The Fate of the Hobbyist Programmer

Stephen Ramsay

Among woodworkers, there is a longstanding distinction between “Normites” and “Neanders.”

“Normites,” who prefer power tools to hand tools, are named for Norm Abrams, host of the US TV series The New Yankee Workshop (1989–2009). To say that Abrams “preferred” the use of power tools in the making of furniture understates the case a bit; he saw no task in the realm of joinery and cabinet making for which power electricity was inappropriate. His followers love gadgets, speed, automation, and the undeniable accuracy that often accompanies the use of such tools.

“Neanders” are named for Neanderthals—the much-maligned (and quite extinct) branch of the genus Homo under which modern humans are also categorized. The Neanders’ cynosure was Roy Underhill, host of the series The Woodwright’s Shop (1980–2017). Where Abrams reached for motorized router and drill press, Underhill reached for mallet and chisel. And again, the preference seemed thoroughgoing and entire. Hand saws, brace and bit, hand planes, and even (on occasion) a foot-powered lathe. Neanders value process, quiet, tactility, and the slow acquisition of mastery.

I am not a woodworker myself; I break into a cold sweat at the thought of hanging a picture on the wall and am in general the least “handy” person you’re likely to meet (I’m more of a kitchen-and-laundry sort of chap). But I grew up around woodworkers, and so have known about the distinction above since around the time it first appeared (apparently on USENET) in the 1990s.

Still, I’ve always known that if I were ever to get over my fear of toolbelts, I’d certainly side with the Neanders. In fact, all my weird little hobbies have a kind of Late Pleistoscene vibe to them. I hand-sharpen knives on Japanese whetstones; my preference for making coffee is quiet, process-focused, and meticulously overengineered; I’ve been a dedicated 19th-century shaving reenactor for probably twenty years; and I still write most things—for example, all drafts of this dispatch—using fountain and dip pens. My kitchen is remarkably spare when it comes to gadgets.

I could wax romantic about all of this, but you already know the sorts of things people say about these sorts of things. Books have been written on the subject. I’d merely like to point out that Neander tendencies are entirely the province of the amateur. You can buy handmade furniture made by professionals, of course (and you can expect to pay dearly for it). But most furniture—indeed most fabrication of any kind, including the production of food and clothing—is the result of elaborate industrial processes that make Norm Abrams’s toolchest seem startlingly primitive.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this old divide among weekend woodworkers, because more and more I feel as if I undertake the task of computing like a Neander.

I vastly prefer the hard POSIX-y core of UNIX to any kind of GUI: terminals, command line tools, vi…I’ve even been known to use ed from time to time. I love the UNIX philosophy, the shell, and the way little single-purpose tools can be chained together and orchestrated into more complex and useful behaviors. C is, and I suspect always will be, my favorite programming language (or, at least, the one I always come back to). I only rarely use graphical desktop applications, and even then, I tend to use ones that are sort of UNIX-adjacent in their minimalism.

That’s always been a bit eccentric, but not conspicuously so; plenty of people who work with computers feel (and work) as I do, and while many are indeed old enough to remember US public television from the ’80s and ’90s, it is not entirely the province of the middle-aged hacker. No one has ever accused me of teaching some rebarbitive form of 1970s retro-computing when I show students how to solve research problems with command line tools. And I certainly don’t insist that they restrict themselves to the computational equivalent of treadle lathes.

But one wonders if hobbyist computing is in the process of sorting itself into Normite and Neander camps—the one entirely willing to vibe code their way to a solution, the other not only refusing to do so, but sticking to a set of tools that are not too conceptually distinct from those that were cutting edge in the days of the PDP-11. One senses a strange shift in the atmosphere. More people asking about C on Reddit; more people interested in suckless tools and minimalist window managers. Perhaps that’s just a function of the places I tend to hang (or maybe I’m hallucinating). Could we be entering a world in which programming is a starkly different thing for amateurs than it is for “professionals.”

Of course, it always has been, at some level; hobbyist programmers and solo hackers, whatever their accomplishments (and they are considerable), have never had to deal with managers insisting on this or that framework, metric, language, or methodology. No weekned engineer has ever had to work up the RoI (or worse, the Estimated Time to Project Completion) before getting on with it. I’ve always found the term “Enterprise Computing” a bit twee, but there’s no denying that PeopleSoft (to pick a random example) is a rather different undertaking than, say, ripgrep or jq (both of which were side projects). But for all that, coding is coding. Or was.

But we now seem to be entering a period of modernity in which software, like furniture, is the result of elaborate industrial processes that are no longer comparable to what even the most ambitious amateur might undertake. You can use power tools—read, AI—if you like. You can also do things the old-fashioned way. Perhaps you choose one or the other on principle. But in this new world, software is built with agentic AI using massive CI pipelines that can only be vaguely mimicked by even the most passionate weekend coder. Norm Abrams, even with what was assuredly a substantial budget, wasn’t trying to build a furniture factory, and it seems unlikely that your side project, even if you have no resistance at all to AI, is going to compel you to invest in API tokens (or GPUs) at the scale of even a modest a commercial venture. One might even wonder if “modest commercial ventures” will have to find another way to compete. Capitalism has been here before.

Will people stop creating software “for fun” under such a regime? It has probably already occurred to you that “solo hackers” and “weekend coders” with “side projects” are almost always people for whom creating software is also their day job. That is already a remarkable thing. One doubts that many weekend woodworkers (or knitters, or ceramicists, or what have you) are pursuing projects quite so continuous with their day jobs in industrial scale furniture, textile, or houseware manufacturing. It seems important to note that a very non-trivial number of professional software engineers also do it for fun. Will they continue to do so if doing so means not doing it with “power tools?” Or doing it with power tools that are attenuated version of the tools that are actually used in the industry?

The question, of course, is why. The “why” of woodworking, sourdough bread-making, hand-knitting, and any number of other arts and crafts has always been buoyed by two presumptions. The first, as one hapless romantic put it, is that this is all “soulcraft”—that acquiring the skill to do things “the old fashioned way” is spiritually satisfying in some way, even if only for the flow-states such work tends to induce. The second, though, while perhaps debatable, is the belief that handmade things are inherently better. I certainly think my sourdough bread is better than that of any commercial bakery I’ve ever been to (no matter how “artisanal” they say they are); the results of my slow-mo coffee brewing methods are without peer; handmade furniture lasts longer and has a “solidity” that is not to be found at any IKEA. If someone knits you a wool sweater, you will instinctively treat it like royalty. But the glorious truth is that you don’t have to. It may well outlast you and everything in your closet.

Does either calculus apply to software? If you believe that being reduced to reviewing pull requests written by robots all day amounts to something like “soulcrash”—or that the only kind of software AI can produce is “slop”—then perhaps it does. Perhaps you will code on the weekends so that you can get into that Neander zone by making something “real” (and not cheap and ephemeral). But if you’ve come to believe that software created with agentic AI is as good or better than anything you can produce “by hand,” or that the considerable skill and effort involved in making “homemade” code is not worth the trouble…

There have been many days when writing software has seemed to me something like soulcraft. I’ve looked up from a project and noticed that hours have gone by while I’m deep in some network of abstractions. Nothing is worse than a bug that takes days to find—except, of course, finding it and fixing it. “Refactoring” is a piteously bland word for something that can be strangely captivating: tearing something down and making it better. Cleaner. More elegant. More solid. Part of the reason I love C is that I know it as I imagine woodworkers know the quirks of their block planes.

It may be, though, that all of that is about to be so far from the way software is “really” made that only a very small group of eccentrics actually bothers. Like the Neander setting up their workshop with nary an electrical outlet in sight, perhaps the Dijkstrite¹ will shut down all access to AI and fire up their man pages rejoicing in the wabi-sabi of integers that might overflow, edge cases that won’t surface until the hundredth run, and a permanent list of unwritten unit tests and underdocumented features. It’s all a bit messy. And perfect, for reasons that have nothing to do with any of that. They will brag of these austerities as one having triumphed over a character-building adversity. They will insist that their code is “better” in some indefinable, but essential way. Soulcraft, man.

There will be people like that, I think. But perhaps not many.

Keywords: Programming, AI