to kill his girlfriend, who now was holding their newborn child. He kept saying he was going to kill her. I raced over and tackled him to the ground when he was about five feet from them, already having broken the glass door. His friend and mom kept trying to get me off of him and I started screaming so other neighbors could hear that if someone didn't call the police, I was going to have to kill a man in defense. I was bashing his head into the concrete to keep him from escaping while his mom and friend were pulling at my legs. Eventually he slipped away and cut the ankle monitor, and the police had to go on a manhunt across the city for days. The whole time his mom is trying to get me arrested, telling the police I had cannabis in my apartment.
I had to break into my neighbor's home once to take on a burglar who had locked her out of her home, brought him to heel, tackled him and got the cops over. This guy turned out to be experiencing a mental breakdown so we spent some hours convincing him to get into an ambulance and I don't believe he was charged.
I stopped a public shooting after I saw two people arguing after a block party and heard one go, "I'm a veteran, I don't need this shit." I had JUST finished restraining a large man after he'd assaulted my friend, and handed the guy over to security (the second time; first time he broke free from them and I had to come tackle a d restrain him a second time). I hadn't even put my booksack back on before I was slinging it to the ground again to race towards the guy who was running over to the trunk of his car. I dived onto the trunk and he tried fighting me and demanding I get off or his car, and I kept kicking him off and said, "Listen, the only person who might die tonight is you, if you don't fucking get in your car right now and drive away." Turns out he had a loaded AR in there with several mags. I got my friend to remove the other person from the situation, the guy was an immigrant and didn't even understand he was about to be shot and killed. After that, I threw a punch at this guy and told him if he didn't get in his car I was going to fucking kill him. Finally, he got in and left. Most of the very packed crowd never even realized what happene...
About your sister, feel free to discard this thought as we don’t know each other at all: You did the right thing to save her; somehow separate that from the relationship animosity (not sure how); but it’s 2 things, don’t combine them.
The difficulty is in knowing how much her staying alive negatively affected my life. It sent us into crippling debt, nearly cost my girlfriend her job, nearly cost me my relationship, and caused my Constitutional rights to be severely violated after being illegally assaulted by the police inside my own home without a warrant or probable cause... she had us swatted over completely false and entirely uncorroborated allegations in order to prevent me from being a witness against her in custody case (a felony, I know), and sent to prison over bogus charges that we are now fighting. I wish I could be more specific but I'm still fighting the case while she is still free and terrorizing others. My animals were nearly shot and I could have been shot. The officer specifically retrieved his gun with visible glee upon learning we had cats.
Instead I now live with severe permanent disability from the assault. I can barely hold a cup of water right now and I'm in my early 30's. I can't help around the house and things are piling up. I missed an important job interview while in prison and am struggling financially as I was prohibited from returning to California to work during my bond. It's a really hard thing to process. The feeling goes beyond hatred; hatred feels petty compared to the deep-seated resentments now boiling over within myself and my girlfriend. I don't go outside anymore, I get nervous whenever I see certain things that remind me of being assaulted. I have terrible CPTSD from the incident and have to pay out of pocket for physical and psychological therapy even though I currently lack medical insurance in this state.
Still, you are right. I did the right thing at the time given the knowledge I had. Which was part of her manipulation. This is someone who told me for several years that she had leukemia and was given a short time to live, in order to extract tens of thousands of dollars from me. Even her suicide attempt, one of many, was a calculated attempt at emotional manipulation, and she held it over my head to extract more money from me.
Recreational programming used to be one of the rubrics to hire a software developer. If you have an intrinsic motivation to code, it would often be more valuable than your credentials. That's why junior devs would push up sites showcasing their resume of random projects they've done outside of education in order to give them an edge over their competition. Some companies would even encourage some time on the clock for working on side projects to prevent burnout.
At the same time, some of the workers in the industry were disgruntled that you were expected to enjoy coding in your spare time to keep up. While some truly just wanted to do it because they were good at it, and would rather turn off the software dev brain after work to do other things they enjoy in life.
With the advent of high-performing LLM's for coding, though, it seems more important to showcase how you can harness AI for your recreational projects than the projects themselves. It's a bit of a catch-22 for junior devs though.
I still think it's good rubric to get into programming if you like to do it recreationally, but these are just a few of my thoughts on how it can be problematic.
That's not the goal of recreational programming though. You don't do it for the ROI. It may have a ROI, but I don't do this for that, I do it because I am genuinely curious.
something about metrics and targets. When I got my first programming job, one of the reasons they hired me, apparently, was because I knew what components I had in my PC at home. If they had published the question beforehand and everybody knew to study it, it would no longer have made sense to use that question as a filter. You want the people who knew this stuff anyway, with no expectation of reward
> With the advent of high-performing LLM's for coding, though, it seems more important to showcase how you can harness AI for your recreational projects than the projects themselves.
people who ride horses recreationally don't really care that cars exist
I think yours and the rest of the comments to mine are missing the point of the presentation I'm critiquing, and missing the (admittedly cursorily added) escape hatch on why I think it's totally fine to program recreationally. It should be encouraged for everyone to learn. Akin to learning an instrument and/or music theory. It helps you in ways that you might never notice.
I kinda wonder if the hacker community is going to eventually be like the ham radio community in that there are no more jobs in it, and we just have the dedicated enthusiast tinkerers working on the side.
I'm not sure I follow...were there ever (many) jobs in the ham radio community? There have been people making/selling kits and radios, but it is _amateur_ radio, so was inherently non-commercial.
>The Italian artist Bruno Munari began building "useless machines" (macchine inutili) in the 1930s. He was a "third generation" Futurist and did not share the first generation's boundless enthusiasm for technology but sought to counter the threats of a world under machine rule by building machines that were artistic and unproductive.[
>The version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing inside the box again) appears to have been invented by MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but this nomenclature did not catch on. The device has also been called the "Leave Me Alone Box".
So here's a live demo of an ultimate thing I pleasure programmed:
I've been using Claude to recreationally developing a PDP-7 and Type 340 vector graphics display emulator, in order to run an early CAD system called PIXIE, which has the first known radial menus, driven by a light pen, developed at Cambridge in the late 1960's, whose 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code the author Heinz Lemke scanned and sent me.
Once I got it working, I told Mitch Bradley about how much I wanted a Forth system for it. Mitch has written useful things like OpenFirmware and CForth, and I was his summer intern at Sun in 1987, where we had a great time hacking his CForth into CADroid (a circuit editing system developed at LucasFilms) as an extension language.
Since then, Mitch developed his Sun Forth system into OpenFirmware for the boot ROMs of many like the Sparcstation, PowerPC Mac, and the OLPC. So I thought it would be fun to run Forth on the same machine that ran PIXIE, mainly because I'd love to work together and hack Forth with Mitch again after all these years, but also because Forth was the perfect language for the PDP-7.
So Mitch whipped up a PDP-7 Forth in one day with Claude, with Turtle Graphics!
It turns out that the PDP-7 instruction set is ideal for Forth. It has an "XCT" instruction for indirectly executing other instructions, which makes the Forth inner interpreter loop only require 3 instructions.
Interesting idea (on a web site that is hard to use).
AI taught me that I don't really like programming per se. I was very good at it, I believe, but it's never been what I really wanted. I want to build stuff. AI let's me do it faster than ever before. But more important: it takes care of the boring, tedious stuff that caused me to abandon far more projects than I completed.
So far, 2026 has been my most productive year, by great margin. Things that I wouldn't have even dreamed of starting became possible. And the pace keeps accelerating.
This is exactly my experience. It's interesting to see how some people are completely drained by agentic development (even though their management is not forcing them to be 10x engineers), and others thrive. I’d say those of us who thrive are in the minority, though.
The only thing that bothers me about this new era is that many projects are built on shaky foundations, as it is easier to ship, and expectations of delivery speed are often unrealistic. But that is more of a question of prioritizing quality and reliability, and not an inherent feature of development with AI.
what is your metric for "productivity" exactly? generating more and more lines of code? we have always had a way to do that which is called copy pasting. now what we have is a tool that vaguely understands the problem at hand and performing the copy pasting in a stochastic manner. do you get your llm to bring a novel solution to a problem that hasnt been explored before? otherwise, i seem to fail to see the value in this process. what is it that you are getting out of it that makes you "more productive". do you even learn anything new when you are not even the one doing the work. what is the point of anything at this point.
Releasing a major project in about a year (downread.com) while having several ones in the pipeline. Far more than I was able to do in previous years with similar time commitment.
> that vaguely understands the problem
This is not my experience at all (mostly with Opus). It can understand and explain to me even complex programs. And then edit them. Usually it solves tasks on the first attempt, if the instructions were precise enough (and with every new release, Opus needs less and less handholding / context).
> do you get your llm to bring a novel solution to a problem
> that hasnt been explored before?
No. But if I explain a novel solution to the LLM, it can create a complete implementation far faster than I ever could.
> do you even learn anything new
Usually not, unless I work in an area I have no experience in (like setting up an iOS app). But that's not even the point. I don't do it to learn; I do it to build products that either don't exist yet, or are better than the existing ones. These projects are no rocket science, but they are very labour-intensive.
i see. i guess its just my view that is different. i believe the value is in the process of producing, not driving an agent to get something to exist. because if im not learning anything new, is it really me that is producing? as long as you just keep prompting an llm at every opportunity you get, you will be at the exact same spot you are right now and may be easily outraced by someone else who just as well prompts an ai. i believe learning is perpetual no matter the amount of experience. now, are we going to achieve agi? will this really matter then? i guess that is another topic for later.
I've been lucky enough that that for most of my career so far I've been able to do a lot of stuff that I genuinely enjoy. In other words, I've been paid to do recreational programming. It hasn't all been like that, but there's been enough to keep me happy.
It's changing now, though. I don't really get joy from programming any more. I used to do things because they were challenging. I would ask myself "can I really do this" and the joy came from seeing that, yes, I really can. But now the answer to "can I do this" is increasingly just "yes". Actually doing it is just work at that point. I don't get joy from being a mindless button pusher.
I know and understand it. However I see a lot of people being sad and angry because of LLMs/AI agents. I would like to add to this website section about LLMs/AI. You can use them or not at all if you want. I guess nobody forces you to use "magic" AI in your hobby projects.
You could practice the magic in your 9-5 too before.
If you do so now, your coworker has built two features and automated some other job in the time you found the best design pattern for a particular problem.
Yeah. During job use AI if you have to (or just change job if you can). In your free time do programming by hand if you really need. I can understand it but some people can not handle it. I read on Hacker News, Reddit and some other places that people are sad and angry about LLMs/AI. They usually say some shit such as no more problem solving or AI do all work for them.
When you have made a life and career out of a particular skillset, like writing code, the fact that a machine is now doing your job is a hard swallow pill.
You will keep the denial and finding all the cons for as long as you can.
"Oh, but it's not clean", "Oh, but it's a spaghetti mess".
Because accepting that the previous points don't matter anymore in the overwhelming majority of cases, and the technology keeps getting better at each release is difficult.
It is sad after all. I enjoyed the magic and craft too. Now I'm a borderline meat relay, who'se added value is only because business and product people are too lazy to instruct the tools.
It's actually worse than that. In a repo where there is a heavy amount of AI code, it becomes impossible to manually write code. The AI code favors obtuse, unmaintainable mess (from the standpoint of a non-AI dev). Constantly overwriting your changes, large comments, hacky logic, overly-defensive programming, misunderstandings that the LLM made that cause you to waste hours debugging.
I've come to the realization that AI code bases are effectively AI-only code bases, unless one is using AI as just a code-autocomplete, then that seems mostly fine. But most devs are using it as an end2end implementation tool, having it 1-shot full features, and then iterating on them with the agent afterwards. The amount of churn and terrible code stops the manual coder from doing anything effectively.
In my own team's codebase, I'm confident that we would actually be further along without AI, and that AI coding is a hindrance (although AI debugging seems to be a pretty good tool). It is made worse that everyone does code reviews with AI now, and it constantly gets things wrong, and when its right, it's usually for the most basic, unimportant issues (again with the overly defensive coding style). This waste the manual coder time trying to figure out if the issue its requesting a fix for is an actual problem or not.
> If you do so now, your coworker has built two features and automated some other job in the time you found the best design pattern for a particular problem.
And his stuff is also broken, whereas mine is not. So in the end he isn't actually faster than me.
No shortage of universal statements here. We all know it. This is the way it is. But now the goalpost moves to that I will starve in two months time instead?
Of course failing reality itself, one can just move on to psychobabbling[1] about the inner state of people who are disagreeable towards their inevitability.
163 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 14.0 ms ] threadhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKMk6fcKbwE
Now that AI makes it so easy to play yer guitar, there's a lot more shutting up to do!
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@TsodingDaily
I was looking for this one. It's far beyond a mere "style". It breaks the entire premise.
Being a "problem solver" means you live with the code you write on a daily basis the same way as anyone with any other skill such as woodworking or sewing/knitting.
For the people who think writing code (without AI) is so hard that they make it a separate "thing" away from their usual life, I have to also wonder whether they can cook their own breakfast.
Have been used some spare time to learn common lisp and write a manual project, still use web based AI as a quick search method.
But I managed to learn some common lisp and how to do cffi in common lisp and
- use gtk4 cffi binding to start a GUI app - write a ghostty cffi to encode/decode terminal escape sequences - write a libssh2 cffi to communicate with a ssh server
Hope I can build a minimal SSH Terminal using common lisp to keep on experiment and exploration
I have a bunch of abandoned repos. I used to want to finish some of them, so perhaps I can show them to some people and get a in-domain job, but recently I realized that it is probably impossible for me to do so. I don’t have success because I don’t chase it. I chase fun and that’s what I should expect, not other things like career switch or monetary rewards.
Teaching myself assembler was harder because I had no docs. I was so clueless I actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called to ask where I could get a manual. The sales rep who answered the phone must have taken pity on me because he mailed the CPU manual for free. I still have the purple reference card and remember the common opcodes by heart (https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Datasheets/M...)
The first time I made money was about 18 months later when I wrote a pretty handy disk utility program. Stayed up all Friday night finishing it. Copied onto floppies I sold for $5 at the local user's group Saturday morning . Made $140 and got my first 28 customers. That was enough to get me hooked on making software and selling it. ~40 years, three startups, over a dozen products, hundreds of people employed, couple million customers and two PC Magazine Product of Year awards later - regret nothing. Started on a lark to learn and have fun. Much was learned, fun was had. Wonderful journey - highly recommend.
Is there an equivalent to that today? As soon as a cool technology appears, there are startups selling something within a few weeks. What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Well, hitting the first home run took about a decade full of base hits and more than a few strike-outs on the way to figuring out what I needed to know to do a tech startup well.
> What is the "weird" kid doing today?
Over the last decade I've spent increasing pro bono time trying to 'pay it forward' talking to classes and groups of erstwhile entrepreneurs, so I've heard versions of that question a LOT. It actually took me a couple years before I realized there is no 'right' answer because the right thing for each person differs depending their unique personality, skills, interests, context and life journey.
The most helpful thing I can share isn't a guess about which target you should aim for but rather some advice about how to approach your journey. First, I hope you want to be a tech entrepreneur because that's the only thing I know about. I have no idea what skills will be in demand to get a high-paying, secure job or how to get promoted. I had to become an entrepreneur because I was terrible at being an employee.
I never aimed for my guess at what would be "hot" next and I doubt my guess would be right anyway. Every time I found success it was by starting with a real problem some customer actually had. Initially that customer was me or a friend but it doesn't matter. It just has to be a serious enough problem that motivated customers are actively looking for new and better solutions than what exists. Then figure out a way to solve their problem better enough that they'll actually buy it. It doesn't have to be perfect, just better enough. In fact, some of my best products became hits by cleverly solving one part of a problem SUPER well, at the cost of some serious downside in other areas. For example, I desperately wanted a Zig-Zag Widget but good ones were stupid expensive and the ones ordinary schmoes like me could afford Zigged and Zagged like shit. But I figured out I how to make a Zig-Only Widget I could actually afford. No Zag but it Zigged better than the best and I realized, that was a trade-off I'd be okay with, especially after we worked on adding some 'pseudo-Zag' features that blunted the most annoying parts of not Zagging. The world's best Zig (but no Zag) at 1/4th the price of even a half-assed Zig-Zag. Not really new technology, just a very clever mixture of the exact right old tech with a little new stuff, some clever UX innovations and cool workflow integrations. First Product of the Year.
If prototyping dozens of different iterations and trying each one out with real, live problem-having customers and listening empathetically to their constant complaints, ridiculous demands and occasional awesome suggestions sounds like fun, then you may have found your calling. If you just want to write great code for a good paycheck and be left in peace, then run the other way.
To anyone that might listen, I wanna add my own insight on this: it's all about design. Not in any "shapes and colors" way, but in "Notes on the Synthesis of the Artificial", way.
People in tech obsess about, well, tech. While what sells and builds businesses is great design, achieving the right balance of user and developer experience and delivering some abstract shape that fits extraordinarily well with some high-dimensional definition of a problem space.
It's never been about the code, the tools, the tech. It's all about how things fit together. Think about "quality of life" mods in popular games. The more complicated abstract systems our minds engage with, the more opportunities to design something are created. The human cognitive space has a lot, and I mean A LOT of problems waiting to be solved that only need someone to realize how to build some abstract shape that fits better that what is currently available.
My mom and I used to take turns reading the code from the magazines out loud while the other typed the code into our Commodore 64. She used to say things like "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but thwarted was actually learning something" (no, my mom doesn't call me "thwarted").
I hope its "Ted" and not "Wart".
What were these products?
You almost want to find out if that person is still around, to thank them.
Nearly 40 years post college, I still play with coding and system design on my time and TBH, much more satisfaction and happiness from that than my day job.
Do you have a blog somewhere we can read?
The VIC-20 had a particularly good one. It could be read by children and gradually introduced programming concepts in such a way to ease anxiety. For example by stating that error messages were "your VIC-20's way of helping you". Since BASIC was the only thing the machine could do without an additional purchase, this was incredibly helpful.
You can still build a table from scratch even though you can buy one from Ikea.
etc etc
So if an external factor like LLM prowess “killed it all” for you, I would suggest you may not have been intrinsically motivated in the first place.
I like to swim.
(Just in case: Above is metaphor attempt.)
If you want to call something AI Slop, and parrot terms from papers you've never read and whose meaning you don't actually understand, then please at least write in complete sentences and explain exactly what it was that made you think it was AI Slop, and what you think of the paper that coined the term "Stochastic Parrot", because your drive-by one-line anti-AI comments are much more tedious and unoriginal than anything an LLM can generate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48070022
I checked it out several months later and the UI issues are still there.
I try to extrude a sketch (you know, a basic and critical feature in a CAD program) and click on add profile and it does nothing, it doesn't even explain what I did wrong.
that's kinda the gist of it
i don't wanna use software that nobody cares about
People use punctuation and grammar for things they care about.
also i never said "stochastic parrot" lollol
what a weird non sequitur
https://hyperties.org/databases/playground/sun-founders-big-...
I have many years of expeiments, a selection of just 3
https://k8.fingswotidun.com/static/ide/?gist=ad96329670965dc...
https://c50.fingswotidun.com/
https://lerc.neocities.org
But lots of things like evolving pictures, palettes, or little creatures. Fluid simulation, cellular automata. Fluid simulation in cellular automata. Enough game Jams that I no longer know how many games I have made.
I have done all sorts of things, I am undeterred by AI. For some things I will now get AI to explore entire ideas. Other things I will do entirely myself, and many things will be varying degrees of each.
I see more opportunities for exploration. If you can see further by standing on the shoulders of giants, why begrudge a personal giant assistant?
My exact feelings, its so unpleasant
That's our predicament in modern society - and I mean "modern" as in the obsolete value system and culture that produced the shameful century of world wars - that is stealing our dreams and choking the future of humanity. We didn't learn the lesson the last time fascists took over the world.
The message of the story was that imagination is our hope, it has the power to create new futures from the ruins of the old and the past, to bring forth new life from the dead.
Being a now hobbyist programmer, AI is just fun for me chatting with it, throwing structs and snippets at each other, but boy am I reading some horror stories about what it does for jobs, working conditions and code quality. The thing is, its just humans making great inventions and then as usual, fucking everything up with them.
Now imagine how depressing the industry is when you don't actually agree that this stuff really works. People are tripping over themselves to replace human craft with a tool that can't even do the job properly. It's so awful to watch.
It has never been a better time to be a recreational programmer and I have never been more excited with all the changes! As someone that started making html pages with dial-up, I am just gobsmacked with LLM's! Programming has helped me immensely in my career as a professional firefighter and I hope to have a second act in tech... we'll see!
If you actually enjoy the process of debugging, discovering root causes and fixing things, emergency medicine can be very rewarding & fulfilling on an importantly-human level.
Fair warning: There are also some really bad experiences you will never un-see, if you're not ready for that I would stay away. Seeing death is objectively worse than the most catastrophic datacenter outage.
I administered CPR to a stranger who was overdosing on pills and resuscitated them until emergency services arrived and could take over, after hearing someone screaming for help while I was taking a walk.
I ran into an old high school acquiatance who told me he was on psychedelics, came upstairs for a moment to say hi, another old acquaintance was there, also tripping. I was inside the apartment for maybe 60 seconds before I saw the second person's eyes flick for just a split second toward a pair of sharp scissors on the table. Without hesitation, I lept for the scissors at the same moment as him, we both grabbed onto them and he tried as fast as he could to slice his neck open with them. After a few seconds of struggle I managed to shove him off, hand the scissors to someone else and then restrain him until I felt he was no longer an immediate danger to himself. That's actually not the only person I've been in this exact situation with, another friend was under the influence and tried the same exact thing and I had to literally beat him into submission and keep watch until he came out of it.
One time I heard screaming and came outside to see two neighbors in a domestic incident. The male was trying to kill the female and his mom was preventing her from escaping. I managed to get her off the property, call the police and get him charged. After a summer vacation, I came back home and heard more shouting. I run outside to see the same male wearing heavy boots and an ankle monitor, a few seconds away from kicking in a glass door to kill his girlfriend, who now was holding their newborn child. He kept saying he was going to kill her. I raced over and tackled him to the ground when he was about five feet from them, already having broken the glass door. His friend and mom kept trying to get me off of him and I started screaming so other neighbors could hear that if someone didn't call the police, I was going to have to kill a man in defense. I was bashing his head into the concrete to keep him from escaping while his mom and friend were pulling at my legs. Eventually he slipped away and cut the ankle monitor, and the police had to go on a manhunt across the city for days. The whole time his mom is trying to get me arrested, telling the police I had cannabis in my apartment.
I had to break into my neighbor's home once to take on a burglar who had locked her out of her home, brought him to heel, tackled him and got the cops over. This guy turned out to be experiencing a mental breakdown so we spent some hours convincing him to get into an ambulance and I don't believe he was charged.
I stopped a public shooting after I saw two people arguing after a block party and heard one go, "I'm a veteran, I don't need this shit." I had JUST finished restraining a large man after he'd assaulted my friend, and handed the guy over to security (the second time; first time he broke free from them and I had to come tackle a d restrain him a second time). I hadn't even put my booksack back on before I was slinging it to the ground again to race towards the guy who was running over to the trunk of his car. I dived onto the trunk and he tried fighting me and demanding I get off or his car, and I kept kicking him off and said, "Listen, the only person who might die tonight is you, if you don't fucking get in your car right now and drive away." Turns out he had a loaded AR in there with several mags. I got my friend to remove the other person from the situation, the guy was an immigrant and didn't even understand he was about to be shot and killed. After that, I threw a punch at this guy and told him if he didn't get in his car I was going to fucking kill him. Finally, he got in and left. Most of the very packed crowd never even realized what happene...
About your sister, feel free to discard this thought as we don’t know each other at all: You did the right thing to save her; somehow separate that from the relationship animosity (not sure how); but it’s 2 things, don’t combine them.
The difficulty is in knowing how much her staying alive negatively affected my life. It sent us into crippling debt, nearly cost my girlfriend her job, nearly cost me my relationship, and caused my Constitutional rights to be severely violated after being illegally assaulted by the police inside my own home without a warrant or probable cause... she had us swatted over completely false and entirely uncorroborated allegations in order to prevent me from being a witness against her in custody case (a felony, I know), and sent to prison over bogus charges that we are now fighting. I wish I could be more specific but I'm still fighting the case while she is still free and terrorizing others. My animals were nearly shot and I could have been shot. The officer specifically retrieved his gun with visible glee upon learning we had cats.
Instead I now live with severe permanent disability from the assault. I can barely hold a cup of water right now and I'm in my early 30's. I can't help around the house and things are piling up. I missed an important job interview while in prison and am struggling financially as I was prohibited from returning to California to work during my bond. It's a really hard thing to process. The feeling goes beyond hatred; hatred feels petty compared to the deep-seated resentments now boiling over within myself and my girlfriend. I don't go outside anymore, I get nervous whenever I see certain things that remind me of being assaulted. I have terrible CPTSD from the incident and have to pay out of pocket for physical and psychological therapy even though I currently lack medical insurance in this state.
Still, you are right. I did the right thing at the time given the knowledge I had. Which was part of her manipulation. This is someone who told me for several years that she had leukemia and was given a short time to live, in order to extract tens of thousands of dollars from me. Even her suicide attempt, one of many, was a calculated attempt at emotional manipulation, and she held it over my head to extract more money from me.
At the same time, some of the workers in the industry were disgruntled that you were expected to enjoy coding in your spare time to keep up. While some truly just wanted to do it because they were good at it, and would rather turn off the software dev brain after work to do other things they enjoy in life.
With the advent of high-performing LLM's for coding, though, it seems more important to showcase how you can harness AI for your recreational projects than the projects themselves. It's a bit of a catch-22 for junior devs though.
I still think it's good rubric to get into programming if you like to do it recreationally, but these are just a few of my thoughts on how it can be problematic.
people who ride horses recreationally don't really care that cars exist
I prefer the term "Pleasure Programming", to de-emphasize how addictive it is.
>Permission to build useless things.
I prefer the term "Ultimate Things", to de-emphasize how useless they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useless_machine
>The Italian artist Bruno Munari began building "useless machines" (macchine inutili) in the 1930s. He was a "third generation" Futurist and did not share the first generation's boundless enthusiasm for technology but sought to counter the threats of a world under machine rule by building machines that were artistic and unproductive.[
>The version of the useless machine that became famous in information theory (basically a box with a simple switch which, when turned "on", causes a hand or lever to appear from inside the box that switches the machine "off" before disappearing inside the box again) appears to have been invented by MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, while he was a graduate student at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky dubbed his invention the "ultimate machine", but this nomenclature did not catch on. The device has also been called the "Leave Me Alone Box".
So here's a live demo of an ultimate thing I pleasure programmed:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/ultimate/
What this is:
I've been using Claude to recreationally developing a PDP-7 and Type 340 vector graphics display emulator, in order to run an early CAD system called PIXIE, which has the first known radial menus, driven by a light pen, developed at Cambridge in the late 1960's, whose 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code the author Heinz Lemke scanned and sent me.
Once I got it working, I told Mitch Bradley about how much I wanted a Forth system for it. Mitch has written useful things like OpenFirmware and CForth, and I was his summer intern at Sun in 1987, where we had a great time hacking his CForth into CADroid (a circuit editing system developed at LucasFilms) as an extension language.
https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware
https://github.com/MitchBradley/cforth
http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/forth.html
Since then, Mitch developed his Sun Forth system into OpenFirmware for the boot ROMs of many like the Sparcstation, PowerPC Mac, and the OLPC. So I thought it would be fun to run Forth on the same machine that ran PIXIE, mainly because I'd love to work together and hack Forth with Mitch again after all these years, but also because Forth was the perfect language for the PDP-7.
So Mitch whipped up a PDP-7 Forth in one day with Claude, with Turtle Graphics!
https://github.com/MitchBradley/pdp7forth
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/forth/
It turns out that the PDP-7 instruction set is ideal for Forth. It has an "XCT" instruction for indirectly executing other instructions, which makes the Forth inner interpreter loop only require 3 instructions.
AI taught me that I don't really like programming per se. I was very good at it, I believe, but it's never been what I really wanted. I want to build stuff. AI let's me do it faster than ever before. But more important: it takes care of the boring, tedious stuff that caused me to abandon far more projects than I completed.
So far, 2026 has been my most productive year, by great margin. Things that I wouldn't have even dreamed of starting became possible. And the pace keeps accelerating.
The only thing that bothers me about this new era is that many projects are built on shaky foundations, as it is easier to ship, and expectations of delivery speed are often unrealistic. But that is more of a question of prioritizing quality and reliability, and not an inherent feature of development with AI.
Releasing a major project in about a year (downread.com) while having several ones in the pipeline. Far more than I was able to do in previous years with similar time commitment.
> that vaguely understands the problem
This is not my experience at all (mostly with Opus). It can understand and explain to me even complex programs. And then edit them. Usually it solves tasks on the first attempt, if the instructions were precise enough (and with every new release, Opus needs less and less handholding / context).
> do you get your llm to bring a novel solution to a problem > that hasnt been explored before?
No. But if I explain a novel solution to the LLM, it can create a complete implementation far faster than I ever could.
> do you even learn anything new
Usually not, unless I work in an area I have no experience in (like setting up an iOS app). But that's not even the point. I don't do it to learn; I do it to build products that either don't exist yet, or are better than the existing ones. These projects are no rocket science, but they are very labour-intensive.
It's changing now, though. I don't really get joy from programming any more. I used to do things because they were challenging. I would ask myself "can I really do this" and the joy came from seeing that, yes, I really can. But now the answer to "can I do this" is increasingly just "yes". Actually doing it is just work at that point. I don't get joy from being a mindless button pusher.
I know and understand it. However I see a lot of people being sad and angry because of LLMs/AI agents. I would like to add to this website section about LLMs/AI. You can use them or not at all if you want. I guess nobody forces you to use "magic" AI in your hobby projects.
If you do so now, your coworker has built two features and automated some other job in the time you found the best design pattern for a particular problem.
When you have made a life and career out of a particular skillset, like writing code, the fact that a machine is now doing your job is a hard swallow pill.
You will keep the denial and finding all the cons for as long as you can.
"Oh, but it's not clean", "Oh, but it's a spaghetti mess".
Because accepting that the previous points don't matter anymore in the overwhelming majority of cases, and the technology keeps getting better at each release is difficult.
It is sad after all. I enjoyed the magic and craft too. Now I'm a borderline meat relay, who'se added value is only because business and product people are too lazy to instruct the tools.
I've come to the realization that AI code bases are effectively AI-only code bases, unless one is using AI as just a code-autocomplete, then that seems mostly fine. But most devs are using it as an end2end implementation tool, having it 1-shot full features, and then iterating on them with the agent afterwards. The amount of churn and terrible code stops the manual coder from doing anything effectively.
In my own team's codebase, I'm confident that we would actually be further along without AI, and that AI coding is a hindrance (although AI debugging seems to be a pretty good tool). It is made worse that everyone does code reviews with AI now, and it constantly gets things wrong, and when its right, it's usually for the most basic, unimportant issues (again with the overly defensive coding style). This waste the manual coder time trying to figure out if the issue its requesting a fix for is an actual problem or not.
And his stuff is also broken, whereas mine is not. So in the end he isn't actually faster than me.
No shortage of universal statements here. We all know it. This is the way it is. But now the goalpost moves to that I will starve in two months time instead?
Of course failing reality itself, one can just move on to psychobabbling[1] about the inner state of people who are disagreeable towards their inevitability.
It is so sad, after all. Many tears.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50086406