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I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

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Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#171

Post by xboxnolifes »

dllu wrote: post #143

I 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 pro…

Then say all of that in the issue. Say you have a real problem. Say you tried using AI. Add the human element by communicating. I dont think there is a real problem there.

People just want to know you put in the effort, and that you didnt just prompt an AI and hand over completely unchecked slop.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#172

Post by greiskul »

ahartmetz wrote: post #160
tough wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lon…

If you already know it's not good enough, you can just say so by calling it a proof of concept or hack to demonstrate what needs to be done. Such code is often very useful when writing the real fix.

Yup, some of my first contributions when I was a teenager, was to an open source project where I was able to find a couple of bugs, and implement a hacky solution that I shared with the team on the forum. My code was absolutely awful, but by having done both the effort of tracking down the cause of the bug, and one possible way of fixing it (which was badly coded, but worked), made the developers able to quickly turn around and edit my patches into actual patches that got merged into the project.

And it was actually a pretty good feeling. Made me feel that even as a newbie programmer, I was adding value to the community, which I was!

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#173

Post by agumonkey »

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

For people totally new, it can be partially understood, just as i was ecstatic having a tool create something on a computer for me in my early days.

For anybody else thought, I get that a LLM is a regression (npi) where you don't have to learn or understand anything .. therefore the personal growth value is moot (except the alleged sales if the person tries to use LLM to create a side business).

For actual devs it's disheartening and caused me real grief seeing how many of them were happy not thinking anymore.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#174

Post by dllu »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #171
dllu wrote: post #143

I 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 pro…

Then say all of that in the issue. Say you have a real problem. Say you tried using AI. Add the human element by communicating. I dont think there is a real problem there. People just want to know you put in the effort, and that you didnt just prompt an AI and hand over completely unchecked slop.

Yes I wrote the issue by hand and try to communicate well.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#175

Post by ErroneousBosh »

gedy wrote: post #167
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does" I guess it depends on what you consider "better". I've tried using LLMs to write code over the past couple of weeks with extremely mixed results. The LLM certainly writes more interesting code! They like their cute ASCII/unicode animations, don't they? It definitely writes a lot more code, none of it actually correct but some of it funct…

Yes I basically meant those folks weren't very good developers to begin with and now extrapolating to: "wow this is better than all devs!" , when it's more like "it's you, dude"

This sounds awfully like the people who think that self-driving cars and even auto-braking systems will eliminate all accidents, because everyone else is as bad a driver as they are.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#176

Post by ErroneousBosh »

aidenn0 wrote: post #156
ErroneousBosh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure you get crackpots still, They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths looks about right to me but I'm not a good eno…

Maybe lots of (most?) people are crackpots about something , but they lack the time and/or resolve to do something about it.

I wonder what I'm crackpotty about? Forth, probably, although I did actually port Dave Dunfield's 6809 Forth to a mid-1980s sampler. It boots off a floppy, I know what the memory map is, if it boots off a floppy I can make it run anything, right?

How about this crackpot view? Perl vs. Python, which I guess has been replaced by Rust vs. Go - I prefer Python and Go to Perl and Rust, simply because I know them better. If you want me to work in Rust or Perl I don't really care, they're just languages. I'm not as proficient in them, expect it to take longer. Rewrite it all in Rust? Sure. I'd prefer not to, but if that's today's project then shut up and pay my invoice.

Let's see, what other things are wild crackpot ideas around here?

I don't think LLMs are very good.

I don't think self-driving cars solve the right problem.

Permaculture would be better for long-term ecological sustainability and food security than "everyone should be vegan".

Bikes would work perfectly well in American cities if you used enough of them.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#177

Post by saltcured »

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

I posit that there are people who get a sense of accomplishment from operating their laundry machine.

And people who get a sense of accomplishment from hitting the jackpot on a slot machine.

Operating an LLM is a strange combination of the two.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#178

Post by cushychicken »

thomasahle wrote: post #127

I recently built a very large test bench for System Verilog. I ran a bunch of different compilers on it, including some open source ones. Some of them failed some tests, and it was natural to have my LLM (Claude Fable 5) root-cause the issues, and to double-check my test bench wasn't to blame. But now I stood with all these patches that I couldn't just throw at the upstream maintainers all at once. I ended up just fi…

This is a real problem.

I suspect that part of it is that people don’t have enough time to mentally incorporate the fix.

Is it weird to submit the MR later, after people have had a chance to digest the issues?

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#179

Post by cyanydeez »

aidenn0 wrote: post #60

I 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…

if anyones got an active issues list, the maintainers should close all issues and open only ones they intend to fix. A bot should repeat this message to the issuer and point them to issues they're accepting.

So at a minimum, you could maybe fish some useful work out. PRs should be the same.

Re: I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

#180

Post by overfeed »

thomasahle wrote: post #127

I recently built a very large test bench for System Verilog. I ran a bunch of different compilers on it, including some open source ones. Some of them failed some tests, and it was natural to have my LLM (Claude Fable 5) root-cause the issues, and to double-check my test bench wasn't to blame. But now I stood with all these patches that I couldn't just throw at the upstream maintainers all at once. I ended up just fi…

> I ended up just filing a few issues and moved on to other things.

This is the most valuable contribution you had time for, hopefully with a minimum-viable bug reproduction.

Drive-by patches/PRs are usually a net-negative because the maintainer has to reverse-engineer the intent from GenAI code, and then make changes to have it fit in with the rest of project.

> It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a lot of time root-causing and fixing the issues

There are countless ways to fix any issue, and only a few right ways (subjectively). The maintainers' role is to decide which ways are right for their project. You shouldn't worry too much about "wasting" code you already generated, GenAI made that step very cheap, but did little for taste and roadmapping.

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