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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
JCattheATM wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
It's just silliness. Judge the code on the merit of the code, not
deciding to reject it if you learn it was constructed with the aid of
AI.
devrundown wrote 6 hours 46 min ago:
> Generative AI notice: I do not use LLMs, agents or any other
generative AI tools for help with writing, coding, image creation or
any other tasks related to this blog or my open source work.
This reminds me way back when you would see "Website written in
Notepad" on websites.
eranation wrote 9 hours 8 min ago:
Asking contributors to first make sure there is an approved requirement
before creating a PR sounds like a great idea regardless of the use of
LLM.
But another issue is - AI disclosure (agent, model etc). I'm sure
others tried similar approaches, but in case this is not common
knowledge - I tried to see what happens if you ask agents to disclose
themselves in the PR description / comments in a rule file.
It seems to work pretty well as most AI "assisted" PRs will be opened
by agents using the gh cli or MCP on behalf of the user. (Of course
this can be bypassed, but for someone who doesn't mind disclosing or
doesn't care, this is a good step forward)
Example: [1] (so far worked on PRs from both Claude Code and Codex -
both got a footer disclosure of the agent name and model)
HTML [1]: https://github.com/arnica/depsguard/blob/main/AGENTS.md#ai-dis...
WhitneyLand wrote 10 hours 42 min ago:
The PR quality problem is legit and needs a solution.
But saying his opinion hasnât changed on this:
âthe main and most important reason why GenAI tools do not work for
me is that they do not make me any faster.â
Itâs been a year and agents and models have improved dramatically.
I can see for some things it doesnât make sense, but not using it at
all because thereâs nothing it can help with?
Devs who donât use models at all are a dying breed and I think it
wonât be long before heâll be forced to concede the point.
bigstrat2003 wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
> Itâs been a year and agents and models have improved
dramatically.
It's been years of AI advocates saying that. It has never yet been
true, and it isn't true today either.
mplewis wrote 9 hours 44 min ago:
Why is that any of your business?
zeroonetwothree wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
On the other hand, thereâs nothing more frustrating when I submit a
hand-written issue to an open source project, happy to implement it if
they approve, and then their bot closes it with some AI slop comment
that indicates it has no idea what Iâm talking about.
On the plus side itâs easier than ever to patch or fork projects. So
at least this toxic gatekeeping behavior matters less than it used to.
emodendroket wrote 12 hours 13 min ago:
> Does open source matter anymore?
I mean, did it ever? It depends what you mean. Very few open source
or free software projects are successful in any meaningful sense.
Thrymr wrote 9 hours 46 min ago:
Considering that the whole industry, including the big AI companies,
is built on top of open source now, I would have to say it did
matter. That doesn't mean every project mattered (in a larger sense),
but certainly thousands of open source projects have value, and
dozens have contributed enormous value. The fact that the value has
been disconnected from the maintainers has been a problem for a long
time, but it is getting worse, and this is one example of a
maintainer near the breaking point.
zeroonetwothree wrote 12 hours 8 min ago:
I feel like projects can be successful without being popular.
emodendroket wrote 9 hours 57 min ago:
To me the "open source" model implies something about community
development and people sharing or otherwise using it. Otherwise
what does it matter if it's open or closed source?
dllu wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
I totally understand the point of view from maintainers. Review fatigue
of low quality slop is a legitimate issue.
The worst ones are fully autonomous AI agents looking for open source
projects and adding random pull requests.
But in some cases, I find a legit bug that needs fixing. For example, I
want to get a particular program working in Wine/FEX on aarch64 [1], or
I find a 12 second hang in Darktable [2]. The problem is that, as a
software engineer working in a totally different discipline, I have no
knowledge of the low level C code to fully understand what the problem
even is, or how to fix it. All I want to do is to fix the issue and
help other people avoid running into the same issue. Right now, on my
machine, I maintain a set of custom patches to get everything working.
But I am too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to create the fix by
hand, so I can't submit a pull request (or when I do, I feel really bad
about it. I honestly feel like a horrible person, e.g. when a project
added a "No AI" policy soon after I submitted some AI-generated PRs
[3]). Going forward, I feel like this sort of scenario is going to be
way more common. [1] [2]
HTML [1]: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/issues/5512
HTML [2]: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/21069
HTML [3]: https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/commit/8c85096f98084ca9438b16b2...
xboxnolifes wrote 11 hours 52 min ago:
Then say all of that in the issue. Say you have a real problem. Say
you tried using AI. Add the human element by communicating. I dont
think there is a real problem there.
People just want to know you put in the effort, and that you didnt
just prompt an AI and hand over completely unchecked slop.
dllu wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
Yes I wrote the issue by hand and try to communicate well.
DrewADesign wrote 12 hours 58 min ago:
Those mad about auto-rejected drive-by PRs should go fork themselves
a copy of the repo.
lelanthran wrote 13 hours 10 min ago:
Solution: write a markov generator (or use the cheapest AI possible) to
generate plausible-looking rejections for PRs.
Let those agents bankrupt their owners in a loop of neverending
improvements and changes.
thomasahle wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
I recently built a very large test bench for System Verilog.
I ran a bunch of different compilers on it, including some open source
ones.
Some of them failed some tests, and it was natural to have my LLM
(Claude Fable 5) root-cause the issues, and to double-check my test
bench wasn't to blame.
But now I stood with all these patches that I couldn't just throw at
the upstream maintainers all at once. I ended up just filing a few
issues and moved on to other things.
It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a lot
of time root-causing and fixing the issues. But then, maybe they could
just have their LLMs do the same.
Still not sure if it was the right call?
overfeed wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
> I ended up just filing a few issues and moved on to other things.
This is the most valuable contribution you had time for, hopefully
with a minimum-viable bug reproduction.
Drive-by patches/PRs are usually a net-negative because the
maintainer has to reverse-engineer the intent from GenAI code, and
then make changes to have it fit in with the rest of project.
> It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a
lot of time root-causing and fixing the issues
There are countless ways to fix any issue, and only a few right ways
(subjectively). The maintainers' role is to decide which ways are
right for their project. You shouldn't worry too much about "wasting"
code you already generated, GenAI made that step very cheap, but did
little for taste and roadmapping.
cushychicken wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
This is a real problem.
I suspect that part of it is that people donât have enough time to
mentally incorporate the fix.
Is it weird to submit the MR later, after people have had a chance to
digest the issues?
alex_young wrote 13 hours 38 min ago:
A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? I donât
get the analogy. I understand heâs talking about getting pushed
around by an LLM, but would a normal centaur push an LLM around? It
doesnât even have any hands right? Seems like a reverse centaur is
more capable of typing.
probably_wrong wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
> A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right?
Well, no. A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs.
That is, it's an augmented person who drives the powerful machinery
underneath. Think of a person driving a car.
A reverse centaur is the opposite, namely, a machine making the
choices and a frail human following them. In this context, a reverse
centaur is an AI spitting thousands of LOC for a human to find the
good ones.
toast0 wrote 13 hours 1 min ago:
> A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs.
Well also more numerous than human legs... And the whole two torsos
thing
HTML [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/...
stephenlf wrote 13 hours 58 min ago:
GitHub Issues before PRs is a great approach. The ghostty project takes
that one step further: GH _discussions_ before GH issues. Only
maintainers can make issues.
ethagnawl wrote 14 hours 2 min ago:
> Back in pre-LLM days, receiving an unexpected pull request (PR) from
a fellow coder was a source of excitement and pride.
As a maintainer of a few FLOSS projects, this tracks.
The Pavlovian PR notification response has gone from, "Oh! What do we
have here?" to "Groan. Do we have _anything_ here?"
I won't get specific but I just had to remove a contributor from a
project after multiple submissions of either cutesy, fluffy bullshit
(add ASCI animations!) or "rewrite entire project in other language".
Not only did the PRs result in wasted time and energy but they also
resulted in conversations about how to deal with this sort of spam.
(Probably good to get out of the way and set policy but still...) So,
this person probably spent fifteen minutes prompting together these
stupid PRs and multiple maintainers had to spend hours agonizing over
what to do about them.
anal_reactor wrote 13 hours 50 min ago:
TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort needed
to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with the rest
of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one small
thing.
There's one project where I need to download a new version once in a
while and I just rebase my changes.
lelanthran wrote 13 hours 7 min ago:
> TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort
needed to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with
the rest of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one
small thing.
That's a good thing; OSS projects don't want drive-by contributors,
they want a community. A small bit of friction is a good thing.
After all, we can see what happens with frictionless contributions.
tough wrote 12 hours 44 min ago:
I some times will open a PR even if i know it will get closed,
simply by because if its a bugfix or feature i want, someone else
might do so too, and i have many times adopted code from PR's
that were never adopted by mainstream or closed.
By pushing that PR, i might be annoying a grouchy maintainer, but
at the same time helping tens or hundreds of other users of the
software.
Imho the beauty of open source is as long as you're adhering to
the licenses, you can do whatever the heck you want =)
ahartmetz wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
If you already know it's not good enough, you can just say so
by calling it a proof of concept or hack to demonstrate what
needs to be done. Such code is often very useful when writing
the real fix.
greiskul wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
Yup, some of my first contributions when I was a teenager,
was to an open source project where I was able to find a
couple of bugs, and implement a hacky solution that I shared
with the team on the forum. My code was absolutely awful, but
by having done both the effort of tracking down the cause of
the bug, and one possible way of fixing it (which was badly
coded, but worked), made the developers able to quickly turn
around and edit my patches into actual patches that got
merged into the project.
And it was actually a pretty good feeling. Made me feel that
even as a newbie programmer, I was adding value to the
community, which I was!
ahartmetz wrote 8 hours 44 min ago:
I've done the same for a fix in the Gold linker, which is
now obsolete due to even faster linkers being available.
Shout out to Ian Lance Taylor, his behavior as the
maintainer was exemplary: very gracious and very
responsive.
yoyohello13 wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
I not trying to be mean about it, but... that's good. If your one
small thing wasn't worth the effort for contribution then it
probably doesn't need to be in upstream. Contrary to what many seem
to believe, code existing is not inherently better than code not
existing.
darkwater wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
Actually it's good for another reason, and that's the very
essence of opensource: the user can customize the software to
their needs, but there is no obligation to participate in a
community effort (although it's definitely cool as a side effect)
doginasuit wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
It seems like there is a ready solution here, have an LLM review and
filter pull requests from unknown sources before you read them. My
understanding is there are semi-reliable ways to detect AI writing,
maybe there is an analog for code. In any case, you can filter
according to criteria you set. Analysis and bug-finding is where LLMs
shine, much more than their ability to generate code.
I can understand wanting to minimize your interaction with LLMs, so
this might not be an attractive solution. But it seems like a
worthwhile feature to have on the platform level for people who would
like to continue to accept pull requests without the frustration.
phyzome wrote 10 hours 46 min ago:
"AI-detectors" are still probabilistic and none of them are exactly
stellar. (No, even Pangram. It still screws up on the regular, very
badly.) And some of that includes calling real people's writing
"AI-generated", which isn't acceptable for this task.
jdw64 wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
I think the answer to this question probably doesn't exist and opinions
will remain divided. I can understand this person's feelings. But I
'won't be able to feel them' because I'm in a different position. The
technology this person takes pride in is directly affected by AI.
On the other hand, there are also people who start coding with AI, and
those people will love a large part of code that isn't pretty but
works.
Some will say that messy code will ruin software in the long run, while
others will think otherwise. This reminds me of Sturgeon's law: 90% of
everything is crap. This means that for any type of thing, there are
quality items and inferior ones, and quality items make up about 10%.
The 10% of code created by AI will be valuable, and only 10% of
human-written code was valuable. AI has just increased the amount of
crap.
Whenever I think about these issues, I always think of Undertale.
Undertale's code is overwhelmingly messy, yet it's a masterpiece often
cited as one of the best games. I love it too. But Leaked Undertale
code (its quality) is terribl
Ultimately, it seems that AI's usefulness and harmfulness are
determined by the purpose for which it is used.
If someone enjoys code quality, long-term perspective, and intellectual
exchange and interaction with people from these kinds of discussions,
they will be hostile toward AI.
On the other hand, someone like me, who is in a community that has a
hostile attitude toward on-time delivery for clients and learning
(based on mockery and disregard), will be receptive to AI.
Honestly, I am a direct beneficiary of AI. I'm on the side of consuming
the results managed by open-source maintainers, so I can't fully
understand their position. I just think, 'That must be incredibly hard
for them.'
In my case, AI writes English functions and documentation, and by using
AI to refactor English function/variable names that were previously
hard to use, I can now write code that's easier to read.
But since my role mainly involves assembling things using IoC on top of
frameworks, I see more advantages. The downside is that my coding skill
declines, I suppose. I'm a traveling contract programmer who often goes
on-site to work with legacy codebases and add features to them.
Actually, my workflow hasn't changed much. It's just that the legacy
codebase has become an AI-generated codebase. My workflow of debugging
and tracing the flow there hasn't changed, so I'm probably in the
beneficiary camp.
Conversely, people like the OP have seen a massive change in the number
of PRs they need to handle, so it's understandable. The intellectual
exchange with people they've always had, and the values that come from
that, have been damaged.
This is a really difficult problem.
aidenn0 wrote 14 hours 34 min ago:
I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's
publications; good chance it didn't originate there though:
There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has
put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read
something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many
Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited.
I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was usually obvious when
a PR was either completely terrible or very half-baked, and the
required effort to create even a shitty PR was usually more than that
required to reject it.
AI makes it trivial to make a completely terrible PR, and much easier
to make a not-immediately-obviously-bad PR.
alexanderdmitri wrote 6 hours 29 min ago:
I think this is from Sartre's "Literature & Existentialism."
I'm not a big fan of his generally, but I highly recommend this book
in particular. A lot of what he wrote there really resonated for me.
cyanydeez wrote 11 hours 19 min ago:
if anyones got an active issues list, the maintainers should close
all issues and open only ones they intend to fix. A bot should repeat
this message to the issuer and point them to issues they're
accepting.
So at a minimum, you could maybe fish some useful work out. PRs
should be the same.
ErroneousBosh wrote 12 hours 22 min ago:
> Sure you get crackpots still,
They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than
you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The
late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where
he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not
exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths
looks about right to me but I'm not a good enough mathematician to
prove - were pretty damn odd, but his writing in 1989 on how it would
be vital for an interconnected network of computers for information
sharing to treat censorship as damage and route around it and some
ideas for doing this was bang on the money (as we now see) and his
writings on how American business management methods result in the
worst possible outcome for everyone that's not already a billionaire
have also proven oddly prophetic.
So maybe there's something in the crackpots after all.
aidenn0 wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
Maybe lots of (most?) people are crackpots about something, but
they lack the time and/or resolve to do something about it.
ErroneousBosh wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
I wonder what I'm crackpotty about? Forth, probably, although I
did actually port Dave Dunfield's 6809 Forth to a mid-1980s
sampler. It boots off a floppy, I know what the memory map is, if
it boots off a floppy I can make it run anything, right?
How about this crackpot view? Perl vs. Python, which I guess has
been replaced by Rust vs. Go - I prefer Python and Go to Perl and
Rust, simply because I know them better. If you want me to work
in Rust or Perl I don't really care, they're just languages. I'm
not as proficient in them, expect it to take longer. Rewrite it
all in Rust? Sure. I'd prefer not to, but if that's today's
project then shut up and pay my invoice.
Let's see, what other things are wild crackpot ideas around here?
I don't think LLMs are very good.
I don't think self-driving cars solve the right problem.
Permaculture would be better for long-term ecological
sustainability and food security than "everyone should be vegan".
Bikes would work perfectly well in American cities if you used
enough of them.
toponijo wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at
least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What
really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check
their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier
than ever with LLMs.
This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer.
I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to where in
corporate situations a reader can't say no to doing work for a
selfish writer.
cgio wrote 8 hours 38 min ago:
I think that this is the essence of the argument. I spent two weeks
of long nights across a few different sessions with millions of
tokens generated, to produce a 5 page proof. I think we have come
to the age of the aesthetics of curation. At least I donât feel
like I broke this silent contract. The effort you put in driving
the torrent of words before distilling it is a new art. First time
I tried it and it felt more creative than slop. The judgement
nevertheless lies on the eye of the beholder.
RealityVoid wrote 12 hours 12 min ago:
I've had a guy once reply in an email with a bug report generated
by ChatGPT telling me that some piece of software I wrote wasn't
working. He just plopped right there the discussion he had with the
confirmation bias machine confirming 100% that what he had in front
was sending spurious messages. With all the information in the
world at its disposal, the LLM did not consider informing the
reporter that maybe his code should flush the serial device pipe
before starting his processing. I stopped short from facetiously
replying to him that maybe he should use another model, since his
seems to be broken.
XorNot wrote 12 hours 23 min ago:
Isn't this just a continuation of the performance art of the modern
corporate environment though? There's an entire industry producing
pages of documents which aren't read, aren't responded to, but need
to be at least X lines long for anyone to take them "seriously".
Then suddenly LLMs happened and it's like the mask is off: no one's
reading them still, but also no one is writing them either.
Which is perhaps a drop in the ocean of the insanity which is "we
need you to work on the Jira tasks" as basically a job title.
inigyou wrote 11 hours 57 min ago:
You're absolutely right! The modern commercial sector has been
writing bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit, and become
completely disconnected from the actual outputs of its work. And
it has to be, because if only useful work was done, two thirds of
the population would be unemployed without benefits and would
revolt so they didn't starve.
kentm wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I
reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can
safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller
PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I
reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit
their time.
The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive
workflow slowing everyone else down, so the pressure is growing for
writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use
LLMs to make that tractable. I suppose those advocates have more
faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.
greiskul wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
Thats the thing with giant PRs. They never really needed to be
reviewed anyway. In cultures with strong review culture I have
worked at, if you send me a thousand line PR and ask me to review
it, I will look at the giant blob of text, and immediately fire
off a "it's too long, can you cut it into smaller PRs?".
Because I don't trust myself to review a giant PR. It takes too
much cognition to properly review it.
And now that people are making PRs with AI, this is even more
important. If the AI was good enough to have coded it, please
instruct it to make the changes in reviewable chunks.
majormajor wrote 12 hours 14 min ago:
> the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs
out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable
Even in these move-fast envs, it should be reasonably apparent
for people to realize that the author should be using the LLM to
make the PR tractable, not solely using the LLM to shovel out a
giant PR + slop PR description.
And the LLMs can often do this - if you ask to restructure or
break up a big change differently, they can often make quite
reasonable suggestions and help with it. That's just not what
you're gonna get if you're lazy. If you want a small
LLM-generated change, often you have to start with a big one then
ask it to figure out what it can get rid of, since many times it
doesn't have perfect model of all the code in it's "head" before
it starts spitting stuff out. The big companies have been doing
their best to automate this for the last couple of years vs the
even-more-blind attempts you used to get, but there's still the
issue of the models+tools following generic advice aimed at
median codebases vs being intimately familiar with this codebase.
You can go fast without being lazy. And when going fast, in some
ways, it's more important than ever to put in that effort to not
blowing things up.
kentm wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
It should be but often isn't. There's been a lot of threads on
HN where the response to huge PRs wasn't "Don't do that, use AI
when authoring better" but "The reviewers are actually the
problem, they're missing the AI train". And I see this in
industry too.
gedy wrote 13 hours 9 min ago:
> I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output
compared to humans than I do.
Some of this is the funny situation where the faithful will
state: "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony
of: "yes, yes it does"
ErroneousBosh wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
> "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of:
"yes, yes it does"
I guess it depends on what you consider "better". I've tried
using LLMs to write code over the past couple of weeks with
extremely mixed results.
The LLM certainly writes more interesting code! They like their
cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?
It definitely writes a lot more code, none of it actually
correct but some of it functionally similar to correct code.
If you like lots of code then I guess that's better. I like
less code.
toponijo wrote 3 hours 48 min ago:
It can write correct code, but it's still really not good at
that, at least without lots of prompting. In my experience,
that prompting is usually just doing the design/planning work
I'd do with or without AI.
ErroneousBosh wrote 1 hour 47 min ago:
I've said this before on here, to much derision as it turns
out, but I write my best code in the car. Nowhere near a
computer, no distractions, just point the car along the
grey stuff and away from the green stuff and think about
what I want to write.
Then when I get home, it's just a case of typing it in,
which is the bit I'd love to automate away.
My experience with LLMs has been a bit like rubberducking
code with someone who's *really* fast at looking stuff up
on StackOverflow.
TylerE wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
> They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they?
One of the few global Cluade directives I have setup is to
never use emojis - and it never has, either in chat output or
in code. Don't blame the tool when you don't spend 30 seconds
configuring it. It's even easier with AI since you don't have
to go digging for some obscure .vimrc snippet - it's
literally just plain English.
gedy wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
Yes I basically meant those folks weren't very good
developers to begin with and now extrapolating to: "wow this
is better than all devs!", when it's more like "it's you,
dude"
ErroneousBosh wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
This sounds awfully like the people who think that
self-driving cars and even auto-braking systems will
eliminate all accidents, because everyone else is as bad a
driver as they are.
ryandrake wrote 8 hours 12 min ago:
Someone pointed out[1] a while ago that LLMs look good at
things you are bad at. Which is I think one of the best
explanations of why so many people disagree about how
good they are at programming. There are a lot of people
really bad at programming, and they will look at the
output if an LLM and say âWow, itâs so much better
than my code!â
1:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48315309
kentm wrote 12 hours 6 min ago:
I find it can often write correct code but not maintainable,
performant, or reviewable code without additional human
guidance. The "solution" frequently given is that humans
don't need to maintain it anymore so its not actually a
problem. But the agent can't be accountable for mistakes, so
unless that changes or the risk of a defect is close to zero,
one still has to put forth effort to keep the code
maintainable.
To be fair, there are plenty of situations where throwaway
code is perfectly fine and/or defect risks are low enough to
make the trade-off worth it. I don't think a lot of
developers are thinking about it in that context, though.
(No unit tests aren't enough)
themgt wrote 12 hours 31 min ago:
Some of this is the funny situation where the faithful will
state: "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony
of: "yes, yes it does"
"Blessed are the humble ..."
powera wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
The priesthood doesnât like that the peasants can read the Bible for
themselves now.
phyzome wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
There hasn't been a programming priesthood for decades, now.
bluefirebrand wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
No one was ever stopping anyone from learning to program in the past.
Don't act like there was some massive gatekeeper you had to overcome
to learn to code other than your own laziness
layer8 wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
> My perception is that there is less interest in open source, and in
coding in general. The main reason I love coding is that it is a
challenge, and I think this is actually the same reason why a lot of
people prefer to give money to an AI lab and get a machine to spit out
code for them, even with the risk of the code being subpar.
I maintain the hope that those technically minded who are really
interested in coding and care about doing things properly using their
own reasoning on all levels of detail will find each other and maybe
become less diluted as a community by the coding-just-for-money crowd
than in the past decade or two.
hungryhobbit wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
This blog post had serious "old man yells at cloud" vibes for me.
kaffekaka wrote 13 hours 52 min ago:
The old man is absolutely pointing out a very real problem. It is too
easy with LLMs to create crap PR:s.
I learned Flask from Grinberg, god bless the man.
iainctduncan wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
nope, it's an old man yelling get off my lawn. And as a fellow old
person with an open source lawn, I 100% sympathize.
My lawn == I'm not wasting any of my dwindling old man time on
bullshit people vomit out. You want to do that, you fork and leave me
out.
weinzierl wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
The article closes with the question: "Does open source matter
anymore?"
I wouldnât pretend to have an answer. of course. Opens Source means,
always meant, different things to different people.
I know what always counted for me:
1. Copyleft License
2. No CLA or Copyright assignment
3. Diverse group of contributors
I sympathize with Miguels point but it bothers me it clashes with point
3 in my list. If you hand select your contributors[1] you will never
reach the diversity necessary to effectively make relicensing
impossible. Without that Open Source matters less to me.
[1] I admit that controlled set of known contributors has other
advantages too.
phyzome wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
"Diversity" doesn't mean "zero thresholds for skill or respect".
yoyohello13 wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
He is 'hand selecting' for people that show respect for others. Still
plenty of room for diversity within that framework.
d1l wrote 15 hours 3 min ago:
The question that resonated with me was whether open source even
matters anymore.
I think it does but there are weird dynamics I donât fully
understand. Iâm curious about HNs thoughts.
My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new
users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto
these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using
llms.)
So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes
harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects
because they are perceived as safer bets.
bluefirebrand wrote 14 hours 27 min ago:
I think we need to stop having open source as soon as possible to
stop giving AI more material to train on.
Sucks, because open source was a really wonderful thing for many
years but we should not continue to create fuel for the theft
machines
fantasizr wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
I - and many, many others - learned flask from his mega-guide that he
obviously spent a lot of time working on.
I feel bad for people like him who get the brunt of dilettantes who can
"code" polluting his time and focus. Reminds me of that mitch hedberg
joke: "When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here
you throw this away." but for PRs
mystraline wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
As a systems engineer, ive been a reverse centaur more often than not.
I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway
in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the
behest of the ticketing behemoth.
Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles
will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or
system-breakage (which impacts lots of customers).
Im not sure what IT roles im capable of doing wouldnt have tickets. So,
yeah. Reverse centaur.. But not an AI driven reverse centaur, yet.
bendmorris wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
Reverse centaur means a machine is using you to get things done.
Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other people.
So not really the same thing at all.
mystraline wrote 11 hours 55 min ago:
I look at at reverse centaurs as a spectrum of autonomy at work.
We can now observe a complete reverse centaur. But those of us who
go ticket after ticket, metrics of tickets, response times, and all
of those management metrics also go directly to reverse centaurs as
well.
Now, its not Marshall Brain's "Story of Manna" level each listed
action at a time... But it was definitely getting to that point.
Call centers were already absolutely at that point, with completely
scripted communications, that that attendant could not deviate from
or be fired.
> Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other
people.
Sometimes. As a systems engineer, tickets can also be generated by
other systems as an "immune response" to detected but unfixable
errors.
stantaylor wrote 15 hours 19 min ago:
Even if this guy were not anti-AI, as the primary maintainer of OS
projects, it sounds like he's dealing with a genuine problem.
> My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if
there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure
out in just a few seconds.
OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.
phyzome wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
You pretty quickly get a sense for it. But the author does also
explicitly list a few indicators.
GrinningFool wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
If someone goes out of their way to hide it, it probably can't be
detected. But the default commit comment and PR writeup styles are
pretty distinctive.
raincole wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
> OK. How?
By vibe. That's what people who believe they can detect AI do.
bluefirebrand wrote 14 hours 31 min ago:
Don't blame the people who dislike AI, blame the people producing
AI and using it to produce mass amounts of trash. They're the ones
poisoning the public well and making all of this distrust necessary
raincole wrote 13 hours 51 min ago:
I didn't blame anyone? I judge whether an article / repo is
AI-generated by vibe too. Vibe/intuition is the essential part of
our daily lives. It's the #1 think you ask yourself in an
interview.
CagedCoder wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
I feel like these 2 sentences answer what the author is looking for:
> I do not want an LLM-generated novel with chapters, bullet points
and emojis, just a simple description of the problem in your own
voice.
> If I don't see proof of human involvement, then I'm not interested
ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
>OK. How?
Have you never seen vibe-slopped PRs?
austin-cheney wrote 15 hours 23 min ago:
What criteria are people using to discern if code contributions are
from humans or LLM?
Are there concrete patterns that somebody could write a linter to auto
evaluate for this?
kvark wrote 15 hours 24 min ago:
We had a process at one company where you had to create an issue before
filing a PR. I found it most non-sensical and introducing friction for
no good reason. Very surprised to see the author suggesting it in the
article.
Review is indeed the main bottleneck now for open source, and we need
to solve it. Introducing more friction is hardly helping.
aakresearch wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
In my opinion review will always be a bottleneck, in OS as well as in
commercial development.
To my understanding Code Review is first and foremost a
trust-building exercise, seeking to establish common understanding
behind the piece of code which is to be delivered. That it also may
lead to improvements or "catch some bugs" is a distant tertiary
side-effect, not the primary goal. At least this is the vantage point
I reviewed any code from in the last two decades, and found that team
morale and overall quality of teamwork - and delivered software, and
customer satisfaction, as a result - responds very well to such
interpretation. Regardless of the side you are on and competency
level of your vis-a-vis. I would put "elevating competency level of
both partners" as a secondary goal of Code Review, and very closely
connected to the primary.
With current crop of LLMs there simply nothing on their side to which
words "trust" and "understanding" can be meaningfully applied. Hence
the "review" takes drastically different shape and implies very
different goals. As both the primary and secondary goals described
above cannot apply too. The only remaining goal of "improving and
bug-catching", in absence of trust, understanding and learning, now
requires much more work, which is also much more exhausting.
aakresearch wrote 2 hours 37 min ago:
And a follow-up to my comment above, as wanted to reply to "create
an issue before filing a PR" remark too.
I find it actually extremely useful practice. We engineers tend to
center our thoughts around "code" and with such code-centric
mindset to accumulate knowledge as "code-adjacent" - in repo's
commits, PRs, markdown files of all sorts. But in reality most if
not all projects extends past the code, and it makes much more
sense to have a "project-centered" mindset. As such, an external
"issue" captures much more context and provides more useful insight
about project impact than PR description alone. Love or hate JIRA,
beyond microscopic solo-projects it makes full sense to use
broader-scope external tools for project management.
As a nice cosmetic effect it also removes (some) bickering about
whether to put "type" or "scope" first in the commit message :).
Simply provide a reference to the ticket! (No, really, I hate JIRA,
honestly!)
dreamcompiler wrote 11 hours 6 min ago:
We had that process too, and I insisted on it. Any PR not matched to
one or more issues gets automatically rejected. The friction this
injects ensures people are not wasting company resources
bikeshedding.
I'm a world champion bikeshedder, and I both hated this policy and
insisted we keep it.
oytis wrote 14 hours 42 min ago:
Are there other companies? Where you are submitting PRs that solve no
known problem?
janalsncm wrote 15 hours 4 min ago:
The author is describing a method for turning a low trust/no trust
environment into a slightly higher trust environment.
A company is usually already a high-trust environment, where people
use real names and have real reputations. So creating an issue cannot
serve the purpose of increasing trust.
katerberg wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
I think the point that he is making is that the additional friction
is a good thing and necessary in this case because it's an open
source project. It's too easy to do drive-by PRs that don't actually
provide value and just eat up review cycles. The issue requirement
simply ensures that the requester actually is invested and cares
enough about this to get approval before starting work on it.
I can see why that doesn't sound great particularly on a team where
everyone knows each other and is working together but it totally
makes sense for me if I were maintaining a project that was large
enough to get a lot of low-effort PRs coming into it.
ctoth wrote 15 hours 26 min ago:
The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but
see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be
able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from
non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they
wanted to.
We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but
like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-demand app
store where features / forks are shared/upvoted/evolved by the
community where the maintainers don't have to get burnt out, and when
it inevitably becomes a ball of mud oh well it does the job? I really
don't know!
I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though
because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and
so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?
austin-cheney wrote 13 hours 46 min ago:
> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help
but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to
finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and
accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something
work the way they wanted to.
You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.
Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and
probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote
corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people
had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together
using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled
to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems
that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or
starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still
see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the
response.
thisisit wrote 13 hours 53 min ago:
If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone
will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget
tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they
wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote?
Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code
which others might not really care for and might even be particularly
be mean. Thatâs how the Internet works unfortunately.
The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a
technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground
breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move
the needle at all.
xboxnolifes wrote 12 hours 28 min ago:
A customized budget tracking sheet is the personal finance
equivalent of a programmer showcasing their TODO webapp. Obviously
it's going to be incredibly unpopular. Yet, there are popular tools
people have shared in personal finance communities.
LuckyAbe wrote 12 hours 41 min ago:
Very well framed.
nihakue wrote 14 hours 3 min ago:
[1] This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app
store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps
to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software,
where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every
piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's
going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly
maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm
bullish on things like [2] (not affiliated, just a customer). I have
a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand
up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run
claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy
so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that
sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to
have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this
set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my
family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little
sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's
still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can
really make this seamless for people they'll have something really
special.
As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated
brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for
example), so I used my template to create [3] (This one a put a
cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page
and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is
basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my
wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it
was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the
latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.
HTML [1]: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
HTML [2]: https://sprites.dev/
HTML [3]: https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/
ramses0 wrote 14 hours 25 min ago:
...maybe some sort of "Software Bazaar", where the users of the
software can edit their own software and make local modifications
that they need to it, probably with NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO
THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW. [1] It'd also be really nice
that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to
run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change
it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute
either the original, or your modifications to the software? [2] ...we
can dream though, can't we?
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...
jrm4 wrote 14 hours 41 min ago:
I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer
activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then
challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and
"programming a computer" starts.
It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.
skydhash wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
As soon as youâre specifying instructions for the computer to do
a task automatically, youâre programming it. It can be recording
a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like
Shortcuts,⦠The core thing is automation.
jrm4 wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
Not convinced this is clear at all? I'm typing a document in,
lets say -- word.
I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party."
If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then
ctrl-v twice, it is?
doctorpangloss wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin
ecosystems.
maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more
complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!
oytis wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a
sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for
you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend
saltcured wrote 11 hours 26 min ago:
I posit that there are people who get a sense of accomplishment
from operating their laundry machine.
And people who get a sense of accomplishment from hitting the
jackpot on a slot machine.
Operating an LLM is a strange combination of the two.
agumonkey wrote 11 hours 41 min ago:
For people totally new, it can be partially understood, just as i
was ecstatic having a tool create something on a computer for me in
my early days.
For anybody else thought, I get that a LLM is a regression (npi)
where you don't have to learn or understand anything .. therefore
the personal growth value is moot (except the alleged sales if the
person tries to use LLM to create a side business).
For actual devs it's disheartening and caused me real grief seeing
how many of them were happy not thinking anymore.
perching_aix wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
Do you think people in product design never feel a sense of
accomplishment or something?
Or for another perspective, why do you think a "sense of
accomplishment" is an essential, and dominantly important thing for
everyone? Maybe they feel two hot shits about such a thing.
Especially when the "accomplishment" in the vast majority of cases
is in the realm of "having had the patience to endure the
humiliation ritual of figuring out the arbitrary abstractions some
other dude came up with, and doing the plumbing to reconcile that
with the requirements to the extents possible"?
It's like that Star Wars: Battlefront PR comment's idea of a "sense
of accomplishment". Outright asinine and cynical. [1] When I make
things, what I care about is exactly the function they provide.
It's endlessly rewarding to make something useful. It's not some
exercise in polishing my ego by proxy. I don't want people
appreciating the things I make because they were hard to make.
That's borderline condescending and pitiful.
But hey, maybe I'm mischaracterizing the way you meant "sense of
accomplishment" myself. Maybe this is exactly what you meant too.
But then how would people vibecoding be robbed of feeling this?
Makes no sense.
HTML [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff...
AndrewKemendo wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
You should see the non AI trash that people are proud of
Someone having pride doesnât mean what they did has value
gavmor wrote 13 hours 34 min ago:
Who gets a sense of accomplishment from cheering for their home
team?
danso wrote 13 hours 44 min ago:
Back when image-gen was made widely available (2023ish, feels like
eons ago), there were people who took genuine satisfaction with
their art prompting skills. It did come off as a bit cringe though:
HTML [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/s/KxwhqJ5hrU
slopinthebag wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
That thread is hilarious. They update the model and the guy
thinks his art skills has improved. Something to consider when
someone tries to tell you prompting is a "skill"...
kerblang wrote 13 hours 45 min ago:
It doesn't even matter and isn't worth arguing about what emotional
state the submitter obtains. I don't care if they even achieve
nirvana and ascend to permanent buddhahood.
What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of
someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.
Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.
luma wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
What sense of pride an accomplishment do you get from using a
library, or a high level language? You didn't write that code, you
didn't hand translate into processor opcodes, etc. There are a
million man hours of other people's work involved in making a
simple python script run.
Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater
amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing...
Why do you feel accomplishment?
Making things is fun, using tools to make things can continue to be
fun. I have fun woodworking with hand tools and I also enjoy using
my CNC where the job permits. Both bring joy.
lbrito wrote 12 hours 42 min ago:
That's a poor analogy, because the intention is orders of
magnitude greater on those things than with an LLM. You still
need the intention to write Python instead of C, or C instead of
assembly. You need an insignificant amount of intention for LLMs,
which will happily spew code even for the worst, most incomplete
or nonsensical commands.
slopinthebag wrote 13 hours 45 min ago:
I think most people feel pride when they put effort into doing
something challenging and in return achieve a good result. You
can use high level languages and libraries and still put effort
into something that is challenging, thus feeling a sense of
pride. Of course, they may feel more pride if they achieve the
same result without libraries, or in a more challenging language.
Prompting an LLM neither requires comparative effort nor is
comparatively challenging, thus it's would be odd to feel a sense
of pride from any associated outcomes.
I cannot believe this even requires an explanation.
luma wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
Developing a functional app that meets your needs with an LLM
takes it's own kind of skill, and is substantially more
difficult if you can't recognize when the machine is steering
your architecture in the wrong direction. It takes actual,
real work. It's certainly a completely different kind of work
than writing most of the code yourself, but so is using Java
when compared to hand writing x86 opcodes.
Prompting an LLM to produce good code isn't a lot of work for
you. Writing hex without an assembler or compiler would be a
lot of work for you.
People have ideas, and now they have better tools to turn those
ideas into reality. They aren't doing it like you would do it,
but they're getting it done all the same, getting their needs
met, and enjoying the ride.
Maybe just let people have fun, and when they report that they
are in fact having fun... believe them.
slopinthebag wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
I'm not saying people can't have fun, I'm saying it's a
misplaced sense of pride that gives me the ick when I sense
it in others. I see plenty of people who readily disclose
that their thing they "built" was just slopped together by an
LLM and this is perfectly okay, because they aren't trying to
take credit for accomplishments that they didn't put in the
expected effort for.
The difference between the skill & effort required to build
vs prompt your way to something is orders of magnitude
different. If it took just as much effort, people would just
do it by hand anyways.
bigstrat2003 wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Yeah, there's something pathetic about being proud of
something you didn't actually get challenged by making.
Like, I love building Lego sets. It's relaxing, it's fun,
and I enjoy having the completed model to put on a shelf
and look at. But I would never in a million years say I was
proud of those Lego models, or that I had a sense of
accomplishment. That wouldn't be merited.
newAccount2025 wrote 12 hours 4 min ago:
I think âbuild vs promptâ is a false binary that frames
the argument badly.
There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free
âwrite me a facebook clone.â Like, hey LLM, help me
develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me
articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas
for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me
debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor
across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid
examples that way over simplify.
Iâm super proud of the work Iâve created /alongside/
LLMs. Iâll let it build me development aides and such
with little oversight and thereâs no skill there. But you
can use it deliberately and maintain control, and itâs
amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with
you from so many angles.
paulddraper wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
Amen.
I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get any sense of
accomplishment from authoring software.
collingreen wrote 14 hours 10 min ago:
I'm a professional software engineer and even I get excited about
having an ai vibe out some throwaway software for me (two recent
examples - a personal recipe site I never made time for and a video
game skill tree build tool that isn't worth the time it would have
taken to build).
As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first
taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream
something up then have it exist. This is very cool!
That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to
maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't
caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community
(architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we
haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even
the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.
rpdillon wrote 14 hours 11 min ago:
I think there's a spectrum between simply writing a prompt and
generating slop and using AI in a loop over many hours/days/weeks
to produce something that works the way you want it to. I get a
great sense of accomplishment from doing the second, and I pretty
much refuse to do the first, except only in the most ephemeral of
cases.
ai_critic wrote 14 hours 19 min ago:
Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team
ships a product feature?
rowyourboat wrote 4 hours 20 min ago:
I guess that's why I burned out as a manager: I do not get a
sense of accomplishment when my team achieves something
oytis wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
Yeah, they created a team that accomplished something (or a team
that created a team), so it's well-deserved.
aidenn0 wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
1. There exists some X that you wish existed, but does not
2. The world has changed in such a way that X now exists
3. You took even a tiny action towards #2
Even if the main goal was #2, Is it really hard to see how there
might not be some sense of accomplishment? Many investors take
pride in the impact the companies they invested in have on the real
world; this is the same thing in the small.
LatencyKills wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
> Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM?
I have a good friend who is a VP at a telecom company who has never
written a line of code. He's been using Claude to create
interactive web pages to help him understand parts of the company.
He was so excited when he got something to work he called me
immediately.
I'm sure the code isn't what you or I would write, but it is good
enough for my friend. That said, heaven help him if he loses access
to Claude. ;-)
seanlinehan wrote 14 hours 38 min ago:
One can reason by analogy here.
In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs,
designers, and engineers.
Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code.
And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they
would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination,
prioritization, etc.
When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real
sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real
thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of
code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody
would reasonably look down on them for that feeling.
Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But
you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!
slopinthebag wrote 13 hours 49 min ago:
It's more akin to someone commissioning a piece of art, where
they describe the piece in varying detail and then it's the
responsibility of the artist to see it through, perhaps
deciphering ambiguities in the pÌ´rÌ´oÌ´mÌ´pÌ´tÌ´ commission
brief.
If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the
manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it
off to their employees and then spending the rest of their time
watching TikTok in their office. It would be strange if they felt
pride in that.
IggleSniggle wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
Some artists use a brush, but others use a chisel.
And then there's the bullshit artists.
Just because we never had the option of a chisel before doesn't
mean all chiselers are bullshit artists.
seanlinehan wrote 12 hours 26 min ago:
I think that's fair for certain one-shot generations. For
example, sending off a single prompt to an image or music
generator and just accepting the output.
But I think most of this stuff is iterative, multi-turn. You
type a thing in, see what comes back, and then repeat until you
have something that satisfies your desire.
Taking the manager analogy. If you spent 30-minutes writing up
a draft spec, waited for the outputs, had a review meeting
where you provided good feedback, and then repeated that cycle
until the product was done... Again, I think that manager
(assuming, of course, that their feedback was useful) should
feel some pride in shaping that output!
slopinthebag wrote 10 hours 18 min ago:
Taking the art commission approach, you go back and forth
with the artist until you have what you want. Should you feel
pride?
I think it's much closer to the art commission than it is to
a manager who is managing humans, the constraints of the
business, customers, etc.
IcyWindows wrote 9 hours 41 min ago:
Maybe a movie producer is a better analogy?
keiferski wrote 14 hours 39 min ago:
Donât think of it as creating art, but as solving a frustrating
computer problem. For people that arenât technical, computers
are often irritatingly obtuse and unclear if youâre trying to get
something to work in a particular way.
zephen wrote 14 hours 44 min ago:
After trying and failing multiple times to get any LLM to create
exactly the picture that I was trying to make, I have to admit
that, at one point, if one of them had succeeded, I would have felt
a quantum of accomplishment.
But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just
completely stopped pulling the lever.
However, I can see that for the right people, this level of
difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the
features that are collectively termed "gamification."
surgical_fire wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
> I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though
because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and
so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?
I think no answers are needed.
If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be
needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his
thing.
If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will
progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that
eventually dies out.
There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in
this bathtub matter too much.
skybrian wrote 14 hours 28 min ago:
I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need
infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still
wonât make sense to implement your own cryptography.
surgical_fire wrote 13 hours 6 min ago:
Why not?
If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography
as well.
You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the
person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters
anyway. Or why proper anything matters.
This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as
your knowledge".
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
skybrian wrote 12 hours 21 min ago:
Because doing enough security reviews to remove all the
security bugs gets expensive, and if you use well-reviewed
code, it's already been done.
lwyrup wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
So I am thinking this is like an army of plebs going to Home Depot,
buying power tools, and building a house with no experience. Oh what
funâwe can finally build a house the barrier has been broken.
I donât want software written by plebs.
Trasmatta wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
> The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my
non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The
sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally
able to make something work the way they wanted to.
There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over
the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and
to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took
some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past
the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.
fragmede wrote 12 hours 10 min ago:
Huh? The difficulty and the cost was stopping them before. It was
really difficult, took a ton of time and money, and you had to deal
with another person.
jackp96 wrote 14 hours 42 min ago:
I mean, I largely agree with the sentiment (friction is important
for growth/happiness, after all). But even as a developer, I'm able
to quickly whip up custom personal apps that I just wouldn't be
able to justify the time for previously.
Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw
it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of
the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the
typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some
elements we hadn't added yet.
We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the
first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage
mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved
version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.
mostlysimilar wrote 15 hours 2 min ago:
> sense of pride and accomplishment
What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?
ben_w wrote 14 hours 44 min ago:
> What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?
The sense of accomplishment does not necessarily require much
accomplishment. [1] and
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
HTML [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
unacorner wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
Maybe building something? It doesn't matter much that the
programming language was English and built by an LLM and a harness.
They created something they wanted that wasn't there before.
the_af wrote 14 hours 57 min ago:
I get where you're coming from, but for completely non-technical
people, it seems to me the more precise analogy is not "building"
but "ordering online". Or hiring someone to do something for you.
If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick
ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a
pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?
mostlysimilar wrote 14 hours 56 min ago:
That's a better analogy than my dumb drawing one. You can be
happy you got your pizza and you can enjoy the taste but it is
not an accomplishment to be proud of.
ctoth wrote 8 hours 45 min ago:
The pizza analogy smuggles in this idea of
cheep/mass-produced. I'm talking about blind people who can
now prompt their way to an accessibility mod for their
favorite game, the sort of thing which literally would have
never been written before. How you know it wouldn't've been
written is by counting the accessibility mods pre and post
LLM.
Now generalize this. Every tiny community, every person with
a disability, everybody for whom the default software doesn't
work right? Can now change it specifically for them. Not add
peperoni, that's far too low-dimensional to capture what is
happening. Actually build their own interface, be able to use
something they simply didn't have access to before, and
critically not depend on another programmer (there are like a
dozen of us blind ones!) to build something for them.
the_af wrote 7 hours 14 min ago:
It's not about cheap. It's about ordering vs building. If
you tell an architect and a bunch of workers to build you a
house, even if you pick some details and make some choices,
it's them that are building the house, not you.
You can feel happy about the result, you can find the house
useful, but you shouldn't feel a sense of building
accomplishment, because you didn't build anything.
With AI & apps there's less friction, because you don't
even have to hire another human being, it's just prompting.
In that sense, it's definitely closer to ordering food from
an app.
In any case, in the context of TFA, there's also a sense of
low quality, cheaply made. The bots making the PRs aren't
reading the contribution guidelines, so that's low quality
all by itself. Drowning a human reviewer with a mass of PR
is also a low quality way of contributing.
rpdillon wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
It's mostly that how much you decide to involve AI as a
spectrum. To extend to the pizza analogy, I feel like you're
telling me that because I used dough that I bought at the
store, I shouldn't be proud of the pizza I made, even though
I made the sauce and cut the pepperoni and the sausage and
baked it myself on a peel covered with cornmeal. That's not
the same as just ordering it on DoorDash.
the_af wrote 13 hours 20 min ago:
Agreed there are nuances, but in the context of this
conversation about TFA, the suspicion is that this is
mostly on the "100% AI" side of dial. There's also a "high
volume, low quality" aspect to the PRs, as evidenced by the
fact that the bots (or humans) don't read or follow the
repo's contribution guidelines.
The very concept of "reverse centaur" implies a balance
towards the "order pizza online" side of the equation.
mostlysimilar wrote 14 hours 59 min ago:
It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print
over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and
no, you shouldn't be proud of it.
john_strinlai wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
is there a list somewhere that i can check what i am allowed to
be proud of and what i am not allowed to be proud of?
edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if
someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?
mostlysimilar wrote 14 hours 39 min ago:
No, but come on. If you insert a computer into your brain and
wake up tomorrow speaking German, would you be proud you
could speak German? Wouldn't you rather work diligently to
learn the language and be proud of that effort?
tekne wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
Absolutely -- why on earth would I spend more time and
effort than I have to?
Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German
in the first place, like appreciating German culture or
talking to German people.
Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all
there's a translator" since learning a language lets you
experience the culture more intimately and communicate
better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if
somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why
not?
QuantumNomad_ wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
Depends on why the person is wanting to be able to speak
German.
If you only want to speak German for its own sake, then
maybe it does seem silly to be proud of what the brain
computer did for you.
But there are many other reasons to want to be able to
speak German. Thanks to his brain computer, a French cheese
maker could travel to Germany to promote his cheeses in a
new market to great success without having to rely on the
German speaking skills of expensive to hire people, and
without wasting years to learn German on his own when all
he wanted to do was to make cheeses and grow his customer
base for his cheese. German in and of itself was never a
goal to him.
Just like computer programming is not a goal in and of
itself to a lot of people, and who would otherwise have to
spend time to learn programming instead of doing the thing
they want to do, or having to hire software engineers that
might cost more than they could ever hope to afford.
And even though the computer is doing something for the
person, they are leveraging that for something that they
feel pride and accomplishment in. Such as for example to
use German (done by the computer) to expand your cheese
customer base into Germany (your own accomplishment that
was only possible thanks to the existence of the German
speaking skills of the computer).
john_strinlai wrote 14 hours 35 min ago:
would i? no.
would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario?
also no.
mostlysimilar wrote 14 hours 29 min ago:
Alright, weâre each entitled to our opinions on the
matter.
senordevnyc wrote 14 hours 52 min ago:
Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they
want?
jplusequalt wrote 13 hours 53 min ago:
Sure, you can feel proud of whatever you wish.
But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel
similarly proud of what you did.
senordevnyc wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
lol, youâre literally talking about non-coders that GGGP
said they know. No one is sharing their AI stuff here
asking you to be impressed.
bigstrat2003 wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
> No one is sharing their AI stuff here asking you to be
impressed.
That actually happens all the time on Show HN these days.
mostlysimilar wrote 14 hours 43 min ago:
Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard
to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI
output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.
senordevnyc wrote 13 hours 36 min ago:
And Iâm sure ctothâs non-coder friends will be just
devastated to hear that some random online account is
embarrassed because theyâre proud of a little app they
created for fun.
acheron wrote 13 hours 39 min ago:
Hope all your programs are written in machine code.
Wouldnât want to be proud of compiler output.
bigstrat2003 wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
When LLMs are remotely comparable to compilers, your
analogy might hold water. But in the world of today, it
holds none.
mostlysimilar wrote 12 hours 48 min ago:
I mean yeah? Wouldn't you be more proud of your ability
to write a program in machine code than you would in
assembly? Or more proud of assembly than of C? Or more
proud of C than of Python?
Each stage takes greater effort, effort which creates
skill. Those hard-earned skills are accomplishments to be
proud of.
rpdillon wrote 14 hours 4 min ago:
But you're acting like everything that you use AI to build
is easy to achieve, and that doesn't seem to be true.
Trasmatta wrote 15 hours 1 min ago:
People are very proud of their prompts I guess
It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce
janalsncm wrote 15 hours 7 min ago:
What is the kind of person who would use such software? What youâre
describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one
side exists.
A user would have to be someone who doesnât have access to an LLM
to make bespoke software themselves, and isnât able to use existing
software. I think thatâs a vanishingly small segment of people.
rpdillon wrote 14 hours 8 min ago:
You're assuming that everybody will be equally skilled in using an
LLM to create software. I don't think anything in my experience
indicates that this is true.
navane wrote 14 hours 21 min ago:
Sounds like the user could just ammend the software to his need
with the LLM, but instead of sending that update to the maintainer
with a pull request, just keep it to himself, to the users version.
beering wrote 15 hours 11 min ago:
I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do
what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or
isnât possible.
At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they
donât want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any
obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in
2026. And I donât think we need an on-demand app store either
because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can
have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.
tomxor wrote 12 hours 59 min ago:
> For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what
they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or
isnât possible.
The crux is here somewhere.
A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about
code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve
their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who
initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care
deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's
lifetime, because that serves everyone.
Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time
they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding.
They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking
for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are
selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the
path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes.
The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this
perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is
watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own
personal hell.
As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into
their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into
LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder
what their response will be.
joseda-hg wrote 15 hours 14 min ago:
An ecosystem on shared formats can exist hapily
There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it
and generally they all coexist hapily
marcosdumay wrote 15 hours 17 min ago:
> We almost need like ... noncanonical software?
You mean some modern version of vb or php?
That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.
dude250711 wrote 15 hours 18 min ago:
When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone
camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood
movie.
dgellow wrote 14 hours 5 min ago:
I think a better analogy would be commissioning an artist to create
a painting. Yes you provided instructions and decided which style
you preferred, and maybe pointed some corrections you wanted. And
you can be proud of owning that specific, unique painting. No you
didn't create anything.
utopiah wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
Art isn't craftsmanship.
You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you
want to be more traditional, at least in 1917.
You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its
tool.
You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa.
You can also be popular without any or both of these.
There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends
on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system
but there goals might not be yours.
jrm4 wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
This is so good, I wonder if op did it on purpose.
Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely
"Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern
iPhone cameras.
The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see
the good ones?
awhitty wrote 15 hours 13 min ago:
This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist
in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now.
Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been
using iPhone to break into the industry for years.
ninkendo wrote 14 hours 23 min ago:
Using Appleâs preferred practice of using no article before
iPhone (ie. never âan iPhoneâ or âthe iPhoneâ or even
âiPhonesâ) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. Itâs
like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.
troupo wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
"You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has
been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with
elitism.
Those professionals are professionals not because they own an
iPhone and use it to shoot something.
awhitty wrote 13 hours 27 min ago:
Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument
that someone's work is less-than because they used a
cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded
professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but
the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer
points of professionalism.
But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste,
demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to
their work quality, show up to the work environment with
respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human
relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools
with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter
here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.
troupo wrote 13 hours 3 min ago:
> So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is
less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool
versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using
No. Just the fact that they have a tool does not
automatically make them a professional, doesn't automatically
make them skillful, and doesn't automatically make their
output worth something.
This is the meaning of "When they shoot a little artistic
clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean
they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie."
There's nothing elitist about it.
projektfu wrote 13 hours 43 min ago:
Professionals are professional because someone pays them, that
is all.
troupo wrote 1 hour 52 min ago:
The word has other meanings, too ;) E.g. "professional
conduct" isn't one that is paid for:
1a. of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession
1c.1. characterized by or conforming to the technical or
ethical standards of a profession
3. following a line of conduct as though it were a profession
ben_w wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
If you think filming is the only skill needed to make a film, may
I suggest looking at the very long list of names that appears at
the end of the film of which only a few actually do filming?
Takes a lot to know what to film, and how to be good at using the
tools you have.
Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video
games⦠I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only
because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top
will either be QA or art.
DrewADesign wrote 13 hours 13 min ago:
Artists of all stripes (including audio, animation,
cinematographers, lighting, environment, textures, etc,)
including tech artists, designers, writers, musicians⦠the
ratio of functionality to look-and-feel is dramatically
different than in non-entertainment products, and the labor
involved reflects that. Itâs a real shame that some of the
people that contribute most to what makes a game great are
often the first to get dropped when people talk about how the
game is made, (but most are perfectly happy to fly under the
radar when a bunch of entitled kids start raging about the
âlazy devs.â ;)
fantasizr wrote 14 hours 54 min ago:
the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a
Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production
notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.
hext wrote 14 hours 33 min ago:
I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source
maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a
major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source
projects for years.
skydhash wrote 14 hours 12 min ago:
Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If
you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in
variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review,
discuss, and accept your changes.
hext wrote 14 hours 7 min ago:
Iâm not entirely following you. I generally donât
contribute anymore, but in the past Iâve found a lot of
maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration,
rather free labor.
I certainly understand things are different nowadays, Iâm
talking pre-LLM proliferation.
skydhash wrote 13 hours 2 min ago:
> Iâve found a lot of maintainers are not actually
looking for collaboration, rather free labor.
Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A
nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull
request. A patch, even when correct, can be
counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and
goal of the project.
The goal of open source is to give you freedom in
maintaining your own version and extending it.
Collaboration is not a requirement.
fantasizr wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly
welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to
cultural communication differences :) )
hext wrote 14 hours 9 min ago:
I donât know if itâs just me, and these days I do
understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but
Iâve always detested the idea that I need to reach out
and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening
a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing
an approved GH issue.
Iâve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over
the years simply because they didnât âfit the visionâ
of the maintainer, despite being +1âd by many members of
the community or even other contributors. I donât even
mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested
in actually merging anything where they didnât architect
the changes themselves upfront.
On one hand I get it, youâve spent so much time building
something itâs fair to want to hold on tightly to that
level of control, but to me it's just always felt
antithetical to the entire idea of open source.
Makes me feel like Iâm not contributing to a true open
source project, just doing free labor for someone.
satisfice wrote 15 hours 3 min ago:
Films arenât open open to random contributions by casual
volunteers. Itâs not about iPhones.
tehjoker wrote 15 hours 28 min ago:
To respond to the ending of this piece, I think open source still
matters because LLMs generate very specific code for a specific
situation. Quality libraries mean solutions can be reliably shared
between projects.
WorldMaker wrote 14 hours 40 min ago:
But how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones? How do
you even discover up quality libraries if you are leaving so many
code decisions to LLMs? Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries
how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code
without your attribution and without directing people back to your
library (and your very human interests in funding development on it
or getting copyleft contributions back to it)?
I think there are so many hard questions right now for "Does open
source even matter any more?" and many of those questions seem
particularly demotivating to me right now, especially because we
don't seem to be at risk of getting some, much less better, answers
any time soon.
tehjoker wrote 5 hours 21 min ago:
> how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones?
Reputation. LLM libraries can also be high quality in theory. It's
the level of effort, duration of use, stability, and test coverage.
People will need to resist using LLMs to make huge transformations
of their libraries all the time to avoid erasing their reputations
unless they have convincing safeguards like comprehensive tests or
formal proofs that are not touched.
> Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so
many copies just getting pasted into people's code
Those copies are not reliable like a callsite. Maybe there is less
advertising... but it is still better to use the library. I have to
hope that at some point AI psychosis will end and engineering,
which has not changed, will remain. You have to have reliable
inputs to your processes. To do otherwise is insanity.
> getting copyleft contributions back to it
This is a hard question. That said, for my own libraries, I get
very few contributions but people use the libraries! The more
"hardcore" the library is, the higher the ratio of users to
contributors because they're just not expert enough to contribute
meaningfully (until your stuff becomes so valuable companies
sponsor teams of contributors as in Linux).
That said, my libraries seem to have made it into the weights, so
when I talk to LLMs about my problem space they shockingly
frequently recommend my own libraries to me (which is kind of ego
stroking not gonna lie).
I think there's a lot of reasons to feel demotivated right now, but
my perhaps privileged attitude (since I don't have bosses forcing
me to use AI for everything) is to use AI where appropriate and
apply engineering discipline and thinking in all cases. Retain your
own human skills. If expertise really does become completely
devalued, we're going to have bigger problems than you can solve on
your own.
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