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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#131

Post by gedy »

kentm wrote: post #104
toponijo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.

Some of this is the funny situation where the faithful will state: "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does"

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#132

Post by lelanthran »

anal_reactor wrote: post #107
ethagnawl wrote: post #98

> 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.

> 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.

That's a good thing; OSS projects don't want drive-by contributors, they want a community. A small bit of friction is a good thing.

After all, we can see what happens with frictionless contributions.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#133

Post by surgical_fire »

skybrian wrote: post #72
surgical_fire wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater? I think no answers are needed. If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing. If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to i…

I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.

Why not?

If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well.

You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters.

This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#134

Post by darkwater »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #122
anal_reactor wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I not trying to be mean about it, but... that's good. If your one small thing wasn't worth the effort for contribution then it probably doesn't need to be in upstream. Contrary to what many seem to believe, code existing is not inherently better than code not existing.

Actually it's good for another reason, and that's the very essence of opensource: the user can customize the software to their needs, but there is no obligation to participate in a community effort (although it's definitely cool as a side effect)

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#135

Post by troupo »

awhitty wrote: post #120
troupo wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with elitism. Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.

Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism. But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, p…

> So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using

No. Just the fact that they have a tool does not automatically make them a professional, doesn't automatically make them skillful, and doesn't automatically make their output worth something.

This is the meaning of "When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie."

There's nothing elitist about it.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#136

Post by AndrewKemendo »

oytis wrote: post #39
ctoth wrote: post #3

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. 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

You should see the non AI trash that people are proud of

Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#137

Post by skydhash »

hext wrote: post #92
skydhash wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.

I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor. I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.

> I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.

The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#138

Post by toast0 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #128
alex_young wrote: post #116

A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? I don’t get the analogy. I understand he’s talking about getting pushed around by an LLM, but would a normal centaur push an LLM around? It doesn’t even have any hands right? Seems like a reverse centaur is more capable of typing.

> A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? Well, no. A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs. That is, it's an augmented person who drives the powerful machinery underneath. Think of a person driving a car. A reverse centaur is the opposite, namely, a machine making the choices and a frail human following them. In this context, a reverse centaur is an AI spitting thousands of LOC…

> A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs.

Well also more numerous than human legs... And the whole two torsos thing

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Te...

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#139

Post by tomxor »

beering wrote: post #16
ctoth wrote: post #3

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. We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-dem…

I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible. At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the…

> For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.

The crux is here somewhere.

A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone.

Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes.

The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell.

As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.

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