Beej Hall has been writing code by hand since the early 1990s, and he wants you to know there's a difference between making something and getting something made.
Hall — a CS instructor at Oregon State University-Cascades and author of Beej's Guide to Network Programming, a free online reference that has taught network programming to developers for roughly three decades — published a post in March 2026 titled "On Making" that opens with a deliberate trick. A sci-fi excerpt, some digital art, a carpentry description, and a block of Rust code are shown under his name. Then he reveals none of it was hand-crafted. The reveal isn't about quality. It's about authorship.
His central claim: directing an LLM to produce code, art, or writing is closer to managing a contractor than to making anything yourself. You initiated its creation. You didn't make it. The distinction sounds simple, but Hall argues it's where <a href="/news/2026-03-14-hacker-news-bans-ai-comments">the entire debate about AI and creative work should be anchored.</a>
He describes himself as a Claude Code user and doesn't dismiss the technology. He lays out the familiar trade-offs — loss of low-level craft on one side, access to high-level thinking and long-deferred projects on the other — then sets them aside to focus on something more personal: the psychological reward of making. He recounts writing 177 lines of JavaScript by hand for his wife's Spanish flashcard app. It took roughly 50 times longer than prompting Claude would have. He says he's genuinely proud of that code in a way he cannot be of AI-generated output.
His discomfort isn't about skill atrophy or output quality. It's about what it means to claim credit. On his own Utopia/Doom scale for AI, he places himself at 65 percent Doom — measured, not catastrophist. But on the question of calling AI-initiated work "his," he's unambiguous: he can't.
That position carries weight because of what Hall actually built. Beej's Guide to Network Programming has been freely available online since around 1994 — written by hand, maintained across decades, given away to anyone who needed it. Hacker News threads on the guide have accumulated enthusiastic commentary for years, with developers regularly describing it as a rare labor of love. CS courses around the world have assigned it. When Hall writes that he cannot claim credit for work he merely initiated, it's not abstract philosophy. It's a standard his entire public identity was built on.
For anyone tracking where humanistic resistance to agentic AI is hardening, his post is a useful marker. The argument isn't that AI-generated code is bad or that developers who use it are cutting corners. It's that something specific is lost when <a href="/news/2026-03-14-codespeak-wants-to-replace-code-with-markdown-specs">execution is delegated to an autonomous system</a> — and that something is the satisfaction of having made the thing yourself. Hall's framing suggests that satisfaction isn't a side effect of the work. For many developers, it's the point.