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Changing how we develop Ladybird

ladybird.org

391–400 of 602 posts

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sense your comment as saying: "AI is hype, and reality will catch-up.". But the simple fact is there's massive evidence that in skilled hands 10x or 100x engineers are possible. We're seeing evidence of it across major open source project as well. And definitely behind closed doors across companies. Reality will catch-up with that too, once the other smoke clears.

I can believe that the difference between the slowest programmer in the world and the fastest AI aided programmer in the world is now 100x in terms of lines of code output. Like I can imagine a programmer writing 250 lines of code per week by hand and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

>and I can imagine an AI powered person writing 25,000 lines of code per week.

A year of that is 1.3M code: the size of systemd, or postgres.

Can you imagine a single person writing systemd (not a POC, the current version feature complete and battle tested) from scratch in a year? If so can you point me to any such project?

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#392
> For decades, code contributions have been how open source projects learned who to trust. People would show up, do the work, take responsibility for their changes, and stick around. Over time, trust emerged from the work itself.

Trust is key.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#393

Reading this leaves a weird taste in my mouth, since the author tends to regularly make nontrivial >1k LOC PRs (sometimes several per day) and merge them on the same day with no reviews at all. This is even ignoring the LLM aspect; I don't know what % of them are assisted, but even if it was 0%, this isn't the pace of development I'd be comfortable with.

His Github page [1] matches some of this. 83% commits, 14% PRs, 2% reviews, 1% issues. Clearly out of control.

[1] https://github.com/awesomekling

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#394

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

"I was afraid" .. "hurt a lot" .. "I hope that" .. "that feels" .. "I'm conflicted" .. "I'm confused" .. "I'm afraid" .. "human touch" .. "I liked" .. "I feel so stupid". Maybe, just maybe, you're not thinking rationally/logically about the situation and instead are mostly operating on emotion and feelings?

its okay for humans to have feelings (and even occasionally talk about them).

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#395
post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m never getting accustomed to the fact that there’s now an entire generation of coders who have never seen a world where "everything" is open-source and developed in the bazaar style (are people these days even aware of the metaphor or Raymond’s book?), a world in which the frigging Microsoft is a major OSS vendor and in charge of facilitating most of the open-source programming on the planet. Try explaining that t…

I’m confused, when has “everything” been a bazaar, and when did that cease to be?

of course not literally 'everything', but as someone that grew up in a post-git world, with github as the 'default', to me projects that don't accept (or expect!) outside contributions have been the exception; definitely aware of notable examples (sqlite? some web servers, a few internal-libraries-that-outsiders-use?) but very much used to the bazaar

i think the claim is that more projects are locking up contribution paths ~currently

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#396

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

"I was afraid" .. "hurt a lot" .. "I hope that" .. "that feels" .. "I'm conflicted" .. "I'm confused" .. "I'm afraid" .. "human touch" .. "I liked" .. "I feel so stupid". Maybe, just maybe, you're not thinking rationally/logically about the situation and instead are mostly operating on emotion and feelings?

What are you talking about? There was nothing irrational or illogical about what he said. The fact that he balanced his (well thought-out) opinion with emotion does not make it instantly irrational.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#398

When AI first happened, I was afraid I was going to eventually lose my job. And while I've been lucky since, many did, and that hurt a lot. When people are losing something to automation, regardless of the economics of the situation, you cheer for the humans, or at least hope that society keeps being fair to those who are most affected. Now I see communities being affected. When you kill PRs, you not only kill the co…

"I was afraid" .. "hurt a lot" .. "I hope that" .. "that feels" .. "I'm conflicted" .. "I'm confused" .. "I'm afraid" .. "human touch" .. "I liked" .. "I feel so stupid". Maybe, just maybe, you're not thinking rationally/logically about the situation and instead are mostly operating on emotion and feelings?

The core of the human experience is to react to emotions. There’s nothing without emotions. Even if you feel like you can numb yourself to look at everything objectively, those “objective” “rational” thoughts are still based on feelings and inklings about what you trust and which facts you believe through chains of sources and anecdotes. There’s no such thing as operating without emotion.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#399
post #35

I can understand where they come from. If most of the pull-requests were AI-coded, well, the maintainers are equally capable of prompting Claude Code themselves. I think the whole game of software engineering, open source or not, has completely changed. A lump of code doesn't mean or imply the same thing as it did 2 years ago.

> If most of the pull-requests were AI-coded, well, the maintainers are equally capable of prompting Claude Code themselves.

I see this position a bit: the notion that AI-generated code has no value. I think it's easy to generate zero-value code, but I don't agree that all AI-generated code is zero-value. I've been working on my side projects in OpenCode, and I spend quite a bit of time prompting, setting up the right files, descriptions of the product I'm trying to build, and the roadmap for it. I have a tight validation loop that lets me run through a bunch of automated checks after each change, and then I do a bunch of manual testing through edge cases that the generated feature might screw up, and then I iterate. It's a different kind of work, but I can make progress more quickly than I could coding by hand. Validation loops are the main critical component.

My experience doing this over the past months is that using AI to code is a skill, and I learn new techniques and get better at it as I try stuff. But that also suggests that, when done well, it can produce something of value.

All of this is to say: while I take issue with your first sentence, I completely agree with your second sentence. What we've lost is the ability to distinguish easily between something well-thought out and something generated thoughtlessly. Focusing on cheap validation would help here immensely, as well.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before. I strongly doubt that is happening for an individual.

> 100x is achieving something in two days, what it took an entire year before. Reduce your scale: "100x achieves in 1 hour what used to take 1 week." One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point. 1 week of work can be reduced to an hour and some change.

>One year of work could require levels of complexity and human judgement that can't be accelerated past a certain point.

In other words, if you include everything that's required to create useful software then 100x turns out to be a fantasy.

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