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points by lionkor 1 day ago | 0 comments

> akin to the early GPL vs BSD wars

It's more akin to copy-pasting from stack-overflow versus people writing code, or code written by engineers vs code written by outsourced "code monkey" farms/contractors/consultants?

It's not about freedom, which is what GPL vs BSD is fundamentally about.

[–] mrbn100ful 1 day ago

Most of what you use is built by "code monkeys" and is on the way to being vibe coded.

[–] 0c3ca83 1 day ago

Yeah. We noticed. We've been complaining about the quality for a while.

[–] iamnothere 1 day ago

I wasn’t referring to the specifics of the disagreement, I meant the level of vitriol.

[–] Revanche1367 1 day ago

Except in this case the monkeys are pretty good at coding as long as you have enough bananas (tokens). They can follow directions pretty accurately and work independently for at least short periods and incrementally test the work even if you’re not present onsite monkey-handling all the time. I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue. If and when nearly the entire professional industry changes to LLM-based code in most cases, what are they going to do to find those relatively few people who are still willing to write everything manually and spend their spare time maintaining these projects?

[–] officeplant 1 day ago

>I don’t understand this hard anti-ai stance from open-source groups except as a submission volume issue.

plagiarism machine can not be trusted.

therefore plagiarism machine must not be allowed to make decisions.

[–] Revanche1367 21 hours ago

Plagiarism is on the part of the companies making them, the machine cannot really intend things and thus are not the things that are "guilty" of plagiarism. It also doesn't have to be the thing that decides anything, you can still decide anything of importance while acting as a guide.

[–] da_chicken 1 day ago

Especially when it's the corporate plagiarism machine owned by the amoral billionaire class that is profiting wildly off the well-paid legislature's shocking sudden disinterest in protecting the rights and privacy of the people after the capture of the first, second, and third branches alongside the fourth estate.

People are tired of exploding costs, loss of privacy, intrusive technology, pervasive advertising, malignant anti-intellectualism, endless rent-seeking products, and fascist leadership. Adding economic crisis from job loss is a fast track to violence.

I use AI and see it's value and even I'm furious about how it's going.

[–] iamnothere 1 day ago

Perhaps one day we’ll finally understand the value of simpler software that moves ever-closer to “complete” (simple maintenance only), rather than constantly reinventing Zawinsky’s Law.

It’s ok for software to be replaced when something better comes along for a new generation, but what I wouldn’t give for more well-maintained tools that are feature complete.

What is the modern version of Zawinsky’s Law, anyway? Every program expands until it contains a web browser (Electron), notifications, and a chatbot?

[–] bigstrat2003 1 day ago

Except none of that is actually true. LLMs suck at programming, and the level of effort you have to put in to police their suck is so great that you may as well have just written it yourself.

[–] Revanche1367 22 hours ago

I and countless others have been using them quite effectively for complex coding tasks since at least 2023. This seems to be a skill issue in itself or you haven't used any frontier models in about 3 years. Living in denial about new technology isn't very beneficial generally; look around you, the industry has already changed significantly, people like Linus Torvalds who are tough on even good human coders are willing to use LLMs nowadays.

[–] lukaslalinsky 23 hours ago

If you know what you want to do (i.e. you have the architecture/pseudo-code in your head already), LLMs are a actually quite good at transforming that into real code and do save you time/effort. If you are using them like slot machines, and hope for the best after a vague prompt, then yes, it's not worth it, it just leads to frustration and wasted energy.