LLM coding tools killing the joy of coding for some builders
The July 2026 'What Are You Working On' thread included a telling comment: 'LLM coding has made coding less rewarding so I'm thinking about starting a new hobby as coding for fun has become prompting.' This wasn't a lone voice. The thread showed a split between builders who are shipping faster with AI tools and those who feel the craft has been hollowed out.
This matters because side projects and hobby coding have historically been a major pipeline for new tools, languages, and open source libraries. If the intrinsic motivation to code erodes, that pipeline shrinks. The 'What Are You Working On' thread is a decent barometer of builder energy, and the mix this month skewed toward people maintaining existing apps rather than starting bold new things.
The counterpoint is that plenty of people in the same thread are building in C, writing toy kernels, and doing hardware projects precisely because those things resist AI shortcuts. There may be a bifurcation happening: AI-assisted product work on one side, craft-oriented technical work on the other.
So what?
If you're building developer tools, pay attention to whether your users are in the 'shipping faster' camp or the 'craft' camp. These groups want different things from tooling. The craft camp is growing as a reaction to AI commoditization, and tools that serve their specific needs, precision, control, legibility, have an opening.