> In traditional niche dev circles, respect is earned slowly through years of activity in their respective fora, sharing elegant code, displays of genuine curiosity, and through sharing deep domain knowledge along the way. At the end of the day, these communities don’t care if your code works at all, but instead care that you know why and how it works. To me, an LLM functions best as a force multiplier, not a surrogate. In the hands of an expert who already understands a domain deeply, it could act like a lever.1 But in these niche communities, the entire exercise is in the learning. Using an LLM to generate the finished piece doesn’t make us craftsmen; it just robs us of the craft.

IMO, in many, many cases, the journey is the destination. That's what makes learning challenging and enjoyable. Example: I ran a field team installing Sun servers. I would partition disks on the command line. My "Phone-A-Friend lifeline" team member would pull up some GUI tool, overlap partitions, failing miserably, and I had to re-do all his work.

I am a (not very good) amateur pianist. (but a damn good photographer). An "analog" piano is about as smart as an old SLR or TLR camera. The skill is almost entirely with the user, give or take optics or tone/touch.

So, I could work on a difficult piece of music and engage my senses and grow as I go, or I could just plug the ipad or laptop into the electronic piano's input jack and fake it. For a "music minus one" piece, you do that with the orchestral part, and do the solo work on your own.

"Better" (or worse) yet, Rachmaninoff recorded piano rolls, so you can hear him play the 88 today as he did earlier. It's good education, but without the effort, no growth, no accomplishment and no pride.

I have a similar feeling about photography, where to me all the autofocus and processing are there because I can't delete them, and I aim just to capture a photo "as I saw it" with minimal fudging (the mind fudges) and when I see something spectacular coming, I reach for the Swedish SLR. But the point is "Veni Vidi Velvia". I came, I saw and I composed. My Dad was an artist who worked in oils. Photography, to me, is self-expression, and on other forums, I avoid "contests" like flesh-eating-bacteria. Only trolls "rate others' feelings"

It's not that the result doesn't matter. Learning astronomy, I marveled at closed-form solutions like Kepler's Laws. But the rest was all numerical methods. In many cases, how you do something has as much meaning as getting it checked off. One gets to learn. One gets to be creative. Or to incessantly push buttons.