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Changing how we develop Ladybird

ladybird.org

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Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There certainly exists a class of electricians who believe that homeowners shouldn't be changing a light switch, and jurisdictions exist where a permit is required to do so.

I have seen some homeowners who shouldn't own a screwdriver or a hammer try to do minor electrical work. It was not pretty. I've often thought that it would make sense to have a DIY electrician's certificate, proving that you know how to do basic home wiring, such as outlets, switches, ceiling lamps, basic solar (DC and AC), installing new wire, load calculations, and connecting to breakers in a service panel I have…

In the Netherlands anyone may do the wiring of their house themselves but if it is a substantial modification (or an entire installation) a certified electrician has to sign off on it. They are not likely to stick their neck out for any funny business.

That said, I've seen plenty of work from experienced certified electricians that was complete garbage. Not just a few things, more than half their work.

Things like, they cut half way though the wire removing insulation. When you pull the socket out of the wall the wire breaks. So you have to strip it again but they also cut it to short so you have to pull a new wire into the tube. Then you discover the tube is a bunch of segments behind the wall or it has multiple sharp 90 degree corners and the wire wont move or the new wire wont go in. Then you have to open up the walls, new plaster, new paint, do you want one wall with wall paper that doesn't match or will you go for new wall paper for the entire house/floor? All because they did multiple terrible things.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#552
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, are you really going to strawman "engineering should be inherently disqualifying" into "so people shouldn't DIY in their own home"? Please try a little bit harder.

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…

I would argue the result depends 90% on mentality. Experience only makes you work faster.

Fun conversation with a high end coder: ME: I would write it from scratch rather than introduce a dependency. It's not that I don't trust people but I just don't trust people to live up to the specific standards for the specific job. HIM: For what I cost no way I could justify that. ME: It looks like a circus this thing of yours. HIM: Keep the secret!

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintainers can also use the exact same tools to help review and validate PRs

So the solution is for FOSS developers to pay large sums of money to AI companies, to solve the problem that the AI companies created, for profit? ... and you typed this out as though extorting charities were a solution, instead of a grotesquely immoral and unethical systemic failure?

So 50 years ago people who created calculators were at fault for people not calculating from memory? or 100 years ago people who created engines were at fault for people not doing manual labor anymore?

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#554

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…

>It is hard for me to imagine another engineering discipline ... engineering background required to do the work.

Well, that would be because you don't really need to be a real engineer for what people call "software engineering". 50 years ago - maybe, 30 - maybe, but way less.

But for the last 15 years at least - you don't really need a degree to build meaningfull software.

Maybe you need it to build a new compiler or to work on a "close to metal" project etc.

But thats is. Most of people in the industry are called engineers, but let's be real - we are not the same kind of engineers as people who build brindges or airplanes.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Considering the reactions, it was a very amusing "mistake" to make (a bikeshedding lightning rod so to speak).

Though I guess "caste" is a bit more sensitive in some cultures, which might explain why some commentators hyperfixate on that part of your comment.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#556

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…

I’ve seen bounties for re-adding C# to web exports to Godot 4. [1] It’s something that’s had some technical roadblocks for the engine’s developers, and looks like it might take a bit of time. [2] There tend to be a lot of drive-by AI PRs attempt to “re-add” the feature, often not quite addressing the situation comprehensively. It seems like a bit of a local minima trap for the bots. [3] [1] https://app.opire.dev/issu…

Wow, you weren't kidding, I found these before I got bored (they all seem to be LLM-authored from a quick skim):

- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/115280 Implement C# .NET Integration via Headless Glue Bypass (Build 7ae8ec974) by Eliene-byte

- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/107146 [.NET] Add web export support for C# projects in Godot 4 by Enrique726

- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/117787 Readd .NET web export support by santosparra651-arch

- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/119405 WIP: Add Web C# export pipeline pieces by acidstorm2024-star

- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/119119 Allow building Web platform with C#/.NET module enabled by AndresFpdhi

- https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/119330 Cross runtime Solution to Enable C# Web Exports by tommygrammar

- ... and more (some of the claims on he opire thing seem to have been scrubbed, though, or they never opened PRs).

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#557
post #406

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…

What would be great is something like Pangram for PRs and issues. Detects if the PR or issue is AI-generated (with multiple checkers for redundancy) so that maintainers can choose to auto-close and PR authors have to at least manually write _something_ before they launch 20k SLOC diffs.

Isn't Pangram more expensive per token than most (all?) LLMs? Sounds too easily DoSable.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#558
What I fail to understand: Who or how are these AI generated pull requests paid for? There is nothing to gain financially by creating all these AI generated pull requests - yet the increasingly more expensive tokens have to be paid for somehow. How is it paid for? Or are these authors using all their free GPT5.4-mini tokens from Github until hitting the rate limit, day after day? Or are they running some local AI model on their GPU like Qwen and heating the room in they work in, day after day?

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your work on nixpkgs but I think that shapes your perspective quite a lot - its a very different project from Ladybird. Not to belittle your contributions there but the majority of commits there are a few lines of code and much of it is declarative. I'm sure a lot goes into review of entirely new packages and there are some complex interactions between dependencies to consider on some changes but not in a…

I missed the part where you weren’t going to belittle the contributions.

It required reading comprehension skills.

It is simply a fact that most commits are small - that is the nature of that kind of project. I looked at the commit history. It still takes a lot of work and it is valuable, but it has very different review requirements.

Re: Changing how we develop Ladybird

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I missed the part where you weren’t going to belittle the contributions.

It required reading comprehension skills. It is simply a fact that most commits are small - that is the nature of that kind of project. I looked at the commit history. It still takes a lot of work and it is valuable, but it has very different review requirements.

Wow you’re on a whole roll today!

Ok, how come your little comprehension examination didn’t grapple with the main point: that they said they could not have made the changes they merged in themselves? Surely pointing out that the commits were small cuts AGAINST your whole argument. For a more complex project where vibe slop might not be appropriate (again, wild thing to say), the potential input from outside is more valuable, not less.

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