Just a PSA.
Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.
It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.
I think it kinda depends on the context. If someone is just making a tool for themselves and they slap on MIT or GPL3 just because who cares someone else can have it, then sure. Who cares if it’s trash if the stakes are so low that they’re scraping the ground and the user base is expected to be single digits.
But when you care about the reputation of your project, or if your project requires people trust it, then yeah for sure it’s not appropriate to vibe/slop it.
I have ethical concerns about the realities of how this tech is used, mainly in what it’s doing to the economic and power dynamics in society. But I don’t have a problem with the tech itself. That said, I have to admit that it may not be realistic to separate the tech from its inevitable impact. Now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds, and all that.
How do people gain the ability to make these major projects if not for cutting their teeth on the small ones though. We cut the apprentice and journeyman stages of mastering an art out, replace it with slop, and then ten years from now we wonder why kids these days are so incapable of actually creating anything.
I have talked to kids who have told me that the assignments they got at school were so trivial they just ran them through ChatGPT rather than waste their time. When I pointed out that the reason the assignments were “trivial” was to give them the skills and confidence to do the big projects when the time came I got, at best, blank looks.
I said it somewhere else, if you are using an LLM to generate unit tests I find it hard to be terribly mad at that. If it’s scaffolding documentation, meh whatever. If it’s generating the main body of your project, I have concerns. Plus I circle back to how can you open source code that may have been stolen from a copyrighted work?
I did a better job explaining my position in another comment, the problem is one of culture. We live in a culture that pressures people to use AI in this bad way, and pressures the creators of AI to court bad people as customers, and throw away their ethics. If we weren’t in a rat race, I feel like a lot of the problems would go away.
But we live in the culture that we live in, and at some point you simply cannot practically view the technology in isolation.
The problems are human nature, capitalism and greed. Doesn’t mean we have to give in, and frankly all the appeasers out there that keep saying “You have to use it or you will be left behind.” are effectively the drug pusher in the locker room telling the insecure young man “Oh yeah everyone else is juicing, you don’t do it you won’t be able to compete.”
Nobody believes the drug dealers are handing out drugs because they are humanitarians, they have a financial interest in destroying that kids life while he tries to justify it to himself.
We know LLMs are harmful on SO many different levels, but the US economy would literally collapse if people acknowledged that and stopped supporting them. So we race headlong towards societal collapse to keep the plates spinning. Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, and so many others should all be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity once the collapse occurs. The sooner our societies start stringing these monsters up rather than celebrating them the more hope we have as a species.
I agree with everything you said except that I think too much nurture is attributed to nature. I don’t think it’s human nature, i think this is the nature of our culture. To say it is human nature is, imo, unnecessarily fatalistic.
I’d love to be wrong, but I feel like we are wired in certain ways by the evolutionary process we are the product of. I think the nurture comes in to play with regards to overcoming some of those baser instincts and drives. Anyone who has raised boys can tell you that for most boys they go through phases of being overly aggressive and or violent, that can often be redirected into better ways of getting that out. Can’t speak for girls or people on the intersection due to lack of first hand experience and want to reiterate that I am fully aware that my anecdotes are not universal and everyone falls into a range of behaviours. I feel like what we lack is an elder species we can look up to and emulate, so we are going to need to figure it out for ourselves. I like to think we have the ability, here’s hoping.