Changing how we develop Ladybird • Hacker News Board

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#471

Post by Sharlin » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #356

cpcallen wrote: post #42

On the one hand, if you grew up in the baazzar, moving to the cathedral might feel like the "death of open source" even if it is really just a return to an earlier way of working. On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.

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…

> 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

(Sorry, accidentally negated my meaning there, what I meant is that they have only seen this current world. Or never seen a world where it isn't the case, to use a confusing double negation.)

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#472

Post by cosmicriver » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:32 PM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #356

cpcallen wrote: post #42

On the one hand, if you grew up in the baazzar, moving to the cathedral might feel like the "death of open source" even if it is really just a return to an earlier way of working. On the other hand, while not accepting external code contributions will certainly improve their security posture it will also make it more difficult to identify who to invite to join the priesthood.

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 think that was a natural outcome of cheaper merges/conflict resolution in distributed version control. It became easier so there were more situations where it made sense.

Now LLM spam has made it harder, so now there are fewer situations where it makes sense, and projects are switching to a cathedral model.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#473

Post by justin66 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #380

justin66 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would normal people even want to become an unpaid janitor for someone else's stuff? Social validation. Or, to be slightly more generous, sort of a compulsory way to force someone more experienced to provide some mentorship, by compelling them to review your pull requests.

That’s the point here, though. The maintainers of Ladybird don’t want to be compelled to mentor people making throwaway contributions without a commitment to the project. It’s pretty frustrating to try to mentor an absentee mentee who isn’t actually ready to learn from you.

I expect they'd like to not mentor new people attempting to make real contributions as well. Sometimes you're just not in a position to do that.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#474

Post by kzz102 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:40 PM UTC

Fraterkes wrote: post #66

I've been looking a lot at Godot (another big open source project) PRs lately, and there's been kind of a surge of wholy ai-generated PRs (both code and description). This is agains project-policy, so people creating these PRs usually get mildly told off. What's surprising is that while many submitters take that fairly well, some people get really indignant, essentially calling the maintainers ungrateful. It's kinda…

Since Godot got mentioned, I thought this recent talk by Juan Linietsky provides a reasonable alternative to heavily restricting contribution.

https://youtu.be/LDSwP37y_W4?si=fMIsdQ2yjoiGChb6

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#475

Post by aorth » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

spacechild1 wrote: post #284

crabmusket wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The generalised form of this, which we are rapidly discovering, is that AI breaks the social contract that used to exist between an author and a reader (of prose, code, anything).

That's the most succinct way I have seen someone put it, thanks! It's really the same issue, no matter if it's software, online comments, e-mails, artworks, homework, etc. We engage because we expect to be interacting with the output of another human being. AI fundamentally betrays this expectation.

Yes, and there was a good post about exactly this social contract last week https://jola.dev/posts/the-social-contract-of-writing. I find the argument compelling on the face of it and true in my experience with colleagues and the broader digital landscape recently.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#476

Post by Klonoar » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

rustystump wrote: post #470

Klonoar wrote: post #424

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’ll be blunt and say you certainly sounds like someone “post money” talking if castes and such. Glad you got your nut and do not care how it shakes out. What is sad about oss? What is it turning into? I will say far before ai came in oss was a few arms deep in the techfluqncer culture where motivations were driven by gh stars and follow counts rather than a genuine interest. Or maybe what was a genuine interest beca…

> Glad you got your nut and do not care how it shakes out.

I do care, it's why I commented what I commented. ;P

I already acknowledged that "caste" is an incorrect word choice and I could've done better there, but my core point remains unchanged.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#477

Post by Klonoar » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #463

Klonoar wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> My sole input here is that software engineering has not protected itself as a field, and it will now pay the price for that. & my point in raising that this is not an issue that's unique to software engineering is to argue that the demons you're proposing software engineers protect themselves from are distractions from the root cause. You're proposing software engineers need to protect themselves from something tha…

> You're proposing software engineers need to protect themselves from something that's specific to their field when the problem is holistic.

I have not said it's specific to their field. I've just been specifically commenting on that field.

(The lack of solidarity is perhaps specific to the field)

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#478

Post by samtheDamned » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:46 PM UTC

dvdkon wrote: post #156

JimBlackwood wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a trust system is the only way. Ladybird will need new/different maintainers at some point in the future. How are you going to find them now? I don’t disagree with their choice, but it’s not sustainable in the long term.

Closed-source projects have been dealing with this forever, by having a mostly-static pool of employees replenished through job listings and interviews. A FLOSS project adopting this model would certainly feel weird, but could work if there were enough willing candidates. The question is, who will take on effectively a job without the monetary reward?

My understanding is that the people working on ladybird are compensated for their full time positions, so I would also expect any future positions to be similar.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#479

Post by calvinmorrison » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

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…

happens all the time. Some business jerk outsources an entire initiative, forces it through review, and we get dumped with externally written crap we gotta deal with. So what if claude wrote it, actually claude is better than money wasted on those outsourced piles of crap projects

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#480

Post by fabon » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

Very confusing statement. It is definitely true that OSS is on the verge of a crisis because of AI agents, but they clearly said AI is not the reason to reject external contributors: "Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point."

If AI is the problem, the solution would be introducing an AI policy, community trust management system or something like that. Definitely not a closed development process.