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Devtools must be open source

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Re: Devtools must be open source

#111

Post by pjmlp »

wredcoll wrote: post #104
pjmlp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the harsh reality is that for a large majority it has been an easier way to pirate, nothing else, while feeling entitled to scream at the poor maintainers for not implementing whatever features they needed for yesterday.

What a boringly reductive take. It's not like hackernews is some amazing bastion of like, optimism and culture and interesting conversation, but surely we can do better than this?

HackerNews, the site when someone posts about their business for developer tooling, there is always a bunch of folks posting links about half implemented alternatives, because who wants to pay for tooling like any other professionals?

Re: Devtools must be open source

#112

Post by djaro »

rvz wrote: post #14

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…

It is crazy how much of the tech industry - one of the biggest industries on Earth - still uses so much volunteer labor. Its crazy because in no other industry would people expect you to not only give away your stuff for free but do it in such a way anyone else can copy your stuff and edit it.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#113

Post by lanstin »

vector_spaces wrote: post #74
simonw wrote: post #3

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…

> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security…

Yeah, due to the friction of maintaining a private fork, I always upstream bug fixes I find where the fix is simpler than a work around. It's just neighborly. I don't it very often, maybe every 2 years? But a lot of other people do so, and it adds up; open source software continues to improve pretty substantially over the years.

And when I'm debugging I read all the code I have access to - certainly glibc pretty often, Python C implementation and C libraries quite often; the Go runtime, if only for the education, etc. It's not often I need to read the kernel implementation, except sometimes for networking protocols where it's also educational. I have found over my career that reading excellent code is as important to the quality of my code as writing code and iterating on it to make it good.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#114

Post by fasterik »

I used to be much more of an open source fundamentalist than I am now. For me, it's more about trust than source availability. There are closed source projects that I have high trust in, and there are open source projects that I don't trust at all. A project being open source can increase trust, but not necessarily so.

Regarding personalization, I would much rather use software with strong design principles that's simple, opinionated, and works out of the box with sane defaults. I want to spend my time getting work done, not tweaking settings and adding custom features.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#116

Post by [deleted] »

wredcoll wrote: post #104
pjmlp wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the harsh reality is that for a large majority it has been an easier way to pirate, nothing else, while feeling entitled to scream at the poor maintainers for not implementing whatever features they needed for yesterday.

What a boringly reductive take. It's not like hackernews is some amazing bastion of like, optimism and culture and interesting conversation, but surely we can do better than this?

[deleted]

Re: Devtools must be open source

#117

Post by raincole »

20k wrote: post #108
theamk wrote: post #15

> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version. 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…

I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this, its one of those things that you say because it sounds modern and up to date, and makes for a good sounding blogpost. The actual reality of any of what they're talking about is absolutely terrible Even just the cost of this would be a disaster, especially once everything goes to token based pricing

Some people even claim that they don't commit the code into source control, only the prompts. The best part about the internet is that you can publish any random shower thought.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#118

Post by CamperBob2 »

20k wrote: post #108
theamk wrote: post #15

> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version. 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…

I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this, its one of those things that you say because it sounds modern and up to date, and makes for a good sounding blogpost. The actual reality of any of what they're talking about is absolutely terrible Even just the cost of this would be a disaster, especially once everything goes to token based pricing

Been doing it for the past several weeks. It is no longer correct to say that LLMs can't/don't/won't exercise reasonable aesthetic judgement on the finished product. Immense progress in this area has been made recently.

If you want the model to maintain a certain look and feel, or to preserve the UX in other ways, tell it. Even if it doesn't get it 100% right today, the direction of progress is pretty clear, so you might as well get used to prompting the models accordingly.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#119

Post by vector_spaces »

simonw wrote: post #99
vector_spaces wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security…

> I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously Don't get me wrong, I've been a strong advocate for the benefits of open source for decades. I think it's delivered enormous value, and most of the top valued companies in the world today wouldn't exist without open source! What's new now is that the end user inspection and modification benefits are feeling a lot more material for a lo…

No worries, I thought so, and agree with your point -- I'm a fan of your work and datasette historically was something I leaned on often at work and in personal projects. I have read some interpretations of recent developments that misunderstand what programmers and mathematicians do and have done, so was filling in the gaps in what you wrote to speak to some of those

I'm grateful for the work you've done!

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