6 ms·

I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get

I don't know, just a quick glance at that repo and I feel like AI could have written your shell scripts which took up several tries from multiple people to get right about as well as the humans did. So your ok with using tools to offload thinking and memory as long as they are FOSS?

lrvick 1y ago
Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compat.sh https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa... It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc. Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not always do this stuff by hand. It is kind of like how writing things down helps commit them to memory. Typing to a lesser extent does the same. Regardless those scripts are like <1% of the repo and took a few hours to write by hand. The rest of the repo requires extensive knowledge of linux internals, compiler internals, full source bootstrapping, brand new features in Docker and the OCI specs, etc. Absolutely 0 chance an LLM could have helped with bootstrapping a primitive c toolchain from 180 bytes of x86 machine code like this: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/bootstrap/stage0/Containerfile https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/... That took a lot of reasoning from humans to get right, in spite of the actual code being just a bunch of shell commands. There are just no significant shortcuts for that stuff, and again if there were, taking them is likely to rob me of building enough cache in my brain to solve the edge cases. Also yes, I only use FOSS tools with deterministic behavior I can modify, improve, and rely on to be there year after year, and thus any time spent mastering them is never wasted.
- simonw 1y ago
  That x86 machine code link reminded me of an LLM project I did just last week - https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount I decided to see if I could get an old Perl and C codebase running via WebAasembly in the browser having Claude brute-force figuring out how to compile the various components to WASM. Details here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassembly/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassemb... Here are notes it wrote for me on the compilation process it figured out: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b434430f2e8a76adfbe3b16/lib/README.md#webassembly-compilation-of-c-programs https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443... I'm not saying it could have created your exact example (I doubt that it could) but you may be under-estimating how promising it's getting for problems of that shape.
  - tensility 1y ago
    "This tool uses the WebAssembly build of Perl running actual SLOCCount algorithms from licquia/sloccount." The best form of (AI) plagiarism is to simply wrap the original tool in your own facade and pretend like you built anything of value. Is this intended to be a bad joke?
    - simonw 1y ago
      You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do! Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards. I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
      - tensility 1y ago
        Actually, my criticism was the result of my own misunderstanding of what you were claiming. My apologies for that, although I'm still unlikely to use these tools based upon the example when my own personal counterexamples have shown me that it's often as much or more work to get there via prompting than it is to simply do the thinking myself. Have a good day.
        simonw 1y ago
        Thanks - this was a misunderstanding, apology accepted!
      - tensility 1y ago
        For whatever it's worth, this is exactly the kind of awful that I never want in any code base that I'm working on: <https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b434430f2e8a76adfbe3b16/lib/webperl/emperl.js https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443...> At least run a pretty-printer on the code so that it can be reviewed by anything but a robot. Part of developing a good software system is about exercising taste in vendored-in libraries and, especially, the structure around them. P.S. I've gone to look at other chunks of Javascript and see that I was unlucky to grab this steaming pile first.

lrvick 1y ago

Take this one for example https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compat.sh https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/src/compa... It took some iteration and hands on testing to get that right across multiple operating systems. Also to pass shellcheck, etc. Even if an LLM -could- do that sort of thing as well as my team and I can, we would lose a lot of the arcane knowledge required to debug things, and spot sneaky bugs, and do code review, if we did not always do this stuff by hand. It is kind of like how writing things down helps commit them to memory. Typing to a lesser extent does the same. Regardless those scripts are like <1% of the repo and took a few hours to write by hand. The rest of the repo requires extensive knowledge of linux internals, compiler internals, full source bootstrapping, brand new features in Docker and the OCI specs, etc. Absolutely 0 chance an LLM could have helped with bootstrapping a primitive c toolchain from 180 bytes of x86 machine code like this: https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/bootstrap/stage0/Containerfile https://codeberg.org/stagex/stagex/src/branch/main/packages/... That took a lot of reasoning from humans to get right, in spite of the actual code being just a bunch of shell commands. There are just no significant shortcuts for that stuff, and again if there were, taking them is likely to rob me of building enough cache in my brain to solve the edge cases. Also yes, I only use FOSS tools with deterministic behavior I can modify, improve, and rely on to be there year after year, and thus any time spent mastering them is never wasted.

simonw 1y ago
That x86 machine code link reminded me of an LLM project I did just last week - https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount https://tools.simonwillison.net/sloccount I decided to see if I could get an old Perl and C codebase running via WebAasembly in the browser having Claude brute-force figuring out how to compile the various components to WASM. Details here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassembly/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/22/sloccount-in-webassemb... Here are notes it wrote for me on the compilation process it figured out: https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b434430f2e8a76adfbe3b16/lib/README.md#webassembly-compilation-of-c-programs https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443... I'm not saying it could have created your exact example (I doubt that it could) but you may be under-estimating how promising it's getting for problems of that shape.
- tensility 1y ago
  "This tool uses the WebAssembly build of Perl running actual SLOCCount algorithms from licquia/sloccount." The best form of (AI) plagiarism is to simply wrap the original tool in your own facade and pretend like you built anything of value. Is this intended to be a bad joke?
  - simonw 1y ago
    You're criticizing me for directly crediting the original here. That's the correct and ethical thing to do! Honestly, I've seen the occasional bad faith argument from people with a passionate dislike of AI tooling but this one is pretty extreme even by those standards. I hope you don't ever use open source libraries in your own work.
    - tensility 1y ago
      Actually, my criticism was the result of my own misunderstanding of what you were claiming. My apologies for that, although I'm still unlikely to use these tools based upon the example when my own personal counterexamples have shown me that it's often as much or more work to get there via prompting than it is to simply do the thinking myself. Have a good day.
      - simonw 1y ago
        Thanks - this was a misunderstanding, apology accepted!
    - tensility 1y ago
      For whatever it's worth, this is exactly the kind of awful that I never want in any code base that I'm working on: <https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b434430f2e8a76adfbe3b16/lib/webperl/emperl.js https://github.com/simonw/tools/blob/473e89edfebc27781b43443...> At least run a pretty-printer on the code so that it can be reviewed by anything but a robot. Part of developing a good software system is about exercising taste in vendored-in libraries and, especially, the structure around them. P.S. I've gone to look at other chunks of Javascript and see that I was unlucky to grab this steaming pile first.