Chris Kiehl pushes back on the gloom around Hacker News, arguing that while AI has changed the economics of paid programming, coding for its own sake is still worth doing. He describes his weekend projects, a buggy Breakout clone, Java type-safety experiments, and a frustrating dive into recursion schemes, to show that learning hard things is rewarding without any business payoff.

• Programming for work and programming for enjoyment are different things; AI changing the value of hand-written code at a job doesn't remove the reason to do it for fun.
• Kiehl admits his projects have no clear payoff: a bad Breakout clone, Agda-inspired Java experiments, and recursion schemes that left him unsure what they were even good for.
• The "there is no point" feeling comes from constant exposure to doom-heavy online discussion, and it fades once you log off.