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Changing how we develop Ladybird

ladybird.org

451–460 of 602 posts

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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.

Fair call out.

My implied argument is not so much that "because llm was used, then llm must be used."

The original argument proposed by the author is essentially distilled into, "because llm could be used, we must no longer accept public contributions."

Which is, in my opinion, a disproportional and misguided overreaction. The llm was apparently good enough to do the byte for byte replica, so we know that it can be used (within the context of ladybird) in a way that's apparently acceptable to the maintainers.

To attempt to get more precise, argument is that "closing the gates" is moving in the wrong direction against progress, and a signals a potentially net negative impact to the ladybird project.

I don't have a fully formed thesis, it's a lot of vibes. It just feels wrong. I'm willing to acknowledge that, much like the overreaction that I'm calling out, I could be experiencing a similar kind of conservative gut reaction to the changing of the open source community that unsettles me.

Well see how it all shakes out. Right now the topic is so charged and we don't have a good suite of tools and heuristics for the new world, that were bound to see the gamut of reactions.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#454
post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I consider this mode of thinking selfish and anti-progress. It’s pretty much exactly what Americans decry about unions.

> It’s pretty much exactly what Americans decry about unions.

If you consider a union to be a "bad thing" then we are likely going to talk past each other for eternity.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In hindsight, the word "caste" is too heavily loaded and I should have chosen a different term. Sorry for the shit choice.

It's not meant to be taken negatively, and is purely a term that I was choosing to represent "hey, you all need to consider better coordinating/representing/holding the line as a group".

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but they could get free token usage from the community

When I contribute to OSS with AI I’m essentially engaging in a donation matching scheme where Anthropic matches 1 to 20 the dollar value invested (usually I can get ~2k of value per month on the $100 plan) in the open source project. So any project that doesn’t accept AI PRs is really missing out on significant investment

> (usually I can get ~2k of value per month on the $100 plan)

Would you pay 2000$ for those tokens? If not, the number is meaningless.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#457
post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Man, you must hate those handymen who put up YouTube videos showing how to do basic home maintenance. A truly class-conscious handyman would insist that the homeowner hire them to replace a light switch.

How this is equivalent at all? The proper equivalence would be "You should be happy a random passerby decided to re-wire your home after watching a youtube tutorial and thank him accordingly".

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#459
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.

The code just isn’t the main effort of work anymore. Anyone can generate the implementation, so it makes more sense than ever to instead hammer out the what, why, and how that underlies any code change. I see all projects moving this direction. Makes more sense to hash out a plan together.

Code was never the main effort of work, but it was a clear signal that someone has done the main effort, which is understanding the codebase, designing a new feature, or investigating a bug, and have the knowledge to write the code. By the time you get to review, you can expect a knowledgeable person on the other end.

It’s the same about published journal article. A lot of them are a few pages. That is mostly one hour of typing. But everyone knows that typing it is not the work.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It's in no way specific to software engineering as a role nor to high salary positions.

Yes, I agree. We are, however, on a site and in a thread that is dedicated to the role of software engineering, so I don't really care about the wider discussion at the moment.

My sole input here is that software engineering has not protected itself as a field, and it will now pay the price for that.

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