GitHub Issues before PRs is a great approach. The ghostty project takes that one step further: GH _discussions_ before GH issues. Only maintainers can make issues.
I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
101–110 of 221 posts
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and no, you shouldn't be proud of it.
Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?
Sure, you can feel proud of whatever you wish.
But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel similarly proud of what you did.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#103The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…
If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote?
Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately.
The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#104I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though: There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited. I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was…
Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs. This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to wh…
Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit their time.
The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing everyone else down, so the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable. I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#105This blog post had serious "old man yells at cloud" vibes for me.
The old man is absolutely pointing out a very real problem. It is too easy with LLMs to create crap PR:s.
I learned Flask from Grinberg, god bless the man.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> OK. How? By vibe. That's what people who believe they can detect AI do.
Don't blame the people who dislike AI, blame the people producing AI and using it to produce mass amounts of trash. They're the ones poisoning the public well and making all of this distrust necessary
I didn't blame anyone? I judge whether an article / repo is AI-generated by vibe too. Vibe/intuition is the essential part of our daily lives. It's the #1 think you ask yourself in an interview.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#107> Back in pre-LLM days, receiving an unexpected pull request (PR) from a fellow coder was a source of excitement and pride. As a maintainer of a few FLOSS projects, this tracks. The Pavlovian PR notification response has gone from, "Oh! What do we have here?" to "Groan. Do we have _anything_ here?" I won't get specific but I just had to remove a contributor from a project after multiple submissions of either cutesy,…
TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort needed to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with the rest of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one small thing.
There's one project where I need to download a new version once in a while and I just rebase my changes.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend
One can reason by analogy here. In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers. Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc. When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment…
It's more akin to someone commissioning a piece of art, where they describe the piece in varying detail and then it's the responsibility of the artist to see it through, perhaps deciphering ambiguities in the p̴r̴o̴m̴p̴t̴ commission brief.
If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it off to their employees and then spending the rest of their time watching TikTok in their office. It would be strange if they felt pride in that.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#109The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…
> The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.
You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.
Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#110The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…
Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend
It doesn't even matter and isn't worth arguing about what emotional state the submitter obtains. I don't care if they even achieve nirvana and ascend to permanent buddhahood.
What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.
Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.