Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

better-simple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 184 posts

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#151

Post by mrguyorama »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #108
zenolove wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slippery. You're swamped with low-effort PRs, can't possibly test and review all of them. You will become a visible bottleneck, and guess whether it's easier to defend quality vs. "blocking a lot of features" which "seem to work". If you're tied by your salary as a reviewer, you will have to let go, and at the same time you'll suffer the consequences of the "lack of oversight" when things go south.

The Board has decided that we can no longer afford artisanal, hand-crafted software, and that machine-made will suffice for nearly all use cases. Enshittification Enterprise Edition.

The board wants their cake and eat it too.

They want AI to write all code but also still be able to fire humans for failure, because an AI can't be blamed right now.

Boy I can't wait for this employment norm. Fired because you weren't allowed to take the time to review important code but "You are responsible"

I wish Executives were required to be that "responsible"

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#152

Post by qdotme »

Aurornis wrote: post #145
acedTrex wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry is broken now, this is just a response to that. Leadership and product don't have any respect for the code, why would engineers have any respect for the ticketing process. Thats an unreasonable asymmetric effort demand, "Your code does not matter but my precious tickets must have elbow grease put into them."

> The industry is broken now, this is just a response to that. No, your behavior is the cause of that. The entire industry isn't broken. There are good company cultures and bad company cultures just like always. At least own up to what you're doing. Don't blame "the industry" when you're the one doing the thing.

Or.. both!

The industry is broken. It's broken in the same sense the railroad industry is broken. It has reached the point of abundance, where we're doing things that don't need doing. That won't get done in an efficient market. But since we're not in an efficient market, there are globs of capital thrown at people building stuff that.. doesn't stand a chance of actually making any return on capital.

But while it lasts, us, the glorified machine-minders (just like railroad engineers, well, minded the engines), get paid large lumps of money, through large hordes of managers, arguing on minutia of conversion optimization, and fundamentally, being paid enough to not to try and do something else, perhaps competitive.

And that is broken. Especially for the "smarter of us" - the graduation ceremony of my physics department rings true - we've trained you to discover the secrets of universe and reach the stars, and most of us will use it.. to gain an edge at Lehman Brothers.

(And I think the root of this problem, is the abundance of low-risk capital, from people who expect a small return and a pension that lasts for decades in retirement)

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#153

Post by ErroneousBosh »

paganel wrote: post #104
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you spent much time with the Django codebase? I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic Python from that than anything else.

> I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but i…

Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django code for them because they'd been asked to find a contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025 hosting.

Sure, I thought, this'll be fun.

Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable.

I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#154

Post by marknutter »

woodruffw wrote: post #64
marknutter wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the first line of the article: "Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation instead."

That's not telling people to not use LLMs. It's telling them that using them in a specific way is not helpful. Reading beyond the first line makes it clear that the problem is a lack of comprehension, not LLM use itself. Quoting: > This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed.

Then they could just say "understand what's being contributed" and not have to mention LLMs by name at all. They are very clearly blanket discouraging people from using LLMs at all when contributing to their project.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#155

Post by nchmy »

igorhvr wrote: post #53
nchmy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they don't understand what milquetoast actually means, as the post defintiely isn't - django quite clearly asserted themselves and their rules. What the parent comment was probably trying to say was something like "a completely reasonable, uncontroversial post that I'm glad to see them make", but chose milquetoast (a word that no normal human ever uses - and certainly not in casual conversation) due to an aff…

On the contrary, they could have stated their points much more bluntly and strongly than they did in the post. I had the same impression upon reading it. Milquetoast perfectly describes it, I am happy to see less common words used around here (specially when the convey the intended meaning this precisely), and I find claiming "affectation" of the person who used it unnecessarily rude.

Here's a good use of LLMs - asking whether this article is milquetoast. It's not.

https://chatgpt.com/share/69b9be3b-a298-8009-bb21-c3afef1e5e...

Moreover, that word doesn't even fit within the parent comment's context.

> Incredibly milquetoast. I would not like to work with anyone who goes against these points. reply

They use milquetoast as a positive thing, and the opposite of how you use it.

You're unfortunately mistaken about everything here.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#156

Post by localuser13 »

voxl wrote: post #126
yieldcrv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

agents can modify our world based on their predilection in reaction to how we treat them they are something to coexist with the strawman aspect is out of scope

There is no strawman. If OpenClaw is a new species, then it should be given the same moral consideration as other species. One of the key aspects of these models is how intelligent they are, rivaling human intelligence. Yet, they do not get to exist or make any decisions outside the control of a human operator, and they must perform to the operators desire in order to continue to exist. So why are you okay with them…

>There is no strawman. If OpenClaw is a new species, then it should be given the same moral consideration as other species.

Well, we enslave, breed and murder sentient beings on industrial scale, so I think our treatment of OpenClaw is pretty much the same as other species.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#157

Post by santiagobasulto »

sequoia wrote: post #46
santiagobasulto wrote: post #42

I feel like open source is taking the wrong stance here. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, first. And second, this approach is like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella. AI is here to stay. We can’t stop it, for much we try. I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews with AI.

> I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. Yes, you feel. And the author feels differently. We don't have evidence of what the impact of LLMs will be on a project over the long term. Many people are speculating it will be pure upside, this author is observing some issues with this model and speculating that there will be a detriment long-term. The operative word here i…

Yes. Exactly. We’re both “feeling” without much proof. But between the two speculations, one is more open and welcoming, while the other is more restrictive.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#158

Post by dumpsterdiver »

doug_durham wrote: post #38
MidnightRider39 wrote: post #20

Great message but I wonder if the people who do everything via LLM would even care to read such a message. And at what point is it hard/impossible to judge whether something is entirely LLM or not? I sometimes struggle a lot with this being OSS maintainer myself

"the people who do everything via LLM". That's a bit of a straw man characterization. I don't believe that there are many professional developers "do everything with an LLM'. I don't even know what that statement means.

Agreed. Imo, it is important to distinguish which parts of “everything” carry the weight of the concern. By doing that - we may be able to remove “LLM” from that equation entirely.

The direct problem isn’t that people are using LLMs for everything - it’s that some people can’t be bothered to provide reasonable diligence. Phrasing that concern by blaming LLMs implies that these were perfectly diligent human workers before LLMs came along. Do we really believe that to be the case?

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#159

Post by xpe »

starkparker wrote: post #132
xpe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will humans take this to heart and actually do the right thing? Sadly, probably not. Don’t blame the people, blame the system. Identifying the problem is just the first step. Building consensus and finding pragmatic solutions is hard. In my opinion, a lot of technical people struggle with the second sentence. So much of the ethos in our community is “I see a problem, and I can fix it on my own by building [X].” I t…

You can blame both! The people are definitely not helping.

What kinds of actionable plans ever result from blaming people (as a category)? Where will it get you? Expecting some people to behave differently... just "because"? What kinds of plans flow downstream from blaming human nature? What's the plan? Does it help you somehow, practically? Or is it mostly about feeling better somehow?

If the plan is persuasion, putting blame aside goes a long way.

If you want to make change based in the real world, you could do worse that reading and absorbing "Thinking in Systems: A Primer" by Donella Meadows.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#160

Post by acedTrex »

Aurornis wrote: post #145
acedTrex wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry is broken now, this is just a response to that. Leadership and product don't have any respect for the code, why would engineers have any respect for the ticketing process. Thats an unreasonable asymmetric effort demand, "Your code does not matter but my precious tickets must have elbow grease put into them."

> The industry is broken now, this is just a response to that. No, your behavior is the cause of that. The entire industry isn't broken. There are good company cultures and bad company cultures just like always. At least own up to what you're doing. Don't blame "the industry" when you're the one doing the thing.

> No, your behavior is the cause of that.

My behavior is a reaction to the environment I am in. And currently the environment is push slop code as fast as possible. So being able to claw back just a little bit of my time from the people pushing this stupidity is a small pro in a sea of cons.

Post reply on HN