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AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet [video]
- LurkandComment 8mo agoMy guess is that this is going to be everything other technology that's democratized. You see a flood of low quality output because you have a lot of new non-technical devs. Some of these are good enough to crowd out some of the prexisting tools. The volume creates noise which also makes the good stuff harder to find. Eventually an ecosystem starts forming around these low hanging products which fill the gaps between pros and amatures (think of what happened to video editing and Apple). Eventually you have more people creating a better product in the long run. There is a bit of a feedback loop here as AI gets better, it makes the products it outputs better, which inturn can benefit AI as it learns from improvements.
- pmdr 8mo agoThat and it's also destroying the environment, trust, truth, creativity, people's ability to afford better computing equipment and so on.
- blibble 8mo agodon't forget the economy too no labour? no demand to buy products/services
- renewiltord 8mo ago[flagged]
- gambiting 8mo agoI mean you joke(I hope) but I know people who literally run their entire relationship and all their communication through ChatGPT/Gemini. Whether it's breaking or improving the relationship - I guess the verdict is not out yet, but I suspect it's not great long term .
- kunai 8mo agoThe fact that whether or not doing something like this (which is bizarre, incredibly unhealthy, and just not how humans are wired socially) is considered at all in the AI space and met with a "oh well, we'll wait and see long-term" is sort of a microcosm of how out of touch the push behind LLMs is. Anthropic, OpenAI, etc have thrust a poorly functioning product with unhealthy obsequiousness and a clever obfuscative instinct to hide its numerous limitations upon a legion of unsuspecting normal people who mistake its cleverness for true wit and insight. And now these people are blowing up their relationships, their passions, and their hobbies, and for what? What, actually, would routing your texts through Gemini or ChatGPT possibly do for your relationship? Is the onus not on us when we individuate and socialize to take it upon ourselves to learn how to communicate our feelings and emotions with each other? What sort of Kafkaesque absurdity are we living in? I suppose Zizek predicted all of this years ago with his little anecdote about how in the future, I paraphrase, but he suggested even sex will be outsourced to technology; perhaps on a date one will purchase an artificial phallus and the other a male pleasure item, and the two will sit on the floor and watch their pleasure objects mating with one another. That's about how absurd this reality is that the genAI pushers seek to impose upon the world.
- jcgrillo 8mo agoQuote from a VP at a big tech megacorp a few months back: > "If we don't start using this technology every day in every aspect of our jobs we will be left behind and never catch up." I'm gonna get that one embroidered and framed on the wall above my toilet so for the rest of my life every day I can look at it and chuckle at the memory of how broken people were before the bubble popped.
- c-linkage 8mo agoJust get an AI wife so you can then spend 100% of your time online talking to bots. *Posted by my ClawdBot Agent
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- kunai 8mo agoI never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers (which given the current curve of improvements despite what the naysayers of human intellect might suggest, is unfeasible). Accountants didn't die off when calculators came on the scene. In no scenario is an LLM a drop-in replacement for any career field the same way CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers, doing CAD drafting and design rather than using raw pen-and-paper skills. Claude and Codex are exceptionally useful for reducing workload and improving productivity. But that's all they are. They're calculators replacing the slide-rule, drafting-esque drudgery of typing out all your code by hand. So why not market them like that? As helpers, assistants, tools to enable you to do things better and more efficiently? Which, in my usage of them, is what they're really only good at. Instead, there's been a mad rush to shoehorn agents and LLMs and genai into everything, outlandish claims like GPT writing better than Hemingway and Ginsberg, and creating absurd tools like Grok or Sora that are fundamentally broken, don't work well, and have flooded the internet with noise and disgusting slop. And in all of this, they've created a cancerous gold rush that threatens to wipe out the entire economy when the jig is up and people realize how useless these claims are, and that at the end of the day, it's a fancy search engine, a calculator, that can think a little better and reason more than the ones of old. It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.
- caycep 8mo agolack of regulation in the VC space? I mean, in order to get these vast sums of money, they have to make all these sky high claims, but I feel like in the old days, someone would get at least a wrist slap for defrauding investors
- kunai 8mo agoI mean that's certainly part of it, but Altman's grotesque comments today about the idea of raising a child being "more inefficient" than training an AI model there's something deeper, darker, psychologically I think; that the VC people are fundamentally misanthropic and antisocial and despite AI not really fulfilling their desire for a world where humans are entirely fungible they want to sell it that way as a sort of bizarre wishcasting. It's just incredibly odd.
- fsflover 8mo agoAlternative opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119404 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119404
- intrasight 8mo agoPersonally I agree with the alternative opinion that it will be a golden age. I'm embarking on a project that involves refactoring something I did 18 years ago. I'm assuming that it'll take 1/10 the time to make a much better modern version with the assistance of LLMs.
- offbynull 8mo agoI wonder if we'll reach a breaking point with public forges, where they'll simply reject hosting a repo if it isn't from someone with a vetted background or if it detects hallmarks of LLM slop (e.g., many commits over a short period of time or other LLM tells).
- intrasight 8mo agoI think that AI will do the vetting of repos - just as humans do that now. Perhaps AI will do a better job. The only way we're gonna fight AI slop is with AI.
- ljm 8mo agoI think there'll be space for curated forges at some point but they're going to live on the margins like most self-hosted repos do. You could solve it with tech by using ideas from radicle and tangled but the slop is ultimately a social problem, so you just have invite-only forges where the source of the invite is also held accountable (lobsters style). If you want a high quality internet experience these days you have to step out of the mainstream.
- cpeterso 8mo agoGitHub recently added new repository settings to turn off pull requests or limit them to approved contributors. The announcement doesn't mention AI agents, but that's certain relevant. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/187038 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/187038
- pklausler 8mo agoGH also needs to find a way to stop AI scraping of IP. (Or not. It might be lucrative to host some novel algorithm on GH under a license permitting its use in generative LLM results, at a reasonable per-impression fee.)
- wheelerwj 8mo ago"They aren't paying their dues..." Author sounds like a relatively well off white dude in the 1950s.. 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s... I get it, everything is being massively disrupted right now. I'm not trying to say ai is good or that bad, but the authors argument is weak.
- lkey 8mo agoThe aesthetics of an argument is not the argument. It's actually sickening that you are defending billionaire's toys, which make work for people already working for free; AIs are constructed from the illegal and unethical expropriation of labor, here and abroad. Invoking the idea that it is classist or racist to reject yet another transparent power grab by the Epstein class against labor is maximum peasant brain.
- josefritzishere 8mo agoThe real problem is that AI doesnt make any money. In fact, AI companies and Buisiness units hemmorage cash. When AI is eventually priced to the market cost the use-case for this all collapses.
- wmf 8mo agoPrevious discussion of the text version: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042136
- postalrat 8mo agoHuman slop can't get enough of this topic.
- lofaszvanitt 8mo agoFOSS was the boot code. And the gullible evangelist pepl.
- Florin_Andrei 8mo agoSome cleanup needs to happen, when the dust settles. It's just not clear to me who, or what, will do it.
- snowhale 8mo ago[dead]
- thaumasiotes 8mo agoObviously the ultimate solution here is to put "don't write bugs into the code" in the original prompt.
- david_allison 8mo agoAI changes little here. It was never guaranteed that an author was available to contact regarding a past PR. Merging a PR from a non-established contributor is often taking on responsibility for the long-term maintenance of their code.
- em-bee 8mo agowhich is why non-established contributors generally are discouraged from submitting large amounts of code.
- g947o 8mo agoPeople will tell you, just ask AI to find and fix bugs. Let's see how that's going to work. (It's not going well so far.)
- weirdmantis69 8mo agoI do that basically all day long and it works great.
- benoau 8mo agoThis is a luxury more than a need-to-have, lots of companies will punt this to an offshore dev they hired just months ago.
- movedx01 8mo agoOrphaned or as Peter Naur wrote in 1985(https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf), dead programs :)
- ahaucnx 8mo ago[dead]
- dist-epoch 8mo agoOpenClaw Peter is using codex to analyze/de-duplicate PRs, extract good ideas from them and then re-implement them. > I spun up 50 codex in parallel, let them analyze the PR and generate a JSON report with various signals, comparing with vision, intent (much higher signal than any of the text), risk and various other signals. Then I can ingest all reports into one session and run AI queries/de-dupe/auto-close/merge as needed on it. Some people bitch, others are real engineers solving novel problems. https://x.com/steipete/status/2025591780595429385?s=20 https://x.com/steipete/status/2025591780595429385?s=20
- Deevian 8mo agoThat's an incredibly dismissive attitude to a real problem.
- dandellion 8mo agoI know someone who started making a game by building his own engine. 5 years later he had made half an engine and zero games made on it. Most of the people I know that are into herding AI spend most of their time doing that, but I can't say I've seen them accomplish much more than other colleagues, even the ones just using built-in AI or copy pasting code from an AI chat.
- SkyeCA 8mo ago> Some people bitch, others are real engineers solving novel problems My most disliked thing about AI so far isn't AI itself, it's how nasty AI evangelists behave when it's criticized. You don't have to attack and/or insult people, you could have just left out that last bit.
- dist-epoch 8mo agoYou are confusing trolling with not handling AI being criticized. It's funny seeing programmers mind shut down when faced with an easy to fix problem - too many PRs, just because they hate AI.
- agentifysh 8mo agoOften I see youtube videos that sells an overwhelmingly negative take on AI, like "OpenAI" fails 93% of Jobs or "AI is destroying the world" and other weirdly outlandish titles that is clearly aimed at clickbait. Watching these content I often get confused because it never seems to highlight the actual real world progress and use that LLMs in particular gets for coding. Much of what was "vibe coding" is becoming just coding now. This means for open source, we are no longer relying on companies that create "opencore" products that nerf/neglect the public version so they can sell their cloud product. We don't have to worry about a maintainer going AWOL on some Clojure or Elixir library and fret about hiring someone who has "20 years of experience". We don't need to pay for a lot of expensive enterprise SaaS tools that charge six digits when we can simply use LLM to internalize existing packages and even create our own. Those that have been using coding agents for the past 6 month know how much progress there have been and the sheer pace of it to know that we are about to turn the corner, especially as new forms of computing are in the pipelines that will scale even faster without incurring more energy, moving away from text token gen to something else that humans can't read etc. While it's important to watch different takes, I think someone who consumes only Youtube and these videos that the algorithm is designed to push is going to be shocked and left behind because by the time these videos are produced, things have already progressed or in state of change. All in all, these videos should be treated like ephemeral commentary that ultimately loses their relevance due to the sheer speed of how things are changing.
- jayrot 8mo agoYou make some fair points here, but I'm unclear as to whether you're claiming Geerling's video is an example of an "overwhelmingly negative take on AI". If so, my suspicion is that you didn't watch it.
- agentifysh 8mo agohe raises some good stats and examples of "slop" and dooming around code gen hitting a ceiling coupled with humans being bottlenecked all very true statements but overall lacking in showing that actually lot of people are using AI coding gen in open source with good success. btw am I talking to a bot? all of your comment history is pretty similar with lot of emdash.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo ago[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47042136
- fsflover 8mo agoAI can also help FLOSS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47129361