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My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I hav

My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made full time work impossible. With the advent of LLMs, AI-autocomplete, and agent-based development workflows, my ability to deliver reliable, high-quality code is restored and (arguably) better. Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality; e.g. is that >really< the right solution/suggestion to accept? It's like peer programming without a battle of ego. When analyzing problems, I think you have to look at both upsides and downsides. Folks have done well to debate the many, many downsides of AI and this tends to dominate the conversation. Probably thats a good thing. But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. I also think it incorrect to look at it from a perspective of "does the good outweigh the bad?". Relevant, yes, but utilitarian arguments often lead to counter-intuitive results and end up amplifying the problems they seek to solve. I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place.

glenstein 7mo ago
Fantastic point. I do think there was a bit of an over correction toward AI hostility because capitalism, and for good reason, but it did almost make it taboo to talk about legitimate use cases that are not related to bad AI use cases like instigating nuclear wars in war game simulations. I think the ugly unspoken truth whether Mozilla or Debian or someone else, is that there are going to be plausible and valuable use cases and that AI as a paradigm is going to be a hard problem the same way that presiding over, say, a justice system is a hard problem (stay with me). What I mean is it can have a legitimate purpose but be prone to abuse and it's a matter of building in institutional safeguards and winning people's trust while never fully being able to eliminate risk. It's easy for someone to roll their eyes at the idea that there's utility but accessibility is perfect and clear-eyed use case, that makes it harder to simply default to hedonic skepticism against any and all AI applications. I actually think it could have huge implications for leveling the playing field in the browser wars for my particular pet issue.
- LtWorf 7mo ago
  I think generating slop and having others review it is bad even if you are disabled. I say this as a disabled person myself.
moduspol 7mo ago
> But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. This is the technique I've picked up and got the most from over the past few months. I don't give it hard, high-level problems and then review a giant set of changes to figure it out. I give it the technical solution I was already going to implement anyway, and then have it generate the code I otherwise would have written. It cuts back dramatically on the review fatigue because I already know exactly what I'm expecting to see, so my reviews are primarily focused on the deviations from that.
- distances 7mo ago
  This, and I curate a tree of MD docs per topic to define the expected structure. It is supposed to output code that looks exactly like my code. If not, I manually edit it and perhaps update the docs. This is how I've found myself to be productive with the tools, or since productivity is hard to measure, at least it's still a fun way to work. I do not need to type everything but I want a very exact outcome nonetheless.
- ok_dad 7mo ago
  The only issue to beat in mind is that visual inspection is only about 85% accurate at its limit. I was responsible for incoming inspection at a medical device factory and visual inspection was the least reliable test for components that couldn’t be inspected for anything else. We always preferred to use machines (likes big CMM) where possible. I also use LLM assistance, and I love it because it helps my ADHD brain get stuff done, but I definitely miss stuff that I wouldn’t miss by myself. It’s usually fairly simple mistakes to fix later but I still miss them initially. I’ve been having luck with LLM reviewers though.
j2kun 7mo ago
This is a bit of a straw man. The harms of AI in OSS are not from people needing accessibility tooling.
- DonsDiscountGas 7mo ago
  It's absolutely not a straw man, because OP and people like OP will be affected by any policy which limits or bans LLMs. Whether or not the policy writer intended it. So he deserves a voice.
  - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    He doesn't think others deserve a voice, so why should I consider his?
    - mr-wendel 7mo ago
      The fact that you are engaging in this thread shows me you have considered my opinions, even if you reject them. I think thats great, even in the face of being told I advocate for the collapse of civilization and that I want others to shut up and not be heard. It is a bit insulting, but I get that these issues are important and people feel like the stakes are sky-high: job loss, misallocation of resources, enshitification, increased social stratification, abrogation of personal responsibility, runaway corporate irresponsibility, amplification of bad actors, and just maybe that `p(doom)` is way higher than AI-optimists are willing to consider. Especially as AI makes advances into warfare, justice, and surveillance. Even if you think AI is great, it's easy to acknowledge that all it may take is zealotry and the rot within politics to turn it into a disaster. You're absolutely right to identify that there are some eerie similarities to the "gun's don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking. There IS a lot to grapple with. However, I disagree with these conclusions (so far) and especially that AI is a unique danger to humanity. I also disagree that AI in any form is our salvation and going to elevate humanity to unfathomable heights (or anything close to that). But, to bring it back to this specific topic, I think OSS projects stand to benefit (increasingly so as improvements continue) from AI and should avoid taking hardline stances against it.
why_at 7mo ago
>Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that? It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!" Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me
- mr-wendel 7mo ago
  I appreciate the feedback. I like it because I have no expectation of perfection-- out of others, myself, and especially not AI. I expect "good enough" and work upwards from there, and with (most) things, I find AI to be better than good enough.
- walthamstow 7mo ago
  You worked with people before haven't you? Sometimes they make stuff up, or misremember stuff. Sometimes people who do this are brilliant and you end up learning a lot from them.
- lawn 7mo ago
  Yeah, if RSI is an issue why would you want to be forced to type more?
- tpmoney 7mo ago
  I can’t say what the OP finds specifically useful but as an example if you’re aiming to make sure you’ve accurately and clearly documented / explained your intent, the misunderstandings and tangents AIs can go down are useful in the same way that putting your theoretically perfect UI into the hands of real users is also useful. It helps you want places where you assumed knowledge or understanding that someone else might not have. Building up style guidelines for AI tools has been an eye opening experience in realizing how many stylistic choices we make that aren’t embedded in the linter, and aren’t documented anywhere else either. The resulting files have actually been a really good resource not just for the AI but for new developers on the project too. It all depends on what your specific goal is.
QuercusMax 7mo ago
A few years ago I was in a place where I couldn't type on a computer keyboard for more than a few minutes without significant pain, and I fortunately had shifted into a role where I could oversee a bunch of junior engineers mostly via text chat (phone keyboard didn't hurt my hands as much) and occasional video/voice chat. I'm much better now after tons of rehab work (no surgery, thankfully), but I don't have the stamina to type as much as I used to. I was always a heavy IDE user and a very fast coder, but I've moved platforms too many times and lost my muscle memory. A year ago I found the AI tools to be basically time-wasters, but now I can be as productive as before without incurring significant pain.
Joel_Mckay 7mo ago
The premise LLM are "AI" is false, but are good at problems like context search, and isomorphic plagiarism. Given the liabilities of relying on public and chat users markdown data to sell to other users without compensation raises a number of issues: 1. Copyright: LLM generated content can't be assigned copyright (USA), and thus may contaminate licensing agreements. It is likely public-domain, but also may conflict with GPL/LGPL when stolen IP bleeds through weak obfuscation. The risk has zero precedent cases so far (the Disney case slightly differs), but is likely a legal liability waiting to surface eventually. 2. Workmanship: All software is terrible, but some of it is useful. People that don't care about black-box obfuscated generated content, are also a maintenance and security liability. Seriously, folks should just retire if they can't be arsed to improve readable source tree structure. 3. Repeatability: As the models started consuming other LLM content, the behavioral vectors often also change the content output. Humans know when they don't know something, but an LLM will inject utter random nonsense every time. More importantly, the energy cost to get that error rate lower balloons exponentially. 4. Psychology: People do not think critically when something seems right 80% of the time. The LLM accuracy depends mostly on stealing content, but it stops working when there is nothing left to commit theft of service on. The web is now >53% slop and growing. Only the human user chat data is worth stealing now. 5. Manipulation: The frequency of bad bots AstroTurf forums with poisoned discourse is biasing the delusional. Some react emotionally instead of engaging the community in good faith, or shill hard for their cult of choice. 6. Sustainability: FOSS like all ecosystems is vulnerable to peer review exhaustion like the recent xz CVE fiasco. The LLM hidden hostile agent problem is currently impossible to solve, and thus cannot be trusted in hostile environments. 7. Ethics: Every LLM ruined town economic simulations, nuked humanity 94% of the time in every war game, and encouraged the delusional to kill IRL While I am all for assistive technologies like better voice recognition, TTS, and individuals computer-user interfaces. Most will draw a line at slop code, and branch to a less chaotic source tree to work on. I think it is hilarious some LLM proponents immediately assume everyone also has no clue how these models are implemented. =3 "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ
VorpalWay 7mo ago
I'm in a very similar situation: I have RSI and smarter-autocomplete style AI is a godsend. Unlike you I haven't found more complex AI (agent mode) particularly useful though for what I do (hard realtime C++ and Rust). So I avoid that. Plus it takes away the fun part of coding for me. (The journey matters more than the destination.) The accessibility angle is really important here. What we need is a way to stop people who make contributions they don't understand and/or can not vouch they are the author for (the license question is very murky still, and no what the US supreme court said doesn't matter here in EU). This is difficult though.
BeetleB 7mo ago
Similar story, albeit not so extreme. I have similar ergonomic issues that crop up from time to time. My programming is not so impacted (spend more time thinking than typing, etc), but things like email, documentation, etc can be brutal (a lot more computer usage vs programming). My simple solution: I use Whisper to transcribe my text, and feed the output to an LLM for cleanup (custom prompt). It's fantastic. Way better than stuff like Dragon. Now I get frustrated with transcribing using Google's default mechanism on Android - so inaccurate! But the ability to take notes, dictate emails, etc using Whisper + LLM is invaluable. I likely would refuse to work for a company that won't let me put IP into an LLM. Similarly, I take a lot of notes on paper, and would have to type them up. Tedious and painful. I switched to reading my notes aloud and use the above system to transcribe. Still painful. I recently realized Gemini will do a great job just reading my notes. So now I simply convert my notes to a photo and send to Gemini. I categorize all my expenses. I have receipts from grocery stores where I highlight items into categories. You can imagine it's painful to enter that into a financial SW. I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me. All of these are cool applications on their own, but when you realize they're also improving your health ... clear win.
- mr-wendel 7mo ago
  > I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me. FWIW, I have a pet project for a family recipe book. I normalize all recipes to a steps/instructions/ingredients JSON object. A webapp lets me snap photos of my old recipes and AI reliably yields perfectly structured objects back. The only thing I've had to fix is odd punctuation. For production, use is low, so `gemini-2.5-flash` works great and the low rate limits are fine. For development the `gemma-3-27b-it` model has MUCH higher limits and still does suprisingly well. I'd bet you can pull this off and be very happy with the result.
- nunez 7mo ago
  I maintain expense tracking software that I wrote a while ago (before ChatGPT) that sends receipts and some metadata about them into Google Sheets (previously Expensify). A few months ago, I used Claude to add a feature that does exactly what you describe, but using the data types and framework I built for receipt parsing. It works really well. Honestly, you can probably build what I built entirely with Gemini or Claude, probably with a nice frontend to boot.
ivan_gammel 7mo ago
If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. It’s ok to use it, if that enables you to work.
- notatoad 7mo ago
  this sounds reasonable, but in practice people will simply sign off on anything without having thoroughly reviewed it. I agree with you that there's a huge distinction between code that a person understands as thoroughly as if they wrote it, and vibecoded stuff that no person actually understands. but actually doing something practical with that distinction is a difficult problem to solve.
  - ivan_gammel 7mo ago
    Unless the code is explicitly signed by AI as auto-commit, you cannot really tell if it was reviewed by human. So it essentially becomes a task of detecting specific AI code smell, which is barely noticeable in code reviewed by an experienced engineer. Very subjective, probably does not make sense at all.
- Groxx 7mo ago
  this is equivalent to claiming that automation has no negative side effects at all. we do often choose automation when possible (especially in computer realms), but there are endless examples in programing and other fields of not-so-surprising-in-retrospect failures due to how automation affects human behavior. so it's clearly not true. what we're debating is the amount of harm, not if there is any.
- heavyset_go 7mo ago
  > If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed. This matters for open source projects that care about licensing. It should also matter for proprietary code bases, as anyone can copy and distribute "their" AI generated code for any purpose, including to compete with the "owner".
gwbas1c 7mo ago
> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place. That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know how to use AI correctly. The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work. In general, a good policy towards AI submission really has to primarily address the "good faith" issue; and then explain how much tolerance the project has for vibecoding.
- pixl97 7mo ago
  >other people are reasonable like you No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them". AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it. Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.
  - shevy-java 7mo ago
    > Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. AI also generates spam though, so this is a much bigger problem than merely "unreasonable" people alone.
    - pixl97 7mo ago
      I mean, AI generates spam at the behest of unreasonable people currently, and we can just think of it as a powerful automated extension of other technologies. We could say it's a new problem in quantity but the same old problem in kind. Now, with that said I don't think we're very far from automated agents causing problems all on their own.
veunes 7mo ago
Accessibility is an angle that rarely comes up in these debates and it's a strong one
setgree 7mo ago
Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).
- mr-wendel 7mo ago
  Much appreciated. I find is that referencing code in conversation is hard -- e.g. "underscore foo bar" vs `_fooBar`, "this dot Ls" vs `this.els`, etc happens often. Lower-powered models especially struggle with this, and make some frustrating assumptions. Premium models do way better, and at times are shockingly good. They just aren't remotely economically viable for me. My solution so far is to use my instructions to call out the fact that my comments are transcribed and full of errors. I also focus more on "plan + apply" flows that guide agents to search out and identify code changes before anything is edited to ensure the relevant context (and any tricky references) are clearly established in the chat context. It's kinda like learning vim (or emacs, if you prefer). First it was all about learning shortcuts and best practices to make efficient use of the tool. Then it was about creating a good .vimrc file to further reduce the overhead of coding sessions. Then it was about distributing that .vimrc across machines (and I did a LOT of ssh-based work) for consistency. Once that was done, it became unimaginable to code any other way. It has been even more true here: agent-based workflows are useless without significant investment in creating and maintaining good project documentation, agent instructions, and finding ways to replicate that across repos (more microservice hell! :D) for consistency. There is also some conflict, especially in corporate environments, with where this information needs to live to be properly maintained. Best of luck!
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    maybe you've done this already, but my first thought would be to make a preparser script that would take your likely voice inputs like "underscore foo bar" and translate to "_fooBar" which you would then pass on as input. i do something similar for a local TTS generator which often stumbles on certain words or weird characters
brightball 7mo ago
Fwiw, I try to make sure we have an accessibility focused talk every year (if possible) at the Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open right now if you'd be interested in submitting something on your story.
shevy-java 7mo ago
> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. I understand that your use case is different, so AI may help handicapped people. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is that the term AI encompasses many things, and a lot of AI led to quality decay. There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop. Personally I'd much prefer for AI to go away. It won't go away, of course, but I still would like to see it gone, even if I agree that the use case you described is objectively useful and better for you (and others who are handicapped). > I also think it incorrect to look at it from a perspective of "does the good outweigh the bad?". Relevant, yes, but utilitarian arguments often lead to counter-intuitive results and end up amplifying the problems they seek to solve. That is the same for every technology though. You always have a trade-off. So I don't think the question is incorrect at all - it applies the same just as it is for any other technology, too. I also disagree that utilitarian arguments by their intrinsic nature lead to counter-intuitive results. Which result would be counter-intuitive when you analyse a technology for its pros and cons?
- GaryBluto 7mo ago
  > There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop. Because young people repeat things they see on social media?
  - cruffle_duffle 7mo ago
    You mean Micro$lop or the classic M$?
heavyset_go 7mo ago
For projects, it's also a licensing issue. You don't own the copyright on AI generated code, no one does, so it can't be licensed.
- badsectoracula 7mo ago
  This isn't an issue of "nobody can use this" but an "everyone can use this", i.e. projects can use AI generated code just fine and they own the copyright to any modifications they do to it. Think of it like random noise in an image editor: you do own the random pixels since they're generated by the computer, but you can still use them as part of making your art - you do not lose copyright to your art because you used a random noise filter.
  - shakna 7mo ago
    Only if the generated text has no inherited copyright from the source data. Which it might. And needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, under current copyright law.
- charcircuit 7mo ago
  That is only true for trivial projects that require no human creativity. For such simple projects not having copyright for it is not a big deal.
martin-t 7mo ago
It's great that LLMs helped you but do you recognize that they are trained on thousands, perhaps millions of lifetimes of human work without the consent of the original authors and often quite explicitly against their will and their chosen license? These people (myself included) made their work available free of charge under some very friendly conditions such as being credited or sharing work built upon theirs under the same license. Now we are being shit on because obscenely rich people think we are no longer relevant and that they can get away with it. What happens to you if, say 2 years down the line, "AI" or AI has absorbed all your knowledge and can do all of your work instead of you better and faster? Do you imagine you'll keep paying for AI and having it work for you or can you also imagine a future where AI companies decide to cut out the middle-man (you) and take over your customers directly?
hatmike 7mo ago
>I love the "hallucinations" Sorry, the rest of your comment could have the recipe for fat free deep fried blowjobs that cure cancer and I wouldn't read past that.
hickelpickle 7mo ago
Glad to see this response, I was wondering the other day how the affected accessibility. I remember reading a thread a few years back of visually challenged developers and their work flow and was kinda surprised there has been such little discussion around developer accessibility with the advent of ai agents and coding routines.
yodsanklai 7mo ago
> without a battle of ego. This resonates. Recently, I've started to consider Claude as a partner. I like how he's willing to accept he's wrong when you provide evidence. It can be more pleasant than working with humans.
- MarsIronPI 7mo ago
  Please don't anthropomorphize LLMs even further by assigning them gendered pronouns. LLMs are always "it"s. They're not alive, they're just really complicated linear algebra expressions. Prematurely anthropomorphizing them, even subtly like this, will come back to bite us if we keep doing it.
  - ssk42 7mo ago
    Can you defend that though? Does living mean needing cells? Does it mean possessing the ability to think and reason? Is Claude thinking and reasoning?
  - cowboylowrez 7mo ago
    I just think that if I treat my AI GF like that she'll just pout and end up giving me the silent treatment and I'll have to reboot her.
  - yodsanklai 7mo ago
    Why not? Claude is a male name, and the model behaves close enough to a human that I think it's fine to refer to it as a he or a she. Also note that some languages don't have neutral pronouns and it's perfectly fine to say a mosquito is a "he", and a spider a "she" for instance. Are they more humans than a LLM?
petterroea 7mo ago
As someone who got a pretty severe case of carpal tunnel in his youth that can still blow up today, I have to admit I have worried about my ability to work. "Will I have to become a manager?" Etc. I think you have a good point
- trinsic2 7mo ago
  for some reason that hasn't happned to me yet. im only in my 50ies, but I have been on a split keyboard for a long time...
  - petterroea 7mo ago
    I think a good routine matters a lot. I played a lot of video games in my youth and got carpal tunnel from there, and haven't been able to recover 100% since.
    - trinsic2 7mo ago
      Yeah good point. I work really hard at taking breaks and moving around. where you using a controler/joystick a lot? I was mostly a keyboard warrior.
      - petterroea 7mo ago
        I was playing rhythm games on a keyboard, so basically button mashing. The real killer was that I was pushing myself beyond what I was actually able to play. There's a certain technique to button-based rhythm games, and once you aren't able to read what is happening on the screen any more you tend to naturally transition to just brute force button mashing with high force, which tends to be very straining. I believe this was the problem for me. If I had been a bit more intelligent at how I was learning, and focused on improving reading skill instead of simply wanting to play whatever music I liked, I would have probably never had problems. Rhythm games in general boil down to training your brain to read moving patterns and convert them to scheduled movements in your body (but mostly your hands). Once you get to an intermediate level you get these "flow states" where you realize you were basically unconscious for most of the song, not a single thought, just internally observing your body's reactions to the screen. Almost a type of meditation.
deleted 7mo ago
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PunchyHamster 7mo ago
> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place. If it makes them go thru AI contributions to make sure there is no AI nonsense in them, that's already massive win. The AI on itself is not a problem > But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. and you are the 1% (assuming your claims are true and not hallucinated gains, which are common in AI world too), vast majority of AI contributions are peak lazy, or at best goal-seeking with no regard of the target, consequences or quality THAT is what people complain about. If AI was just used to shortcut the boring, augument the knowledge and produce better quality code, there would be very little arugments against AI-driven contributions. But that is not the case, the AI pundits will purposefully not check the AI output just because that would require time and knowledge and that looks bad on "how faster AI makes you" KPI
raptor99 7mo ago
lol You are actually trying to argue and say "Oh actually, I love how AI fucks up, it makes me keep on my toes." That's like saying I love hiring fuck ups that randomly do out of context and out of ruleset work for me when I ask them to perform tasks. I would also argue to you that "folks" have done more well to debate the upsides of AI. It is pretty much all I ever see when I come to this website any more the last couple of years. Oh, and by coincidence, the operator/owner of the website just happens to be at the helm of ChatGPT. How convenient.
poulpy123 7mo ago
On the code side of the issue, I would say that AI completion and chat are ok because people are still forced to interact with the generated code. When coding with agents people have to go out of their way to do it
_giorgio_ 7mo ago
That's a super nice story. Sometimes we tend to forget the contributions of AI for the visually impaired or hearing-impaired people—for example, subtitles on Meta glasses or audio descriptions and such. Wish you the best.
viktorianer 7mo ago
[flagged]

glenstein 7mo ago

Fantastic point. I do think there was a bit of an over correction toward AI hostility because capitalism, and for good reason, but it did almost make it taboo to talk about legitimate use cases that are not related to bad AI use cases like instigating nuclear wars in war game simulations. I think the ugly unspoken truth whether Mozilla or Debian or someone else, is that there are going to be plausible and valuable use cases and that AI as a paradigm is going to be a hard problem the same way that presiding over, say, a justice system is a hard problem (stay with me). What I mean is it can have a legitimate purpose but be prone to abuse and it's a matter of building in institutional safeguards and winning people's trust while never fully being able to eliminate risk. It's easy for someone to roll their eyes at the idea that there's utility but accessibility is perfect and clear-eyed use case, that makes it harder to simply default to hedonic skepticism against any and all AI applications. I actually think it could have huge implications for leveling the playing field in the browser wars for my particular pet issue.

LtWorf 7mo ago
I think generating slop and having others review it is bad even if you are disabled. I say this as a disabled person myself.

moduspol 7mo ago

> But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. This is the technique I've picked up and got the most from over the past few months. I don't give it hard, high-level problems and then review a giant set of changes to figure it out. I give it the technical solution I was already going to implement anyway, and then have it generate the code I otherwise would have written. It cuts back dramatically on the review fatigue because I already know exactly what I'm expecting to see, so my reviews are primarily focused on the deviations from that.

distances 7mo ago
This, and I curate a tree of MD docs per topic to define the expected structure. It is supposed to output code that looks exactly like my code. If not, I manually edit it and perhaps update the docs. This is how I've found myself to be productive with the tools, or since productivity is hard to measure, at least it's still a fun way to work. I do not need to type everything but I want a very exact outcome nonetheless.
ok_dad 7mo ago
The only issue to beat in mind is that visual inspection is only about 85% accurate at its limit. I was responsible for incoming inspection at a medical device factory and visual inspection was the least reliable test for components that couldn’t be inspected for anything else. We always preferred to use machines (likes big CMM) where possible. I also use LLM assistance, and I love it because it helps my ADHD brain get stuff done, but I definitely miss stuff that I wouldn’t miss by myself. It’s usually fairly simple mistakes to fix later but I still miss them initially. I’ve been having luck with LLM reviewers though.

j2kun 7mo ago

This is a bit of a straw man. The harms of AI in OSS are not from people needing accessibility tooling.

DonsDiscountGas 7mo ago
It's absolutely not a straw man, because OP and people like OP will be affected by any policy which limits or bans LLMs. Whether or not the policy writer intended it. So he deserves a voice.
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  He doesn't think others deserve a voice, so why should I consider his?
  - mr-wendel 7mo ago
    The fact that you are engaging in this thread shows me you have considered my opinions, even if you reject them. I think thats great, even in the face of being told I advocate for the collapse of civilization and that I want others to shut up and not be heard. It is a bit insulting, but I get that these issues are important and people feel like the stakes are sky-high: job loss, misallocation of resources, enshitification, increased social stratification, abrogation of personal responsibility, runaway corporate irresponsibility, amplification of bad actors, and just maybe that `p(doom)` is way higher than AI-optimists are willing to consider. Especially as AI makes advances into warfare, justice, and surveillance. Even if you think AI is great, it's easy to acknowledge that all it may take is zealotry and the rot within politics to turn it into a disaster. You're absolutely right to identify that there are some eerie similarities to the "gun's don't kill people, people kill people" line of thinking. There IS a lot to grapple with. However, I disagree with these conclusions (so far) and especially that AI is a unique danger to humanity. I also disagree that AI in any form is our salvation and going to elevate humanity to unfathomable heights (or anything close to that). But, to bring it back to this specific topic, I think OSS projects stand to benefit (increasingly so as improvements continue) from AI and should avoid taking hardline stances against it.

why_at 7mo ago

>Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that? It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!" Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me

mr-wendel 7mo ago
I appreciate the feedback. I like it because I have no expectation of perfection-- out of others, myself, and especially not AI. I expect "good enough" and work upwards from there, and with (most) things, I find AI to be better than good enough.
walthamstow 7mo ago
You worked with people before haven't you? Sometimes they make stuff up, or misremember stuff. Sometimes people who do this are brilliant and you end up learning a lot from them.
lawn 7mo ago
Yeah, if RSI is an issue why would you want to be forced to type more?
tpmoney 7mo ago
I can’t say what the OP finds specifically useful but as an example if you’re aiming to make sure you’ve accurately and clearly documented / explained your intent, the misunderstandings and tangents AIs can go down are useful in the same way that putting your theoretically perfect UI into the hands of real users is also useful. It helps you want places where you assumed knowledge or understanding that someone else might not have. Building up style guidelines for AI tools has been an eye opening experience in realizing how many stylistic choices we make that aren’t embedded in the linter, and aren’t documented anywhere else either. The resulting files have actually been a really good resource not just for the AI but for new developers on the project too. It all depends on what your specific goal is.

QuercusMax 7mo ago

A few years ago I was in a place where I couldn't type on a computer keyboard for more than a few minutes without significant pain, and I fortunately had shifted into a role where I could oversee a bunch of junior engineers mostly via text chat (phone keyboard didn't hurt my hands as much) and occasional video/voice chat. I'm much better now after tons of rehab work (no surgery, thankfully), but I don't have the stamina to type as much as I used to. I was always a heavy IDE user and a very fast coder, but I've moved platforms too many times and lost my muscle memory. A year ago I found the AI tools to be basically time-wasters, but now I can be as productive as before without incurring significant pain.

Joel_Mckay 7mo ago

The premise LLM are "AI" is false, but are good at problems like context search, and isomorphic plagiarism. Given the liabilities of relying on public and chat users markdown data to sell to other users without compensation raises a number of issues: 1. Copyright: LLM generated content can't be assigned copyright (USA), and thus may contaminate licensing agreements. It is likely public-domain, but also may conflict with GPL/LGPL when stolen IP bleeds through weak obfuscation. The risk has zero precedent cases so far (the Disney case slightly differs), but is likely a legal liability waiting to surface eventually. 2. Workmanship: All software is terrible, but some of it is useful. People that don't care about black-box obfuscated generated content, are also a maintenance and security liability. Seriously, folks should just retire if they can't be arsed to improve readable source tree structure. 3. Repeatability: As the models started consuming other LLM content, the behavioral vectors often also change the content output. Humans know when they don't know something, but an LLM will inject utter random nonsense every time. More importantly, the energy cost to get that error rate lower balloons exponentially. 4. Psychology: People do not think critically when something seems right 80% of the time. The LLM accuracy depends mostly on stealing content, but it stops working when there is nothing left to commit theft of service on. The web is now >53% slop and growing. Only the human user chat data is worth stealing now. 5. Manipulation: The frequency of bad bots AstroTurf forums with poisoned discourse is biasing the delusional. Some react emotionally instead of engaging the community in good faith, or shill hard for their cult of choice. 6. Sustainability: FOSS like all ecosystems is vulnerable to peer review exhaustion like the recent xz CVE fiasco. The LLM hidden hostile agent problem is currently impossible to solve, and thus cannot be trusted in hostile environments. 7. Ethics: Every LLM ruined town economic simulations, nuked humanity 94% of the time in every war game, and encouraged the delusional to kill IRL While I am all for assistive technologies like better voice recognition, TTS, and individuals computer-user interfaces. Most will draw a line at slop code, and branch to a less chaotic source tree to work on. I think it is hilarious some LLM proponents immediately assume everyone also has no clue how these models are implemented. =3 "A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

VorpalWay 7mo ago

I'm in a very similar situation: I have RSI and smarter-autocomplete style AI is a godsend. Unlike you I haven't found more complex AI (agent mode) particularly useful though for what I do (hard realtime C++ and Rust). So I avoid that. Plus it takes away the fun part of coding for me. (The journey matters more than the destination.) The accessibility angle is really important here. What we need is a way to stop people who make contributions they don't understand and/or can not vouch they are the author for (the license question is very murky still, and no what the US supreme court said doesn't matter here in EU). This is difficult though.

BeetleB 7mo ago

Similar story, albeit not so extreme. I have similar ergonomic issues that crop up from time to time. My programming is not so impacted (spend more time thinking than typing, etc), but things like email, documentation, etc can be brutal (a lot more computer usage vs programming). My simple solution: I use Whisper to transcribe my text, and feed the output to an LLM for cleanup (custom prompt). It's fantastic. Way better than stuff like Dragon. Now I get frustrated with transcribing using Google's default mechanism on Android - so inaccurate! But the ability to take notes, dictate emails, etc using Whisper + LLM is invaluable. I likely would refuse to work for a company that won't let me put IP into an LLM. Similarly, I take a lot of notes on paper, and would have to type them up. Tedious and painful. I switched to reading my notes aloud and use the above system to transcribe. Still painful. I recently realized Gemini will do a great job just reading my notes. So now I simply convert my notes to a photo and send to Gemini. I categorize all my expenses. I have receipts from grocery stores where I highlight items into categories. You can imagine it's painful to enter that into a financial SW. I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me. All of these are cool applications on their own, but when you realize they're also improving your health ... clear win.

mr-wendel 7mo ago
> I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me. FWIW, I have a pet project for a family recipe book. I normalize all recipes to a steps/instructions/ingredients JSON object. A webapp lets me snap photos of my old recipes and AI reliably yields perfectly structured objects back. The only thing I've had to fix is odd punctuation. For production, use is low, so `gemini-2.5-flash` works great and the low rate limits are fine. For development the `gemma-3-27b-it` model has MUCH higher limits and still does suprisingly well. I'd bet you can pull this off and be very happy with the result.
nunez 7mo ago
I maintain expense tracking software that I wrote a while ago (before ChatGPT) that sends receipts and some metadata about them into Google Sheets (previously Expensify). A few months ago, I used Claude to add a feature that does exactly what you describe, but using the data types and framework I built for receipt parsing. It works really well. Honestly, you can probably build what I built entirely with Gemini or Claude, probably with a nice frontend to boot.

ivan_gammel 7mo ago

If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. It’s ok to use it, if that enables you to work.

notatoad 7mo ago
this sounds reasonable, but in practice people will simply sign off on anything without having thoroughly reviewed it. I agree with you that there's a huge distinction between code that a person understands as thoroughly as if they wrote it, and vibecoded stuff that no person actually understands. but actually doing something practical with that distinction is a difficult problem to solve.
- ivan_gammel 7mo ago
  Unless the code is explicitly signed by AI as auto-commit, you cannot really tell if it was reviewed by human. So it essentially becomes a task of detecting specific AI code smell, which is barely noticeable in code reviewed by an experienced engineer. Very subjective, probably does not make sense at all.
Groxx 7mo ago
this is equivalent to claiming that automation has no negative side effects at all. we do often choose automation when possible (especially in computer realms), but there are endless examples in programing and other fields of not-so-surprising-in-retrospect failures due to how automation affects human behavior. so it's clearly not true. what we're debating is the amount of harm, not if there is any.
heavyset_go 7mo ago
> If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed. This matters for open source projects that care about licensing. It should also matter for proprietary code bases, as anyone can copy and distribute "their" AI generated code for any purpose, including to compete with the "owner".

gwbas1c 7mo ago

> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place. That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know how to use AI correctly. The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work. In general, a good policy towards AI submission really has to primarily address the "good faith" issue; and then explain how much tolerance the project has for vibecoding.

pixl97 7mo ago
>other people are reasonable like you No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them". AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it. Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.
- shevy-java 7mo ago
  > Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. AI also generates spam though, so this is a much bigger problem than merely "unreasonable" people alone.
  - pixl97 7mo ago
    I mean, AI generates spam at the behest of unreasonable people currently, and we can just think of it as a powerful automated extension of other technologies. We could say it's a new problem in quantity but the same old problem in kind. Now, with that said I don't think we're very far from automated agents causing problems all on their own.

veunes 7mo ago

Accessibility is an angle that rarely comes up in these debates and it's a strong one

setgree 7mo ago

Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).

mr-wendel 7mo ago
Much appreciated. I find is that referencing code in conversation is hard -- e.g. "underscore foo bar" vs `_fooBar`, "this dot Ls" vs `this.els`, etc happens often. Lower-powered models especially struggle with this, and make some frustrating assumptions. Premium models do way better, and at times are shockingly good. They just aren't remotely economically viable for me. My solution so far is to use my instructions to call out the fact that my comments are transcribed and full of errors. I also focus more on "plan + apply" flows that guide agents to search out and identify code changes before anything is edited to ensure the relevant context (and any tricky references) are clearly established in the chat context. It's kinda like learning vim (or emacs, if you prefer). First it was all about learning shortcuts and best practices to make efficient use of the tool. Then it was about creating a good .vimrc file to further reduce the overhead of coding sessions. Then it was about distributing that .vimrc across machines (and I did a LOT of ssh-based work) for consistency. Once that was done, it became unimaginable to code any other way. It has been even more true here: agent-based workflows are useless without significant investment in creating and maintaining good project documentation, agent instructions, and finding ways to replicate that across repos (more microservice hell! :D) for consistency. There is also some conflict, especially in corporate environments, with where this information needs to live to be properly maintained. Best of luck!
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  maybe you've done this already, but my first thought would be to make a preparser script that would take your likely voice inputs like "underscore foo bar" and translate to "_fooBar" which you would then pass on as input. i do something similar for a local TTS generator which often stumbles on certain words or weird characters

brightball 7mo ago

Fwiw, I try to make sure we have an accessibility focused talk every year (if possible) at the Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open right now if you'd be interested in submitting something on your story.

shevy-java 7mo ago

> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. I understand that your use case is different, so AI may help handicapped people. Nothing wrong with that. The problem is that the term AI encompasses many things, and a lot of AI led to quality decay. There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop. Personally I'd much prefer for AI to go away. It won't go away, of course, but I still would like to see it gone, even if I agree that the use case you described is objectively useful and better for you (and others who are handicapped). > I also think it incorrect to look at it from a perspective of "does the good outweigh the bad?". Relevant, yes, but utilitarian arguments often lead to counter-intuitive results and end up amplifying the problems they seek to solve. That is the same for every technology though. You always have a trade-off. So I don't think the question is incorrect at all - it applies the same just as it is for any other technology, too. I also disagree that utilitarian arguments by their intrinsic nature lead to counter-intuitive results. Which result would be counter-intuitive when you analyse a technology for its pros and cons?

GaryBluto 7mo ago
> There is a reason why Microsoft is now called Microslop. Because young people repeat things they see on social media?
- cruffle_duffle 7mo ago
  You mean Micro$lop or the classic M$?

heavyset_go 7mo ago

For projects, it's also a licensing issue. You don't own the copyright on AI generated code, no one does, so it can't be licensed.

badsectoracula 7mo ago
This isn't an issue of "nobody can use this" but an "everyone can use this", i.e. projects can use AI generated code just fine and they own the copyright to any modifications they do to it. Think of it like random noise in an image editor: you do own the random pixels since they're generated by the computer, but you can still use them as part of making your art - you do not lose copyright to your art because you used a random noise filter.
- shakna 7mo ago
  Only if the generated text has no inherited copyright from the source data. Which it might. And needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, under current copyright law.
charcircuit 7mo ago
That is only true for trivial projects that require no human creativity. For such simple projects not having copyright for it is not a big deal.

martin-t 7mo ago

It's great that LLMs helped you but do you recognize that they are trained on thousands, perhaps millions of lifetimes of human work without the consent of the original authors and often quite explicitly against their will and their chosen license? These people (myself included) made their work available free of charge under some very friendly conditions such as being credited or sharing work built upon theirs under the same license. Now we are being shit on because obscenely rich people think we are no longer relevant and that they can get away with it. What happens to you if, say 2 years down the line, "AI" or AI has absorbed all your knowledge and can do all of your work instead of you better and faster? Do you imagine you'll keep paying for AI and having it work for you or can you also imagine a future where AI companies decide to cut out the middle-man (you) and take over your customers directly?

hatmike 7mo ago

>I love the "hallucinations" Sorry, the rest of your comment could have the recipe for fat free deep fried blowjobs that cure cancer and I wouldn't read past that.

hickelpickle 7mo ago

Glad to see this response, I was wondering the other day how the affected accessibility. I remember reading a thread a few years back of visually challenged developers and their work flow and was kinda surprised there has been such little discussion around developer accessibility with the advent of ai agents and coding routines.

yodsanklai 7mo ago

> without a battle of ego. This resonates. Recently, I've started to consider Claude as a partner. I like how he's willing to accept he's wrong when you provide evidence. It can be more pleasant than working with humans.

MarsIronPI 7mo ago
Please don't anthropomorphize LLMs even further by assigning them gendered pronouns. LLMs are always "it"s. They're not alive, they're just really complicated linear algebra expressions. Prematurely anthropomorphizing them, even subtly like this, will come back to bite us if we keep doing it.
- ssk42 7mo ago
  Can you defend that though? Does living mean needing cells? Does it mean possessing the ability to think and reason? Is Claude thinking and reasoning?
- cowboylowrez 7mo ago
  I just think that if I treat my AI GF like that she'll just pout and end up giving me the silent treatment and I'll have to reboot her.
- yodsanklai 7mo ago
  Why not? Claude is a male name, and the model behaves close enough to a human that I think it's fine to refer to it as a he or a she. Also note that some languages don't have neutral pronouns and it's perfectly fine to say a mosquito is a "he", and a spider a "she" for instance. Are they more humans than a LLM?

petterroea 7mo ago

As someone who got a pretty severe case of carpal tunnel in his youth that can still blow up today, I have to admit I have worried about my ability to work. "Will I have to become a manager?" Etc. I think you have a good point

trinsic2 7mo ago
for some reason that hasn't happned to me yet. im only in my 50ies, but I have been on a split keyboard for a long time...
- petterroea 7mo ago
  I think a good routine matters a lot. I played a lot of video games in my youth and got carpal tunnel from there, and haven't been able to recover 100% since.
  - trinsic2 7mo ago
    Yeah good point. I work really hard at taking breaks and moving around. where you using a controler/joystick a lot? I was mostly a keyboard warrior.
    - petterroea 7mo ago
      I was playing rhythm games on a keyboard, so basically button mashing. The real killer was that I was pushing myself beyond what I was actually able to play. There's a certain technique to button-based rhythm games, and once you aren't able to read what is happening on the screen any more you tend to naturally transition to just brute force button mashing with high force, which tends to be very straining. I believe this was the problem for me. If I had been a bit more intelligent at how I was learning, and focused on improving reading skill instead of simply wanting to play whatever music I liked, I would have probably never had problems. Rhythm games in general boil down to training your brain to read moving patterns and convert them to scheduled movements in your body (but mostly your hands). Once you get to an intermediate level you get these "flow states" where you realize you were basically unconscious for most of the song, not a single thought, just internally observing your body's reactions to the screen. Almost a type of meditation.

deleted 7mo ago

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PunchyHamster 7mo ago

> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place. If it makes them go thru AI contributions to make sure there is no AI nonsense in them, that's already massive win. The AI on itself is not a problem > But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. and you are the 1% (assuming your claims are true and not hallucinated gains, which are common in AI world too), vast majority of AI contributions are peak lazy, or at best goal-seeking with no regard of the target, consequences or quality THAT is what people complain about. If AI was just used to shortcut the boring, augument the knowledge and produce better quality code, there would be very little arugments against AI-driven contributions. But that is not the case, the AI pundits will purposefully not check the AI output just because that would require time and knowledge and that looks bad on "how faster AI makes you" KPI

raptor99 7mo ago

lol You are actually trying to argue and say "Oh actually, I love how AI fucks up, it makes me keep on my toes." That's like saying I love hiring fuck ups that randomly do out of context and out of ruleset work for me when I ask them to perform tasks. I would also argue to you that "folks" have done more well to debate the upsides of AI. It is pretty much all I ever see when I come to this website any more the last couple of years. Oh, and by coincidence, the operator/owner of the website just happens to be at the helm of ChatGPT. How convenient.

poulpy123 7mo ago

On the code side of the issue, I would say that AI completion and chat are ok because people are still forced to interact with the generated code. When coding with agents people have to go out of their way to do it

_giorgio_ 7mo ago

That's a super nice story. Sometimes we tend to forget the contributions of AI for the visually impaired or hearing-impaired people—for example, subtitles on Meta glasses or audio descriptions and such. Wish you the best.

viktorianer 7mo ago

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