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Stoat removes all LLM-generated code following user criticism
- logicprog 8mo agoWhat a shame
- ronsor 8mo agoIt seems the thread was brigaded by militant anti-AI people upset over a few trivial changes made using an LLM. I encourage people here to go read the 3(!) commits reverted. It's all minor housekeeping and trivial bugfixes—nothing deserving of such religious (cultish?) fervor.
- raincole 8mo agoAt this point perhaps to not disclose AI usage is the right thing to do. Transparency only feeds the trolls, unfortunately.
- ronsor 8mo agoI have been saying this for a few years at this point. Transparency can only exist when there is civility, and those without civility deserve no transparency[0]. [0] As a corollary, those with civility do deserve transparency. It's a tough situation.
- longfacehorrace 8mo agoLooked at repos of the two loudest users in that thread; either they have none or it's all forks of other projects. Non-contributors dictating how the hen makes bread.
- throawayonthe 8mo agoisn't forks of other projects how you usually contribute code on github
- ronsor 8mo agoIn general, caving to online mobs is a bad long-term strategy (assuming the mob is not the majority of your actual target audience[0]). The mob does not care about your project, product, or service, and it will not reward you for your compliance. Instead it only sees your compliance as a weakness to further target. [0] While this fact can be difficult to ascertain, one must remember that mobs are generally much, much louder than normal users, and normal users are generally quiet even when the mob is loud.
- lich_king 8mo agoYes, but also... that's like 90% of the interactions you get on the internet? I don't want to be too meta, but isn't that a description of most HN threads? We show up to criticize other people's work for self-gratification. In this case, we're here here to criticize the dev caving in, even though most of us don't even know what Stoat is and we don't care. Except for some corner cases, most developers and content creators mostly get negative engagement, because it's less of an adrenaline rush to say "I like your work" than to say "you're wrong and I'm smarter than you". Many learn to live with it, and when they make a decision like that, it's probably because they actually agree with the mob.
- ronsor 8mo agoI don't actually care what the dev does. That's their prerogative, and it doesn't affect whether or not I'll use the software (I will if it's useful). I think that's the difference between here and a "mob", assuming other commenters think similarly. I do think it's harmful to cave in, but that doesn't make me think less of the maintainer's character. On the other hand, some of the commenters in the issue might decry them as evil if they made the "wrong" decision. It's fine to have opinions on the actions of others, but it's not fine to burn them at the stake.
- longfacehorrace 8mo agoNot just online; priests, CEOs, celebrities, politicians; don't make them happy you're a sinner, a bad employee, hater of freedom, etc. Anyone with a rhetorical opinion but who otherwise provides little to getting cars off assembly lines, homes built, network cables laid. In physical terms the world is full of socialist grifters in that they only have a voice, no skill. They are reliant on money because they're helpless to themselves. Engineers could rule the world of they acted collectively rather than start personal businesses. If we sat on our hands unless demands are met, the world stops. A lot of people in charge fear tech unions as we control the world getting shit done.
- blibble 8mo agomost of the anti-AI community have already migrated their repos from Slophub
- rurban 8mo agoMakes a good block list. Vehemently arguing to block AI
- pythonaut_16 8mo agoWastes of time like this are exactly why Stoat/Revolt is unlikely to ever be a serious Discord alternative
- argee 8mo agoCould you elaborate on this? I can’t tell whether you mean to say that open source projects run into user-initiated time sinks that detract from their productivity (which is arguably the case for any public facing project), or whether private repositories bypass this type of scrutiny by default which affords them an advantage, or whether this is about the Stoat/Revolt devs specifically and how they choose to spend their time.
- ronsor 8mo agoI think the parent comment is referring to the fact that even focusing on whether ~100 lines of code across 3 commits should/should not be generated by an LLM is meaningless bikeshedding which has no place in a serious project.
- pythonaut_16 8mo agoInitially named Revolt then renamed to Stoat due to a cease-and-desist. Both awful names. (Granted Discord is not a great name either). In their docs and website you'll still find a mix of the new and old names. The project is ~4 years old. Screen sharing is still a work in progress. It's been a while since I tested it myself but you can still see plenty of reports of it being buggy and slow. Basically it gives of major bike shedding impressions.
- argee 8mo agoI see, thanks for the clarification!
- Palomides 8mo agowhy? I think having a stated policy on LLM use is increasingly unavoidable for FOSS projects
- sodality2 8mo agoIf only the average open source project got this level of scrutiny actually checking for vulnerabilities. I get that you don't want your private chats leaked by slopcode, but this was a few dozen lines of scaffolding in large software created before LLM coding; it would have been better to register your discontent without making demands, then continue to watch the repo for vulnerabilities. This feels like fervor without any work behind it
- singularfutur 8mo agoReverting a few trivial commits because of purity tests is a bad precedent. It rewards the loudest commenters and punishes maintainers.
- imsofuture 8mo agoIt will be a painful decade until those who have already lost this weird ideological war ever realize it.
- rsynnott 8mo agoAnd which side is that? I mean, from my point of view, it seems like it’s probably the ones who are having a magic robot write a thousand lines of code that almost, but not quite, does something sensible, rather than using a bloody library. (For whatever reason, LLM coding things seem to love to reinvent the square wheel…)
- ronsor 8mo agoNot once in history has new technology lost to its detractors, even if half its proponents were knuckleheads.
- BJones12 8mo agoNuclear power disagrees
- raincole 8mo agoNuclear power will win (obviously). Unless you're talking about nuclear weapon.
- hubertdinsk 8mo agolatest counter-example is NFT.
- ragthr 8mo agoNice move! It is fun to watch the copyright thieves and their companies go into intellectual contortions (militant, purity tests, ideology) if their detrimental activities get any pushback.
- 875765465609068 8mo agoNice move smashing those stocking frames! It is fun to watch the knitting pattern thieves and their companies go into intellectual contortions (militant, purity tests, ideology) if their detrimental activities get any pushback.
- philipwhiuk 8mo agoThe fun part is this only happens because Claude Code commits its changes. If you use for example, GitHub Co-Pilot IDE integration, there's no evidence.
- zihotki 8mo agoThere is also `git commit --amend` available, there are many ways to hide the evidence if one needs.
- cat_plus_plus 8mo ago"it's worth considering that there are many people with incredibly strong anti-LLM views, and those people tend to be minorities or other vulnerable groups." I have pretty low expectations for human code in that repository.
- ronsor 8mo agoThe response mentioning minorities is obviously bad faith. Even if true, it's not really relevant, and most likely serves as a way to tie LLM use to slavery, genocide, or oppression without requiring rational explanation.
- latexr 8mo agoI just read it, and found no bad faith in it. It was polite, not pushy, explained the argument well (though of course you may disagree with it), gave a business reason, and even ended with “thank you for reading and considering this, if you do”. > and most likely serves as a way to tie LLM use to slavery, genocide, or oppression without requiring rational explanation. Assuming and ascribing nefarious motivations to a complete stranger can be considered bad faith, though. Probably not your intention, but that’s how it came across.
- ronsor 8mo agoI have observed this pattern before. Usually minority groups are mentioned in an attempt to shift a debate toward values (which basically means no meaningful debate if you disagree) and away from technical considerations (which arguably deserve the most attention in a software product). Aside from that, the statement is not empirically true (from my perspective at least). Evidence isn't provided either. I'm not saying that the commenter consciously wanted to tie LLM use to those negative things, but it could be done subconsciously, because I have genuinely seen those arguments before.
- latexr 8mo agoI understand your point and believe you believe it, which is why I mentioned I don’t think you were arguing in bad faith. What I am saying is I don’t think the commenter in question was acting in bad faith either, because that requires deception. In other words, it seems to me that commenter—like yourself—was arguing genuinely. If one agrees with their argument (or yours) is a different matter altogether, but bad faith it doesn’t seem to be. Hope that clarifies what I’m getting at.
- stavros 8mo agoI love how people in the thread are like "if I'm going to ask my group of friends to switch to this, I need to know it's not written by security-issue-generator machines", meanwhile at Discord LLMs go brrr: https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-ai https://discord.com/blog/developing-rapidly-with-generative-...
- ronsor 8mo agoTo be fair, many of them are already fleeing Discord over the ID surveillance, so it makes sense that they would be pickier this time.
- latexr 8mo agoNo one on the thread is advocating for Discord, so I don’t understand what argument you are making.
- stavros 8mo agoWhat non-LLM using service do you think the people saying "I can't switch to Stoat if it uses LLMs" are switching from?
- latexr 8mo agoYou pointed out Discord are using LLMs, so by definition that can’t be the “non-LLM using service” they are switching from. But if they are switching from Discord, then that means they are unhappy with it too, thus they are not advocating for it. So, again, what’s your point?
- stavros 8mo agoMy point is there is no non-LLM service. The commenters simply focus on the thing they saw, and didn't even bother comparing against their existing alternative. It's just the perfect world fallacy.
- 8mo ago
- deadbabe 8mo agoIf you find yourself having to use LLMs to write a lot of tedious code, you have bad architecture. You should use patterns and conventions that eliminate the tedium, by making things automagically work. This means each line of code you write is more powerful, less filler stuff. Remember the days when you could create entire apps with just a few lines of code? So little code that an LLM would be pointless.