11–20 of 262 posts
The new personalization talking point appears to be coordinated. It is all over the Internet since last week.
Problem is, 99.99% of people (including developers) do not need "personalized" software, unless you mean Emacs style.
One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…
So, I'm a subscriber/user of exe.dev but even so I was a bit disappointed when the meat.dev tool linked in the article had no screenshots/meaningful docs. So I installed it and was bummed to see it only supported openAI and exe.dev llm integration by default. "You can just fork" - yeah I know, so take it with a grain of salt. That aside aside, I agree. Since reading this article yesterday I've probably been overthink…
FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I’m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to Anthropic with a single prompt? It’s a strange new world we live in.
On the website: you’re right. I have some side-by-side diff examples I want to turn into a website. I am just short on hours in the day. My real goal is to make the tool compelling enough that I can convince my colleagues that we should build it into Shelley. :)
Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees.
"Open source" is now weaponized to price down entire companies to the floor and instead of humans maintaining the software, it is now coding agents doing the work.
Neither the free and open source software movement accounted for this disruption and they have become the new starving artists of the software world.
This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken.
And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask. Yes, your diffs appear but they lack filenames. You've added this requirements to the prompt? Ok, filenames are back but they are font size 4, unreadably small. You want them well-seen? next week they become size 54, taking entire screen.. This is not a problem with regular AI development - you review the changes and test them a bit. But doing it day-to-day with no overview is just asking for trouble.
I disagree. As if a tool is customized via agents and something goes wrong, it should be the users issue to fix it. Say I want to customize a bank app (or sca tool) to use a nickname instead of my name, if it breaks then who fixes it?
This might not generalize beyond developers, or at least not right away. Even if we’re not doing the upgrades ourselves, we know what a merge conflict is, and we’re probably better at telling the AI what went wrong so it can fix it.
These don’t seem like skills that are all that hard to learn for someone who’s interested. Also, merge conflicts an AI can’t deal automatically likely mean something major changed upstream.
There will be jobs helping people who get into more trouble than they can dig themselves out of. And if you can’t afford that, I guess it’s a learning experience.
This is one of the only fields where the customer (developers) almost never pays for their own tools and instead builds their own or even to compete against another developer. Then, they later realize why human developers in open source burnout so easily. Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees. "Open sour…
So, I'm a subscriber/user of exe.dev but even so I was a bit disappointed when the meat.dev tool linked in the article had no screenshots/meaningful docs. So I installed it and was bummed to see it only supported openAI and exe.dev llm integration by default. "You can just fork" - yeah I know, so take it with a grain of salt. That aside aside, I agree. Since reading this article yesterday I've probably been overthink…
(Author here.) FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I’m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to…
On another note, the reason I was perusing the blog was because I was curious about more of how exe handles review/quality/testing because you mentioned there being no code review in another post about stripe billings (maybe a different author). So consider this a casual request for more content on reducing delivery bottlenecks :)
I agree that devtools should be open source, but... I very much disagree with the premise that no tools should have config files, options, or plugin systems, and instead when you want to change something like your text editor's font size, you should have an LLM download the code, change the hard-coded value, and rebuild it. That's just so inefficient and wasteful. Assuming a world in which LLMs do most of the coding…
Without any evidence to back it up, my hope is that your criticism in a decade will be the equivalent to "Everybody having a mainframe at home? Do we want to waste a whole room in each and every house just for that?".
One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…
[flagged]