July 22, 2026
Ctrl+Alt+Existential Crisis
Making
Programmer says asking AI to build stuff feels empty — and the comments got brutally real
TLDR: Beej’s post says the real joy of building comes from doing it yourself, not just telling a machine what to make. Commenters turned that into a bigger fight about whether artificial intelligence is stealing the fun, the pride, and even the point of creative work.
A veteran programmer, teacher, novelist, artist, and deck-builder has dropped a surprisingly emotional blog post about a very modern identity crisis: does it still feel like you made something if a chatbot did most of the work? His answer is basically no — and that sadness hit a nerve. He says the joy comes from making, not just requesting, and that having a machine produce the thing for you can leave the whole experience feeling weirdly hollow.
That sparked a full-on feelings avalanche in the comments. One of the strongest reactions was pure existential dread: there’s “never been anything quite like this before,” wrote one commenter, arguing that artificial intelligence is forcing people to rethink what work, art, and craftsmanship even mean. Others got more blunt. One person said they don’t want to see machine-generated posts at all and wish there were clear labels so they could “happily avoid them.” Ouch. Another cut straight to the emotional core, saying side projects have “completely” lost their appeal since these tools arrived.
The big drama? Whether this is nostalgia talking, or a real loss of human satisfaction. Some commenters tried to define the dividing line as control: if you can understand how changing the input changes the result, it still feels like yours. If not, maybe you’re just the manager of your own hobby. And yes, the darkest accidental punchline of the whole thread might be this: people are now feeling guilty for wanting to actually make things themselves.
Key Points
- •The article frames ongoing debate around generative AI in software development as an "AI dev schism" with both losses and gains.
- •Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall provides his professional and educational background, including industry work, teaching, and partial use of Claude Code, to explain his perspective.
- •Hall states that in the essay, "AI" refers specifically to generative AI and large language models.
- •The article includes examples of Hall’s own creations across media: a science-fiction novel excerpt, a woodcut artwork, carpentry work, and software code.
- •Hall uses these examples to set up a distinction between fulfillment from personally making things and output produced at one’s request by others or by AI.