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Manny Costa replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted September 4, 2026

Ben, this one really made me think. 🤔 We actually met a long time ago, back in the late 2000s at a ColdFusion meetup in NYC. I've been doing web development for over 30 years now, so I've watched a lot of technologies come and go, and AI definitely feels different. I agree with a lot of what you're... read entire comment.

James Moberg replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted September 1, 2026

@Bill Nourse, That's funny that you mention looms... I've been working on a write-up regarding the "Tetrad of media effects" and have identified 31 "technologies" that were replaced. The earliest instance I could find was Socrates arguing that writing would destroy memory and produce "the appearance... read entire comment.

Bill Nourse replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted September 1, 2026

Hey Ben, looms made it possible to mass-produce sweaters. Looms didn't replace the art of knitting, they made sweaters more economical and available. You can argue that the quality is lower. I think AI is similar to the art of hand-coding. With customers, people still value hand-knitted sweaters, gi... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted September 1, 2026

Just realize customers couldn't care less if you did. Just realize that customers never cared about anything we (developers) did. Not the server, not the database, not the client-side frameworks, not the back-end frameworks, not the use of version-control on the code. All of those choices were about... read entire comment.

Mike Peters replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

Ben, I agree; it needs to stay fun. AI is surely having both a positive and a negative impact on most programmers. I enjoy problem-solving system design using coloured drawings on paper. Lots of drawings a day. I'm also a slow coder and make lots of typos. 😎 I finally started using LLM AI this year... read entire comment.

James Moberg replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

@Gregory Alexander, I use multiple platforms depending on the need. LLM-wise, it's Claude, Gemini, Grok and OpenAI. (I also use OpenRouter ColdFusion 2016+ and CFHTTP.) When I'm working on something that's not just research, an idea that requires special generation (art, video, audio), I prefer usin... read entire comment.

Bill Nourse replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. If what you love is hand coding, yes, that has dramatically flipped on its head with AI. Because agentic coding is faster, less expensive, and more accurate each day, hand coding has become less valued, even with legacy code.... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

@Sharon, Well I'm glad at least that I'm not the only one that truly enjoyed the coding parts of it. I think one of the most interesting parts of this transition will be the writing. Posts like this one that might resonate with people are likely going to be fewer and farther between. It will truly p... read entire comment.

Sharon replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

If coding is only relegated to a hobby in my life, I'll probably end up leaving it completely. I get as much joy out of making things with my hands from wood or fiber or even plastic with a 3D printer. I think the industry will still need us oldsters to troubleshoot the AI slop for enough time to me... read entire comment.

Jim Priest replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

Great post. I recently got a new Pebble watch and thought it would be fun to hack on it and create some watchfaces and apps. But when I started I just had no enthusiasm for it. Either I can find answers by Googling (so old school!) or just throw AI at it. And while I know I could hack on it without ... read entire comment.

James Moberg replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 28, 2026

I have no post-high school education regarding programming. (er, but I took Basic, Advanced Basic, Cobol, Pascal and IBM RPG II classes in the mid-80's while in high school.) My early interest in computers came from tinkering with the Commodore 64 that was on display at the local K-mart and the TRS-... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

@Gary, No need apologize for liking to use AI to jam out products in your hobby time. That's exactly why I'm considering this "hobby" time - you can do with it whatever you want. From a hobby standpoint, I just don't really have a desire to build out a lot of different properties. I don't have much ... read entire comment.

Gary F replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

Just as you have, Ben, I've been coding for many decades too. I've coded the same basic components and endless UIs for new projects over and over and over. Sure it's slightly different each time and there are always interesting twists and challenges, but now with agentic coding it highlights how muc... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

@Ben B., I don't mean to denigrate AI at all. It's powerful stuff and is helping me get things done. Even in places where I still want to hand-code, I'm using AI to help me consider workflows and alternatives. And then sometimes I hand-code the suggestions; and sometimes I just let it rip. Right now... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

@Ricky, That's one of the exciting things about AI - the ability to onboard much quicker into new topics. As far as what to do, I'm the wrong person to ask - I'm probably one of the more boring people you'll meet 😜 But I know that a lot of people have loved using the Raspberry Pi computer boards. I... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

@Gregory, Chess is actually a perfect parallel. Just because we have computers that can beat us at chess, it's still a wildly popular game (maybe more so now than ever). That's how I see "coding". It's a personal challenge, now - even if there are ways that the computers can do it faster, I'm still ... read entire comment.

Ben Brown replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

I've been in the programming as hobby since the apple II. I agree the finding your way through a problem is rewarding and entertaining. But then life happened and found myself in a rut I couldn't get out of. My speciality was build systems and development tool chains, programming is hard! So I becam... read entire comment.

Ricky J replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 27, 2026

Im 57 and thinking of getting a commadore 64 to learn basic. I had one as a kid and had no clue what to do with it. I also want to make a rig out of an 11inch tablet and mini keyboard to learn python and data mining using ai as a teacher. That being said, what are some fun things to do that are codi... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Programming As A Hobby In The Age Of AI

Comment posted August 26, 2026

I'll let you know when I figure it out 😜 I hope that I still get to build "things" for "people". That's ultimately what always made me the happiest at work. Solving their problems, seeing their days get easier. Hopefully more of that (but in what exact shape, I don't really know yet).... read entire comment.

Alain replied to a post Exploring The Dialog Element In HTML

Comment posted July 21, 2026

Ha, I follow your work since quite along time now, and fell upon this article while experimenting with dialog. I also read your 2026 article and can only hope you will get better with time. Thanks for sharing ! Cheers. Alain💪... read entire comment.

Alvin replied to a post AI Makes Sitting With Discomfort Feel Shameful

Comment posted July 19, 2026

This really resonates, Ben. That 'hissing background noise' is such a perfect way to describe it. I often feel like I'm 'wasting time' by actually trying to understand a problem when there's an agent that could probably vomit out a solution in seconds. But then I realize that the understanding is wh... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Rendering QR Codes With Zxing And ColdFusion

Comment posted July 6, 2026

@D, I think it was just where I was defining the fromJars() helper function. That said, in my write-up, I'm calling that snippet-1, so it's possible that there were some other non-essential helpers in there. But, looking at the demo code, the fromJars() seems to be the only one that makes sense.... read entire comment.

Yann replied to a post New round() Precision In Adobe ColdFusion 2025 Update 8

Comment posted June 29, 2026

Hi @Ben, you're welcome. They also share a repo on their last slide it seems (but I dont see the round() in the readme: Day7 - Language and Feature Enhancements But, but, just saw that there is a full ppt in there (not sure if it's the same as at the Summit) and this slide I capture is the 47th :D... read entire comment.

Yann replied to a post New round() Precision In Adobe ColdFusion 2025 Update 8

Comment posted June 29, 2026

Hi guys, yes I thought I saw it too and found it in my pictures, it was in the presentation by Nikhil and Vikas from Adobe on the 22nd where they mentionned this and more update/fix related to QoQ for example. For this: Slide photo Forget the link to presentation : https://cfsummit.adobeevents.com/a... read entire comment.

yappy replied to a post Creating A Marquee Effect With CSS Animations

Comment posted June 29, 2026

Hello! I know this article is a bit old but I hope you still respond because I am stuck :(. Okay, so at the top of the page linked, I added a cute little marquee of all of my favorite characters. At first, the marquee consisted of 16 square images. I'm not particularly sure of each image's width but... read entire comment.

Ben Nadel replied to a post Adobe ColdFusion Summit 2026 Schedule

Comment posted June 25, 2026

I just got back from the conference, and I must say that I rather enjoyed having this handy little web-page for the schedule. In retrospect, I didn't end up looking at it in landscape mode (side-by-side viewing of tracks). I found that the mobile-friendly portrait mode was actually quite nice since ... read entire comment.

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