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> So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees wi
by kunai 7mo ago
> So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all.
Because autocomplete still requires heavy user input and a SWE at the top of the decision making tree. You could argue that using Claude or Codex enables you to do the same thing, but there's no guarantee someone isn't vibecoding and then not testing adequately to ensure, firstly, that everything can be debugged, and secondly, that it fits in with the broader codebase before they try to merge or PR.
Plenty of people use Claude like an autocomplete or to bounce ideas off of, which I think is a great use case. But besides that, using a tool like that in more extreme ways is becoming increasingly normalized and probably not something you want in your codebase if you care about code quality and avoiding pointless bugs.
Every time I see a post on HN about some miracle work Claude did it's always been very underwhelming. Wow, it coded a kernel driver for out of date hardware! That doesn't do anything except turn a display on... great. Claude could probably help you write a driver in less time, but it'll only really work well, again, if you're at the top of the hierarchy of decision making and are manually reviewing code. No guarantees of that in the FOSS world because we don't have keyloggers installed on everybody's machine.
- egorfine 7mo agoFully agree with you on all points. But again: how do we distinguish between manual code input and sophisticated autocomplete?
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago[flagged]
- idiotsecant 7mo agoThe project is simply saying what they want. If you choose to ignore that for some weird reason congratulations for being a jerk, I guess.
- egorfine 7mo agoCan you confirm that continuing to use autocomplete in a code base against the policy of the project does make the person a jerk?
- Blackthorn 7mo agoYes, actually. Knowingly violating the policies of a project while pretending you aren't, so you can continue participating in the fully voluntary project, does make you a jerk. If you don't like the policies they set, just leave. I'm willing to bet that every single person on here complaining has zero contributions to PostmarketOS.
- aboardRat4 7mo agoIf it's crap then it's ai. If it's okay, then we pretend that is just sophisticated auto complete.
- egorfine 7mo agoIt's pretty much obvious but the policy specifically argues against it and stands on moral grounds.
- aboardRat4 7mo agoI don't think anybody seriously cares about such "policies".
- egorfine 7mo agoUnfortunately exactly this kind of policies are the ones people care the most about. It's moral values, virtue signaling and rage. Extremely engaging.