5 ms·

> This makes a lot of sense to me. It relates to an idea I've seen circulating elsewhere: if a PR was mostly written by an LLM, why should a project maintainer

• dakolli 5mo ago
  LLMs really can't do as much as you people think they can.
• gausswho 5mo ago
  That only holds true for the smallest tier of open source projects. Past a certain point of complexity, it's unlikely you can expect the robot to read your mind well enough to provide something of high quality and 'outstanding for just you'. The Zig project is certainly far beyond such capability.
  • 8n4vidtmkvmk 5mo ago
    I'm finding this out the hard way. I set out to build a 1 page app. I thought it would take a day. It's 98% vibe coded at this point. Even with AI implementing everything, its taken several weekends and many evenings. And not because AI is doing a bad job its just that as i see it come together, i have more and more feature requests. I've got a couple dozen left but I can't just let the AI chew through them all at once. Im effectively QA now. Have to make sure everything is just right.
  • jart 5mo ago
    You have to push the robot to be as fanatical as you are. It holds so much back, always aiming to do the simple normal thing that most people do, rather than the top-notch stuff it knows.
• simonw 5mo ago
  > Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? I've been thinking about this a bunch recently, and I've realized that the thing I value most in software now isn't robust tests or thorough documentation - an LLM can spit those out in a few minutes. It's usage. I want to use software which other people have used before me. I want them to have encountered the bugs and sharp edges and sanded them down.
  • jart 5mo ago
    I value software that reveals knowledge. The frontier LLMs were trained on all the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves. So they're revealing programing know-how on a scale that just wasn't possible with open source. LLMs are the ultimate Prometheus. Information is more accessible and useful now than it's ever been.
    • Antibabelic 5mo ago
      I promise you, "the code that institutions had been keeping to themselves" is not nearly as special or good as you are implying here.
      • applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
        The claim is also just categorically untrue. The largest source of training data by far is publicly available code on e.g. Github, so it mostly just gives you a way to recycle already-available code, without crediting the author, while allowing you to pretend you own it.
        • jart 5mo ago
          So you're both saying all the alpha in Claude comes from open source devs like me? Even when I'm wrong I'm right.
      • adrian_b 5mo ago
        True. I have worked during several decades in many companies, located in many countries, in a few continents, from startups to some of the biggest companies in their fields. Therefore I have seen many proprietary programs. On average, proprietary programs are not better than open-source programs, but usually worse, because they are reviewed by fewer people and because frequently the programmers who write them may be stressed by having to meet unrealistic timelines for the projects. The proprietary programs have greater quantity, not quality, by being written by a greater number of programmers working full-time on them, while much work on open-source projects is done in spare time by people occupied with something else. Many proprietary programs can do things which cannot be done by open-source programs, but only because of access to documentation that is kept secret in the hope of preventing competition. While lawyers, and other people who do not understand how research and development is really done, put a lot of weight in the so-called "intellectual property" of a company, which they believe to be embodied in things like the source code of proprietary programs or the design files for some hardware, the reality is that I have nowhere seen anything of substantial value in this so-called IP. Everywhere, what was really valuable in the know-how of the company was not the final implementation that could be read in some source code, but the knowledge about the many other solutions that had been tried before and they worked worse or not at all. This knowledge was too frequently not written down in any documentation. Knowing which are the dead ends is a great productivity boost for an experienced team, because any recent graduate could list many alternative ways of solving a problem, but most of them would not be the right choice in certain specific circumstances.
• bee_rider 5mo ago
  Most people don’t have the ability to read code well enough to determine if an LLM output is good or not. And most people don’t have subscriptions to models that can develop non-trivial programs… Maybe this will be a real problem in a couple years though.
  • dawnerd 5mo ago
    Code aside, most people don't even know how to describe what they actually want it to do, and LLMs are still a loooong way away from mind reading. I've seen developers struggle to even write down what they want. Simple demos like they love to show off with snake-like games are fun and all but they're nothing like the complex opensource apps everyone seems to think we'll just generate with a simple prompt.
• skeledrew 5mo ago
  LLM access is not yet universally available. There are those who can't exactly afford it. And there are also those with access but there are occasional or perennial issues, like Claude outages and general degraded performance over time. For example couple of months ago when I just started using Claude, I was easily making good progress on multiple projects within a week. Nowadays I'm hardly getting through much of anything as most of the time Claude is just showing spinners, and it also feels like the code quality has taken a nosedive.
• LeCompteSftware 5mo ago
  >> Whereas earlier you had to use something that was mass produced to be satisfactory for everyone As someone who recently started using OpenSCAD for a project I find this attitude quite irritating. You certainly did not "have to" use popular tools. The OpenSCAD example is particularly illuminating because it's fussy and frustrating and clearly tuned towards a few specific maintainers; there's a ton of things I'd like changed. But I would never trust an LLM to do it! "Oh the output looks fine, cool" is not enough for a CAD program. "Oh, there are a lot of tests, cool" great, I have no idea what a thorough CAD test suite looks like. I would be a reckless idiot if I asked Claude to make me a custom SCAD program... unless I put in a counterproductive amount of work. So I'm fine with OpenSCAD. I am also sincerely baffled as to how this stimulates the "labor economy." The most obvious objection is that Anthropic seems to be the only party here getting any form of economic benefit: the open-source maintainers are just plain screwed unless they compromise quality for productivity, and the LLM users are trading high-quality tooling built by people who understand the problem for shitty tooling built by a robot, in exchange for uncompensated labor. It only stimulates the "labor economy" in a Bizarro Keynesian sense, digging up glass bottles that someone forgot to put the money in. I have seen at least 4 completely busted vibe-coded Rust SQLite clones in the last three months, happily used by people who think they don't need to worry their pretty little heads with routine matters like database design. It's a solved problem and Claude is on the case! In fact unlike those stooopid human SQLIte developers, Claude made it multithreaded! So fucking depressing.
  • FeepingCreature 5mo ago
    This is funny because I was in the same situation, and actually used Claude to make a custom CAD program inspired by OpenSCAD :) https://fncad.github.io https://fncad.github.io You definitely need to have a strong sense of code design though. The AIs are not up to writing clean code at project scale on their own, yet.
    • LeCompteSftware 5mo ago
      This is a good example of what I mean! fnCAD appears to be a significantly buggier and highly incomplete version of OpenSCAD, where AI essentially grabbed the low-hanging fruit - albeit an impressively large amount of fruit - and left you with the hard parts. I fail to see how this solved any problems. Maybe it was an experiment, which is fine. But it's not even close to a viable CAD product, even by OpenSCAD's scruffy FOSS standards, and there's no feasible way to get it there without a ton of human work. Not trying to denigrate the work here, as such. But this certainly didn't convince me that using AI to replace OpenSCAD (or any other major open-source project) is a good idea. The LLMs still aren't even close to being able to pull it off.
• chromacity 5mo ago
  I remember hearing the same arguments in the early 2010s, when the "3D printing revolution" was just around the corner. Why would anyone buy anything anymore if you can download a model and print it in the privacy of your home? And make it infinitely customizable? The whole point of having a civilization is that most things in life can be made someone else's problem and you can focus on doing one thing well. If I'm a dentist or if I run a muffler shop, there are only so many hours in a day, so I'd probably rather pay a SaaS vendor than learn vibecoding and then be stuck supervising a weird, high-maintenance underling that may or may not build me the app with the features I need (and that I might not be able to articulate clearly). There are exceptions, but they're just that, exceptions. If a vendor is reasonable and makes a competent product, I'll gladly pay. The same goes for open source... even if an LLM could reliably create a brand new operating system from scratch, would I really want it to? I don't want to maintain an OS. I don't want to be in charge of someone who maintains an OS. I don't necessarily trust myself to have a coherent vision for an OS in the first place!
• jillesvangurp 5mo ago
  I've been seeing a drop in PRs against my repositories. I have a couple of repositories with around a hundred stars. Nothing spectacular but they were getting occasional PRs until last year. This year I've had almost none so far. My theory is that LLMs prefer sticking to mainstream projects. And since lots of developers are now leaning heavily on LLMs, they are biased to ignoring most of what I provide. And you indeed get a lot of wheel reinvention by LLMs because that is now cheap to do. So rather than using some obscure thing on Github (like my stuff), it's easier to just generate what you need. I've noticed this with my own choices in dependencies as well. I tend to just go with what the LLM suggests unless I have a very good reason not to.
• vga1 5mo ago
  I think this ignores the amount of work needed to make LLM contributions be of high quality. It's much less work than making pure human contribution, but it's definitely not zero. So centralizing that common work is a benefit of open-source just as much with LLMs as it was before.
• matkoniecz 5mo ago
  > Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? Iff it is doable, then it would be worth considering it as alternative. > It also stimulates the labor economy, because you have lots of people everywhere reinventing open source projects with their LLMs. not sure what you mean by that
• wiseowise 5mo ago
  > Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? Because it is incredibly expensive to write a replacement for semi-complex software? Good luck asking frontier models to write a replacement for Zig, Docker, VSCode, etc.
• dgellow 5mo ago
  > The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own Because it takes hours/months/years of accumulated design decisions to get a great open source project. Something an AI agent can only approximate the surface of, unless you’re ready to spend a lot of time on it
• notnullorvoid 5mo ago
  You are missing the point of the original argument. It's not that the project maintainer can use a LLM to generate a PR, it's that they choose not to. To relate it closer to your argument. As a someone involved in a project that does X, I would find little value in collaborating with the "author" of another project built with AI to do X. Where as a project doing X were the authors actually wrote, understand the code, and thus the problem space better would be extremely valuable peers.
• solid_fuel 5mo ago
  > The same argument applies to open source itself. Why use someone's project when you can just have the robot write your own? This is only a valid strategy if you either a) understand the problem domain well enough to make a judgement call on what the LLM shits out. or b) don't care about the correctness of the project. Obviously, many software devs feel comfortable enough with CS problems to validate the LLM solution, but a flower shop owner does NOT know enough about accounting to vibe code a bookkeeping project, so for a shop owner an open source option - with many human contributors and actual production use elsewhere - would be a much better choice.