With everyone talking about Claude code and Opus4.5, writing code manually looks very bearish. Before the LLMs, writing code was manual, meaning everything needed to be written by hand. Today, at least for me, I use LLMs to write the boilerplates, or anything that I know exactly what it does. When coding, I mostly use cli helpers like aider which stands beside answering my questions.

Recently, TailwindCSS laid off 75% of its workforce. This is because of how LLM works: people dont read docs anymore, LLM has already scraped that part. [ref]

StackOverflow also shared that the activity on their platform has decreased a lot. The activity right now is similar to that of their early years. Many people also argue that this is good for developers since StackOverflow was not developer-friendly. Users on the platform are rude towards everyone who tries to ask questions. So, in a way, developers like LLMs as they don’t need Stack Overflow now; although Stack Overflow is still relevant, the end is near. [ref]

The topic I want to write about is coding as a hobby, how it has and will change after LLMs.

I still write code as a hobby, I do work on my homelab, code interesting ideas, often with LLM’s help. If I compare this with a few years earlier, I used to feel like I owned the code since I had written it 100%, something like an emotional attachment towards the project. Today, when I start writing without LLM, I often feel that whatever I’m going to write can be written by an LLM in a few prompts.

So, the motivation goes down a lot, and it gets depressing since something I have spent thousands of hours on, now can be done easily by prompting, is not easy to digest. But the whole point of coding was to solve problems; if that’s being helped by AI, we should find bigger problems now. We can use this powerful tool to solve even bigger problems much faster.

Well, that’s the harsh truth. LLMs can now write code better than ever. I cannot imagine how powerful they’ll be in 5-10years. So, if AI is going to write code, what are most people going to do?

If all companies deploy AI agents and start layoffs, won’t it affect the economy of the country, in turn affecting the company’s stock price? Can this be a reason to lay off people?

VibeCoding is also bringing people from different backgrounds to use code to solve problems. Recently, Indian Chess GM Vidit Gujrathi started exploring VibeCoding, which is interesting.

Anyway, I still work on hobby projects, not because there are ways to do it faster, but because I enjoy solving problems. Thanks to AI, I can now aim higher as a programmer.

BTW, I’m currently writing wingman, it is an LLM codehelper from CLI. It’s in a very early phase, but I’m looking to work on this for some time to see how it goes.