To be fair, Handmade Hero also seems like a project designed to co-opt unearned feel-goods. Maybe one of the goals was to teach, but another goal was to actually ship a game, and he took pre-orders for it before eventually abandoning development. It turns out it's a lot easier to talk about making good programs than it is to actually make them. I do think it is possible to make high-quality handmade software, but being performative about doing so rather than just doing the thing is probably counterwise to ever actually just doing the thing.

There doesn’t seem to be any relationship between Handmade and “not using LLMs” (besides one that can be argued if you believe LLM-aided software is worse in size or performance).

They don't mention the possibility of providing funding for developers anywhere in the article.

> Basically, the thinking goes that Handmade programmers have the technical chops to make amazing software, but don’t always have the aptitude or desire for the many, many other tasks that go into shipping. Payments, licensing, emails, support, design, marketing, testing, the list goes on.

Instead, it sounds like they want to take on the role of a publisher. Perhaps providing publisher-like services without any money changing hands between developer and publisher, with the latter being funded by donations and the former still having to make their own bread, just with some of the development-adjacent work offloaded.

They mention funding projects like 'File Pilot' but it doesn't seem like file pilot will be the first project they'll fund. They didn't mention what % will be going to events and I personally don't want to fund those

I assume you have absolutely no clue what it refers to.

Handmade Hero is a long running yt series by Casey Muratori. He builds a game engine from scratch, no cheats, no shortcuts, straight to the metal (from C-ish perspective). So you learn how to deal with computers to achieve things, fast and efficient, by understanding computers.

At some point Casey thought it was a failure and a waste of time. But to his surprise quite a fanbase evolved around it and it turned that it really helped people to go from zero to "hero". The handmade "movement" relates to this timeline and the aftermath of people thriving from it. My rough definition of "Handmade" dev mentality would be: Ignore the things that seem to make things "easy" (high level software) and learn the actual thing. So you learn what a framebuffer is instead of looking for a drawing api, applicable to different contexts.

That being said is that this foundation doesn't seem to be endorsed by Casey. Their mission goals seem quite shallow, if at all.

My immediate assumption was that this was a reaction against LLM–assisted or –written software, but I couldn’t see any mention of this in the front page.

So maybe ‘handmade’ refers to artisanal, high quality, made with care, etc.

https://handmade.network/manifesto

Better can be argued. More performant though? Yes, massively so.

Turns out spending some time understanding what your CPU and GPU are actually doing when running your app, and how to make them do less work, leads to pretty speedy software.

Then it also turns out that this does not seem to impede most of the features of the software it is competing with, meaning that software is by definition wasteful.

It can't even be argued that the other software made better use of human resources since it's a large team vs one guy who is often not even getting paid, and the guy is the one with the fast software.

On a tangent, still waiting for File Pilot to have even the bare minimum of CJK support... I do like that the software is fast, but without support for other languages than English it's useless to most of the people in the world.