Just Post

I maintain an open source project with a modest following and got my first ever LLM-generated PR this last weekend.

The code change itself was small and largely fine, if somewhat over-commented in that way that LLM code often is. It was a small improvement for scaling one particular aspect of the UI at higher display scales.

The PR description was entirely LLM generated as well. It's quite possible that I was the first human to actually read it, including the "author".

My response:

First of all, there is a major UI refactor in-progress, so no UI related changes will be accepted at this time.
Secondly, you could at least try to make this not obviously AI generated.
Closed.

They went off like I had just personally insulted their family. Posted a huge rant about how AI was the future, I was going to be left behind, and that my project was unusable on 2K and 4K displays due to the issue this PR was addressing.

I posted a follow-up saying that I actually didn't mind the idea of accepting code that had be written with LLM assistance, mostly because I don't want to wade into the mire that is trying to weigh where every small change came from, but I expect human written PR descriptions. I'm not interested in interacting with meat proxies, if I wanted to ask AI to fix all the bugs I was aware of I could just do that myself.

I blocked them at that point, so can't tell you what they may have said in response.

Aside: Ignoring the unrelated mess that is what "2K" actually means, I've been using 1440p displays for a decade and a half, and another regular contributor runs at 4K, so I have no idea what this person's bar for "unusable" is.

I agree with that rant. You're right that's it's annoying.

I feel as if AI/LLM projects have had an overall negative effect on open source communities. There's a constant flood of new projects. It's overwhelming. With all those new projects is a different attitude and that attitude has changed the vibe of these communities completely.

People that use AI or aggressively promote AI care very little for existing community rules or are constantly pushing those boundaries. They get hostile and feel entitled to more when they are called out for not disclosing their AI usage. They constantly push AI on others who are asking for help or advice. They belittle and insult those who do not want AI code/documentation. They act like this technology which has an extremely short existence in comparison to human existence is inevitable and must have complete influence over our futures.

The promoters of AI give off manager vibes. Someone who desires to control someone or something else and then claim all that work as their own. There's very little thought as to how the work was completed or the quality of that work. I don't like bosses or managers so this attitude is not something I like seeing in my communities.

I think this blog post does a good job explaining the effects of AI on an open source community: https://blog.fallible.net/it-breaks-a-village/

What all these AI heavy devs don't understand (or care about?) is that I don't need you as a proxy for the AI. If it keeps improving in the way they hope and expect, you will eventually be able to type "build me an app" and it will just do it.

That sounds great on paper until you realize that you either need A: a subscription to a Big Tech company who is on record saying they want to put human knowledge on a meter, or B: Access to hardware that is priced out of reach for many people (due to the actions of big tech) if you want a useful, performant, local model.

LLM tech is neat if you look at it in a vacuum. But you CANNOT do that in the real world. Most of the force behind the AI push is from people who want to put skill behind a pay wall they control. I cannot advocate that, even if claude can rewrite Linux in Rust perfectly. And it greatly upsets me that there are pillars of the OSS community (looking at you, Linus) who refuse to consider that because it is personally useful to them.

Unfortunately, we've been put in a situation where you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. And the blame is solely on the devs and big tech personalities who move fast, break things, and do not think about the effects of what they put into this world

People are too worried about "being productive" because AI is being sold as the ultimate productivity tool that will totally make you boatloads of money because you're one prompt away from making your million dollar idea into a real app/game. They're falling for it, testing it out, seeing success (or "success") and thinking it's the first step into their millionaire lives. It's the latest get rich quick scheme, only this time it's dragging half the world and its economy with it.

Me, I'm trying to learn my way around SDL3, which seems especially interesting as it also has a GPU API so programs should, in theory, automatically use the appropriate backend (Vulkan, OpenGL, DirectX, etc) without having to write in said spec. Once I have a better idea of what's going on and what I'm supposed to do, I might create a FOSS game engine and a bunch of video classes explaining how and why I did stuff; so, don't expect anything concrete within the next 6 months! I love being unproductive and those hustle-life fuckers can go fuck themselves

Speaking of fun open source stuff you can discover out of nowhere - Licar is written in pure C with almost no dependencies.

I agree with your sentiment. On a side note if English isn't your first language just so you know built/build can seem very similar. Standardly one would say I built this in past tense. If someone says you didn't built this for some reason it's wrong where I'm from, it reverts to the present of build. "You didn't build this". Not sure 100% why.

I want to build a bridge vs I built a bridge. Maybe it is because when you said "you didn't build this", it is in the present accusation... English is dumb

I’ve come across a dozen projects in the past month or so that I’m genuinely interested in looking further into, riiiiiiiiiight up until I hear about the AI in it.

I don’t comment about it or anything, just back out of the thread and tag the poster as a vibe coder and move on.

If I wanted something vibe coded, I could have a model generate it for me and tweak it to my liking at least as well as some random shmuck on the internet. Thats not what I’m interested in. I want stuff people understand enough to fix problems, and that means largely human written.

I have several games/vr spaces I would love to make, but they would require using AI (I don’t know shit about coding or development, and don’t particularly want to learn tbh, its a huge entry barrier that I won’t be hurdling any time soon) so they simply aren’t going to happen, just like the pre-clanker days. If I’m not even willing to put in the work for my idea, its probably not that good an idea to begin with. And that’s the same way I feel about vibe coders.

Was just having this thought. People who think "making" or creating with botslop is actually real, are idiots and delusional. At least its a red flag to stay away from them because they are probably out of their mind on other topics as well.

But they commissioned it themselves in a model which is non consentually and illegally trained. That has to be admired! 😆

This is how I feel about 3d printing.