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His reasoning is quite fresh and interesting: > What LLMs in Debian development will do, I fear, is eliminate any incentive to scrap boilerplate or reform poli
by frabcus 1mo ago
His reasoning is quite fresh and interesting:
> What LLMs in Debian development will do, I fear, is eliminate any incentive to scrap boilerplate or reform policies that require a lot of other senseless human effort. If I had had access to LLMs 30 years ago, I might have just had them generate the rules files, replate with complexity. So they will make Debian even more firmly what it is, and ever less likely to explore what it could become.
I use and like LLMs, but it does feel like structural social changes are harder to do. For example, creation of new protocols. I hope I'm wrong, and LLMs are used to build collaborative, community projects - not just everyone vibe coding their own incompatible software.
- a2ff6eeb0 1mo agoYes, because LLMs have no online learning, it's a mistake to innovative in programming languages and tooling. Use what exists instead, the power of having training data is often underestimated.
- jimmaswell 1mo agoI use LLM's to make massive structural changes I never would have done by hand all the time. It's intractably tedious for me but easy for an LLM.
- glhaynes 1mo agoYes, I experiment much more. It's easier to justify, and, perhaps more importantly, just WAY psychologically easier to throw away a 20 minute experiment that your robot wrote for you than the same when it took you a week of tedious manual coding.
- Cantinflas 1mo agoThat's a very narrow view. If anyone could vibe code their printer drivers, maybe free software wouldn't have existed, because it would not have been needed in the first place.
- vatsachak 1mo agoYeah. We shouldn't have standardized languages either. Everyone was fine with their own regional dialect for hundreds of thousands of years.
- arjie 1mo agoCertainly, but if everyone can vibe code their printer drivers then we have free software in the sense of free speech and so users would be developers and the entire need is met. That is wonderful, not awful. If it had happened early enough, code copyright might never have even been possible and no one can deny you your machine because you can just vibe up stuff.
- Cantinflas 1mo agoYeah I totally agree. It's wonderful, even though it may cause weird localized effects.
- antirez 1mo agoThat's perfectly wrong. Since strong coding AI, people venture into huge rewrites and other big changes that automatically make sense but otherwise would not.
- ChickeNES 1mo agoYeah it's a bizarre claim. Even better, I've literally taken some of the crappy experimental projects from the pre-Opus 4.6 era, and turned them into real software as models have become smarter.
- rcxdude 1mo agoI would say it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, yes, you can experiment with big changes much more easily, but on the other hand, you can have cruft build up in a big way if you're not actively looking for it and trying to cut it back. In Debian, often the barrier to change is one or two people actively disagreeing with a change who are in a position to block it through their own action or inaction, so just being able to do more work on the change yourself is not necessarily going to make it easier to change things.