Showing off can be the point. If I did something tricky and creative and got an interesting (possibly even useful!) result, why shouldn't I be proud enough of that to have a "hey, look at this cool shit I did/made" moment?

That aside, I've been lucky enough in my career to work alongside, mostly, people who have a personal interest in using software as a tool, and knowing their toolchains very well, be that a language, a command line, a system architecture, you name it. If you found something cool to do with a tool, you'd share it to disseminate the knowledge. That culture is very quickly dying off, I feel, because LLM-driven work encourages siloing to a degree I don't think gets discussed enough.

Lastly, using LLMs to write code is its own type of exhausting. I thought I could keep up my hobby by mentally checking out of work and working on projects by hand in my free time, but babysitting the LLM, reviewing the massive corpora of code and documentation it puts out (including those put out by colleagues), and the insane volume of context switches this technology encourages in the workplace makes me want to stay the hell away from computers alltogether if I can help it.

> If you run for fun, what does it matter that someone else does it faster, or in a paid exhibition optimized for max revenue?

This example is actually very clarifying - perhaps almost no one actually runs for fun?

We are not robots and telling people how they should feel and how their mood should not be influenced by this or that is akin to saying to depressed people to just stop being depressed. The divide-and-conquer method you appear to be using is worthless for human psychology.

The cases of a niche culture destroyed by dilution are so common that there are essays around it (e.g. Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution), so it seems to be a very normal and human thing to happen. Blaming the individual members for failing to feel differently is not going to fix that.