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Changing how we develop Ladybird

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Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#441

Post by tarkin2 »

potsandpans wrote: post #414
js8 wrote: post #376

I am old enough to remember what happened to GCC. It was also developed by a closed group of maintainers, because "it couldn't work" as a bazaar-style development. Then EGCS fork happened and became more successful. I think closing contributions (due) to AI will be looked at in a similar way. Forks open to AI will appear, and take over. And people will return to the open model. I think it needs more proliferation of…

[flagged]

The rust conversion was a byte-for-byte replica of the original's bytecode, was it not? Thereby it was easily possible to validate the quality of the AI-based work. The same would obviously not be possible for patches. I don't believe you can use the rust conversion as a valid, if implied, argument that you can take AI-patches in good faith.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#442

Post by sph »

torben-friis wrote: post #251
patates wrote: post #131

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…

>But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though? It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly. Quoting obama, "reality has a way of catching up with you". I see a lot of talk, but iOS is not delivering a decade of features and fixes on each yearly release. Literally no…

> It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly.

It’s been enormously alienating talking to laypeople about the apocalyptic atmosphere in the tech world, while for them ChatGPT is a cool piece of software but the world still hasn’t changed very much. They look at me bug eyed when I tell them how dramatically software engineering has changed in the matter of a couple years. We are in a bubble, or we’re just, as you say, in the eye of the cyclone which still has to hit the rest of the world.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#443

Post by dofm »

ecshafer wrote: post #357
rurban wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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I regularly find the code output of opus and gpt 5.5 to be garbage. Overly verbose, unnecessary abstractions, strange duplication of concepts across objects, unnecessary copying of objects and creation of objects. I have found its much more useful to just ping pong some ideas, have it generate helper methods, and do the code implementation by hand. I guess I am a stoneager.

I think this is one of the grand realisations, and it is why local models are much, much more of a threat to the "metered intelligence as a global utility" business model.

As an AI-cynic I am much more interested in learning how AI solves my problems (of which I have many), not how it can revolutionise programming. How about it revolutionises me not experiencing task paralysis first.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#445

Post by afdbcreid »

thedevilslawyer wrote: post #276
torben-friis wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But all now seems like a transition phase. Transition to f-ing what though? It feels like being in the middle of a tornado. But I think it helps to turn off screens, sit in a desk, and calmly remember first principles and consider them slowly. Quoting obama, "reality has a way of catching up with you". I see a lot of talk, but iOS is not delivering a decade of features and fixes on each yearly release. Literally no…

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.

10x? The most generous studies I know give up to a 50% improvement.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#446

Post by sph »

pianopatrick wrote: post #439
torben-friis wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Well, as a thought experiment, I'd say that depends on if the measure is "1.3M lines of production code" or "1.3M lines of code (test code, comments and production code combined)". I don't think you could get to 1.3M lines of production code, but people say AI agents are good at writing tests. I could imagine that if you had an unlimited budget you could set up agents to generate lots and lots of tests and comments,…

I have seen people with that kind of AI assisted productivity-by-volume, building eldritch abominations like Gas Town.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#447

Post by lucideer »

Klonoar wrote: post #360
lucideer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pre-ai reaction was also unwarranted: committing a massive amount of potentially unmaintainable handwritten code isn't a necessarily positive contribution and any decent engineer (or person tbh) would understand that & not expect gratitude, no matter how concerted their effort. In that context, I wouldn't expect an idiot (of which there has always been far too many in this industry) to change their behaviour in a…

> Fwiw, a non-technical employee in my workplace has begun submitting ai-generated prs to internal repos I maintain & they're of excellent quality, with review feedback graciously received & expediently addressed, so this isn't a matter of the idiots not being technical, it's an attitude problem. It is hard for me to imagine another engineering discipline that would be totally fine accepting work from those who don't…

Ooof. This is a big topic - I understand where you're coming from, but it's a common sentiment & one I've recently come to disagree more & more with.

Firstly: class solidarity. The apparent death of (or at least notable decline in) class solidarity is popularly lumped upon software engineers because they're relatively highly paid, but it's equally as absent in newly created positions (mainly within the IT sector) at all salary levels. There's been a concerted effort to erode class awareness in the private sector for the past 40+ years & it's been effective across all sectors, mostly in newly created job categories without pre-existing union culture. It's in no way specific to software engineering as a role nor to high salary positions.

Secondly: ai & llms. Currently these technologies are monopolised by corporate entities, with models generally being far too inefficient to democratise, so it's obviously tempting to conflate their very existence with their owners, but if you're singling out ai usage as some kind of affordance to the capitalist class you're missing the woods for the trees. You need to separate ownership from existence/usage.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#448

Post by lucideer »

jakolaptu wrote: post #431
lucideer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pre-ai reaction was also unwarranted: committing a massive amount of potentially unmaintainable handwritten code isn't a necessarily positive contribution and any decent engineer (or person tbh) would understand that & not expect gratitude, no matter how concerted their effort. In that context, I wouldn't expect an idiot (of which there has always been far too many in this industry) to change their behaviour in a…

But your company employs said individual, whereas arbitrary drive-by patches from randos on open source projects with no consequence of submitting a mountain of garbage. The answer: require a written proposal for changes before a patch will even be considered unless it is sufficiently small. Also fight AI with AI: have a bot auto reject patches unless they can link to a previously approved enhancement document. Folks…

just to clarify:

1. my company also employs its fair share of folk that would fit into the so-called "idiot" category of my post - I just thought it was of note that I have encountered exceptions to this stereotype

2. I fully support what Ladybird is doing here & find it unfortunate that they have to. I didn't intend my post to criticise their move - my example is definitely the rare exception in a sea of unmaintainable garbage. I do think however that it was already a challenging prospect to manage garbage oss prs in the pre-llm era (see umpteen posts on maintainer burnout) & I wouldn't have faulted any open source project for doing what ladybird is doing even pre-llm.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#449

Post by lucideer »

Klonoar wrote: post #424
dcrazy wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not strawmanning anything. I’m pointing out what I believe to be ridiculous gatekeeping. Software engineering isn’t some holy magic that must be kept from the masses. I can go on YouTube and get step-by-step instructions on how to safely wire an entire house. In many jurisdictions I would even be allowed to do that. I can get instructions on how to completely redo a bathroom, down to the studs and up through the…

Alright, I guess I'll take the bait. Not much else going on today anyway. > I’m pointing out what I believe to be ridiculous gatekeeping. I am not gatekeeping. I am stating that we collectively exist in a professional caste and that will go away or lose influence if you let it do so. Other professional castes do this exact same brain exercise and that is why they have protections in place. > Some people try to cling…

Your initial post on class solidarity was extremely reasonable (even if I disagreed with it - see my comment above) but to follow it up with a post describing castes in a non-negative light is wild.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#450

Post by sph »

maplethorpe wrote: post #283

Their loss. Think about it. Anthropic just reported that their codebase is now improving itself. We're moments away from every open source repo being able to do the same. Think of it like torrenting — you'll be able to open your repo to the public, and have a stream of code flow in from millions of contributors. More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days. Lad…

> More code than you could ever write in ten lifetimes, uploaded to your repository in a matter of days

I wonder if any of you AI boosters have any actual knowledge of how software is written, why bugs exist and how to mitigate tech debt. I wonder if you guys even know what tech debt is.

Somehow it’s always very young accounts which made me wonder if I’m talking to exuberant teenagers or people that have done a one week Python code camp 10 years ago and now think they’re John Carmack with their Claude subscription.

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