The purpose of the work is transformation. – Martha Graham
I’ve been writing and publishing open source software on the Internet for over 40 years. My niche is porting existing concepts to new environments. One of my first projects was a Kermit file transfer protocol client for Atari 8-bit computers. As far as I can tell, it was written and released around January 1984.
Since then some notable releases have been:
- D3DQuake A port of glQuake to Direct3D
- glesquake a port of glQuake to OpenGL ES
- Terminal Emulator for Android A terminal emulator for Android devices.
- bencode-go A golang codec for the Bittorrent bencode data format.
- gateway A golang utility for discovering internet gateways.
- go-nat-pmp A golang utility for a limited subset of the NAT PMP protocol.
- Dandy Dungeon a collection of implementations of a multiplayer 2D dungeon crawler.
Agentic coding agents have obsoleted these projects. There’s little reason to use or extend them. Any of the modern agentic coding agents can implement as-good-or-better versions of these project in minutes, in the langauge and OS of your choice.
I’m keeping my projects published, partly for history, and partly because some (the golang ones) are used in existing projects. But I don’t expect to be doing further development on them, and I don’t expect to be publishing similar projects in the future.
I am still thinking about what it means to be doing hobby programming and hobby art in the agentic coding era.