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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
141–150 of 221 posts
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.
Hope all your programs are written in machine code. Wouldn’t want to be proud of compiler output.
I mean yeah? Wouldn't you be more proud of your ability to write a program in machine code than you would in assembly? Or more proud of assembly than of C? Or more proud of C than of Python?
Each stage takes greater effort, effort which creates skill. Those hard-earned skills are accomplishments to be proud of.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#143I totally understand the point of view from maintainers. Review fatigue of low quality slop is a legitimate issue.
The worst ones are fully autonomous AI agents looking for open source projects and adding random pull requests.
But in some cases, I find a legit bug that needs fixing. For example, I want to get a particular program working in Wine/FEX on aarch64 [1], or I find a 12 second hang in Darktable [2]. The problem is that, as a software engineer working in a totally different discipline, I have no knowledge of the low level C code to fully understand what the problem even is, or how to fix it. All I want to do is to fix the issue and help other people avoid running into the same issue. Right now, on my machine, I maintain a set of custom patches to get everything working. But I am too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to create the fix by hand, so I can't submit a pull request (or when I do, I feel really bad about it. I honestly feel like a horrible person, e.g. when a project added a "No AI" policy soon after I submitted some AI-generated PRs [3]). Going forward, I feel like this sort of scenario is going to be way more common.
[1] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/issues/5512
[2] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/21069
[3] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/commit/8c85096f98084ca9438b16...
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#144Earlier 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.
> 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.
I some times will open a PR even if i know it will get closed, simply by because if its a bugfix or feature i want, someone else might do so too, and i have many times adopted code from PR's that were never adopted by mainstream or closed.
By pushing that PR, i might be annoying a grouchy maintainer, but at the same time helping tens or hundreds of other users of the software.
Imho the beauty of open source is as long as you're adhering to the licenses, you can do whatever the heck you want =)
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#145Even if this guy were not anti-AI, as the primary maintainer of OS projects, it sounds like he's dealing with a genuine problem. > My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure out in just a few seconds. OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.
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Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#146Earlier 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
What sense of pride an accomplishment do you get from using a library, or a high level language? You didn't write that code, you didn't hand translate into processor opcodes, etc. There are a million man hours of other people's work involved in making a simple python script run. Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing... Why do you…
That's a poor analogy, because the intention is orders of magnitude greater on those things than with an LLM. You still need the intention to write Python instead of C, or C instead of assembly. You need an insignificant amount of intention for LLMs, which will happily spew code even for the worst, most incomplete or nonsensical commands.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#147The 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 In…
Very well framed.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
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"
"Blessed are the humble ..."
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#149The 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 In…
A customized budget tracking sheet is the personal finance equivalent of a programmer showcasing their TODO webapp. Obviously it's going to be incredibly unpopular. Yet, there are popular tools people have shared in personal finance communities.
Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur
#150The 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
Do you think people in product design never feel a sense of accomplishment or something?
Or for another perspective, why do you think a "sense of accomplishment" is an essential, and dominantly important thing for everyone? Maybe they feel two hot shits about such a thing.
Especially when the "accomplishment" in the vast majority of cases is in the realm of "having had the patience to endure the humiliation ritual of figuring out the arbitrary abstractions some other dude came up with, and doing the plumbing to reconcile that with the requirements to the extents possible"?
It's like that Star Wars: Battlefront PR comment's idea of a "sense of accomplishment". Outright asinine and cynical. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...
When I make things, what I care about is exactly the function they provide. It's endlessly rewarding to make something useful. It's not some exercise in polishing my ego by proxy. I don't want people appreciating the things I make because they were hard to make. That's borderline condescending and pitiful.
But hey, maybe I'm mischaracterizing the way you meant "sense of accomplishment" myself. Maybe this is exactly what you meant too. But then how would people vibecoding be robbed of feeling this? Makes no sense.