A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn’t have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn’t AI that laid off thousands of employees, it’s deluded executives who don’t understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this “issue” might come up so I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
Culture war? Lol
Yes, the observation that software quality seems negatively impacted by ai use is not allowed to be expressed, because you don’t observe it.
The culture war part is the call to boycott a project or shit on its author because they use coding agents, as is done throughout these comments. The whole separation into “those who use AI are bad” and “those who hate AI are good” is a culture war. A needless one at that.
TIL fact-based opinions and the arguments that come from them are “culture wars”.
I also brought facts and objective reasoning, yet I get downvoted.
Yet anecdotal comments like “I tested it myself and it sucks” get upvoted; apparently simply because it fits the own worldview.
That’s not polarization to you?
It’s for sure a polarizing topic, I just don’t see how it’s a culture war. “Sub-culture war” maybe?
Ok maybe I mis-use the word. If that’s the case, sorry about that. But I hope my point comes across anyway: I really really dislike that the community (or multiple communities, even) get split between people who are ok with AI and who are against AI. This is, IMO, completely unnecessary. That doesn’t mean everyone should be ok with it, but we should not judge or condemn each other because of a different opinion on the matter.
If you notice a project goes downhill, it’s fine to criticize the author (or the whole project) for the degredation in quality. If there are strong indicators that AI is involved, by all means leave a snarky remark about that while complaining. But ultimately it’s the fuckup of a human.
What you’re taking issue with though is deeper than ai. It’s online discourse that is so rude and nuance-less.
In any case, this thread is full of people saying things like “that’s his right to do this but he communicated poorly about this” and getting piles of upvotes. So, yes ai is very polarizing in this corner of the Internet, but I think it’s much more at issue here that people don’t like his handling of it. I know that personally if it weren’t for that I probably would’ve thought “hmm sounds sketchy to use ai in a product thousands of people depend on” and kept scrolling. But no, he was a dick about it and is now hiding his use of ai moving forward. So the people who hate AI are extra pissed about it. Likely because they fear others will follow that lead and enshittify the software they currently enjoy.
I guess that’s a fair assessment. It’s just recently quite annoying that we have tons of AI-hate, age-restriction-FUD, etc., while at the same time war rages, the economy goes to shit, and more and more governments turn right-wing or outright fascist.
We have so many problems, yet we rip each others throat out for topics that are ultimately irrelevant.
I am with you that his last sentence was completely stupid. I am not with you regarding the “hiding” part. I was actually surprised there even were commits marked by claude. The way I use agents is typically completely local, then I review each diff, adjust as necessary and then commit. The commit is then obviously by me; not claude or whatever agent I am using at the time. I am pretty sure a lot of people work that way. So I actually think the default is to not see the involvement of AI. And I don’t do this to hide anything … that’s just a consequence of the workflow and how git works and I didn’t even consider that this should be done any differently.
That’s why I also understand his point - that he shouldn’t have said so bluntly: if that marker was never there, probably no one would have noticed to begin with.
My understanding is that this dude was letting Claude fully author features/bugfixes. At least that would be the only way I can understand commits being credited to Claude. I am sure that is a default setting meant to encourage transparency. Him removing Claude as author on work that is already done is childish (as was his remark about it) and intentionally deceptive. If he was doing what you said you do, I think the attitude would be vague grumpiness but it’s objectively not a big deal because not only does it suggest more oversight, there would’ve been no opportunity for him to remove the author and then act like an ass about it.
I agree with you generally about people being shitty online. I have been treated very poorly for suggesting objectivity when it comes to ai specifically. But in this case I mostly get why people are upset. And again, it does bear repeating, this thread has many level headed comments about this and I didn’t see any negative responses to those. It may not be fair to you, but I think the reason you got the pushback you did is because you seemed fully on the guy’s side. Yeah, unfortunately the binary thinking that goes on has no patience for views that come across that way.
Is flat vs. round Earth a culture war in your mind?
The way flat earthers act? Yes. They treat it as a culture war. Just like anti-vaxers.
As I’ve said in an earlier thread, AI over engineers code and hallucinates APIs that don’t exist. Furthermore, hallucinations themselves are a very well studied phenomenon that has proven difficult to combat. People have very legit compliments about AI that you seem to be determined to dismiss as nothing more than a culture war.
But those issues get determined by reviews and tests. You determined these issues and worked against them, why do you think the author of Lutris is not able to? Neither I nor the author says anyone should use AI produced results as is (i.e vibe code).