So when the news circulated recently that the Lutris developer was using Claude to help write the code (and the angry posts/articles appeared) I figured I’d reach out to Mathieu to hear his side of things.

I chatted to him a little, asking for his side of the story. He goes into some depth on how he uses it as part of his work-flow, the transparency in open-source projects in general, licensing and ownership of code that A.I. writes, safety and so on. Plenty of answers from Lutris, if you’re curious on the topic. As ever, you can find the link here:

https://gardinerbryant.com/mathieu-comandon-explains-his-use-of-ai-in-lutris-development/

  • Machindo@lemmy.ml
    2·
    7 days ago

    I agree.

    I think his take is really healthy. If you use Claude as something to make toilsome work easier then you can stay productive and get over the procrastination hump. He also talks about the velocity part where you can go fix/explore things that you wouldn’t have time to normally.

    It’s also not like he’s some know nothing vibe coder. He’s got a long coding career. Claude is basically a really clever but amnesiac junior dev.

    I had been feeling like I peaked in my career and just was too tired/depressed to work on homelab/coding personal projects. Now with Claude, work is a lot less draining and I’ve got energy leftover for stuff in the evenings. His experience resonates with mine.

    What bothers me a lot is that before using Claude, I was just a AI skeptic/hater. Now that I use it regularly I see all the warts but the good colossally outweighs the bad. Vibe coding is still a menace because people who don’t know better are inundating open source projects with low effort slop. So near daily I feel like I keep getting challenged by the remaining skeptical coworkers with this AI purity test where I have to keep explaining the same shit. “Yes I vet every line of code before making a PR. Yes I understand the APIs/Documentation from the source material. Yes I have been extremely vigilant against slop.” It’s exhausting.

    So I very much sympathize with that sensationalized quote “Good luck telling the difference between Claude commits and mine” because at the end of the day I stake my professional integrity on every thing I produce regardless of whether I wrote the code by hand or dictated to Claude.

    I do leave the “coauthored by Claude” in my commits because I still think it would be disingenuous to do otherwise. But damn if it isn’t tempting to remove it.