I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

141 pointsposted 2 hours ago
by ibobev
(blog.miguelgrinberg.com)

98 Comments

ethagnawl

14 minutes 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

2 minutes 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.

aidenn0

an hour 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.

toponijo

28 minutes 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.

kentm

4 minutes 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.

ctoth

2 hours 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?

beering

an hour 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 isn’t possible.

At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t 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.

thisisit

5 minutes 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. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately.

oytis

an hour 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

seanlinehan

an hour 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

a few seconds 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 p̴r̴o̴m̴p̴t̴ 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.

luma

11 minutes 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.

keiferski

an hour ago

Don’t think of it as creating art, but as solving a frustrating computer problem. For people that aren’t technical, computers are often irritatingly obtuse and unclear if you’re trying to get something to work in a particular way.

aidenn0

41 minutes 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.

ai_critic

31 minutes ago

Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team ships a product feature?

oytis

18 minutes ago

Yeah, they created a team that accomplished something (or a team that created a team), so it's well-deserved.

collingreen

22 minutes 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.

LatencyKills

an hour 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. ;-)

paulddraper

19 minutes ago

Amen. I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get a sense of accomplishment from authoring software.

rpdillon

23 minutes 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.

zephen

an hour 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."

janalsncm

an hour ago

What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists.

A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.

rpdillon

20 minutes 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

33 minutes 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.

nihakue

15 minutes ago

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ 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 https://sprites.dev/ (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 https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (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.

marcosdumay

an hour 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.

ramses0

37 minutes 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...

...we can dream though, can't we?

joseda-hg

an hour 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

surgical_fire

an hour 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

40 minutes ago

I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.

Trasmatta

an hour 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.

jackp96

an hour 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.

dude250711

2 hours 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.

awhitty

an hour 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.

ben_w

an hour 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.

fantasizr

an hour 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

an hour 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.

fantasizr

42 minutes 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

21 minutes ago

I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve 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.

I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.

On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s 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 I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.

skydhash

24 minutes 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

19 minutes ago

I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.

ninkendo

35 minutes ago

Using Apple’s preferred practice of using no article before iPhone (ie. never “an iPhone” or “the iPhone” or even “iPhones”) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. It’s like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.

satisfice

an hour ago

Films aren’t open open to random contributions by casual volunteers. It’s not about iPhones.

troupo

an hour 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.

dgellow

17 minutes 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

35 minutes 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

an hour 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?

jrm4

an hour 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

18 minutes ago

As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.

doctorpangloss

an hour 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!

mostlysimilar

an hour ago

> sense of pride and accomplishment

What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

unacorner

an hour 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.

mostlysimilar

an hour 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.

senordevnyc

an hour ago

Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?

jplusequalt

5 minutes 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.

mostlysimilar

an hour 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.

rpdillon

16 minutes 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.

john_strinlai

an hour 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

an hour 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?

QuantumNomad_

25 minutes 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).

tekne

21 minutes 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?

john_strinlai

an hour ago

would i? no.

would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario? also no.

mostlysimilar

41 minutes ago

Alright, we’re each entitled to our opinions on the matter.

the_af

an hour 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

an hour 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.

rpdillon

11 minutes 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.

Trasmatta

an hour ago

People are very proud of their prompts I guess

It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce

lwyrup

an hour 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 fun—we can finally build a house the barrier has been broken.

I don’t want software written by plebs.

fantasizr

an hour 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

weinzierl

an hour ago

The article closes with the question: "Does open source matter anymore?"

I wouldn’t 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.

kvark

2 hours 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.

janalsncm

an hour 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

an hour 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.

oytis

an hour ago

Are there other companies? Where you are submitting PRs that solve no known problem?

stephenlf

10 minutes 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.

doginasuit

34 minutes 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.

stantaylor

2 hours 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.

CagedCoder

an hour 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

GrinningFool

43 minutes 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

an hour ago

> OK. How?

By vibe. That's what people who believe they can detect AI do.

bluefirebrand

44 minutes 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

3 minutes 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.

ZpJuUuNaQ5

an hour ago

>OK. How?

Have you never seen vibe-slopped PRs?

layer8

an hour 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.

austin-cheney

2 hours 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?

d1l

an hour ago

The question that resonated with me was whether open source even matters anymore.

I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m 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

39 minutes 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

jdw64

44 minutes 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.

mystraline

an hour 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

an hour 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.

tehjoker

2 hours 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

an hour 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.

hungryhobbit

an hour ago

This blog post had serious "old man yells at cloud" vibes for me.

kaffekaka

4 minutes 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

an hour 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.

powera

an hour ago

The priesthood doesn’t like that the peasants can read the Bible for themselves now.

bluefirebrand

41 minutes 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