Pointless exaggerations aren’t inevitable either, but you adopted and shared one. Pointless and “witty” exaggerations won’t change the outcome of the process though. Which is why robust and transparent AI policies are required.

I think as a species we are speed running dearth.

And don’t get me started with taxes.

Of course it’s not necessary. I’m a way-beyond-senior dev who laughed at LLMs up until a few months ago when trusted friends, whose competence is not in question, told me they got good usage out of them.

I decided to challenge my convictions and sat down and took the time to learn how to use LLM assistants (I tried everyting from full vibe coding to manual gatekeeping of suggestions).

Now I use them for my own personal projects, and I’m much more productive (for various reasons - but one is that the initial friction of oh yet another thing I have to learn just to do X is much lower. I have no boss telling me what to do, and I select my projects myself. If they didn’t bring any benefits I wouldn’t use them.

I still don’t understand why people are foaming at the mouth about LLMs. They’re fucking awful at writing software.

That’s because you appear to actually have the skills required for your job.

I recently got assigned to a project where portions of the UI has been LLM vomited. It does not conform to web standards, and it doesn’t give a fuck about accessibility.

There’s a custom checkbox component whose label isn’t clickable. I’ve had to fix so many little things because someone couldn’t be bothered to do it right and chose to outsource their thinking to something that can’t think.

My view on LLM usage is essentially, if you don’t give a fuck about what you’re doing, why should anyone else? If you don’t care enough about your project to actually develop it yourself, why should Flathub platform it?

So this is some what problematic. Technology has benefits does not mean it has to be allowed. Question is what do we gain and at what cost. If the answer is we gain speed, then the followup is “does it really matter?”.

Speed of coding is the common answer. Another one is non programmers are able to make programmes. Both of it does not add much of a real value is the point. Because when the machine churn out code at a very high rate, then the humans who should review it gets under pressure. We are not addressing the real bottleneck, instead we just pump out more material which just intensify the congestion at the bottleneck. Quality goes down, we get things like AWS going down, Microsoft wiping people’s machines, etc. In other words it creates problem without much meaningful gain.

Regarding the non-programmers making programmes, it mostly just create a lot of noise. There is a lot of weekend projects, one shot attempts, or some half cooked outcomes. Only a handful of projects with meaningful impact in the world will be born out of it. We all know, even before AI, out of hundreds of thousands of GitHub repos only a small section is actually well maintained, and deliver something to the world.

I don’t have to explain at what cost. It is just literally affecting the climate and accelarting the collapse of current ecosystem. Are we doing this so that a code can be written in 1 hour, instead of one day? If you get more free time because of this, well, at least we can say the load is reduced. But we all know we just get more work to do from our employer. So I don’t really think this is a net positive.

I agree that you can tell if the whole code base is AI written. But stuff like dependency upgrades being handled by an AI is impossible to detect, IMHO.

That reminds me of my friend who said (a long time ago) that Japanese girls are prettier than Chinese girls, I asked him how he recognises them, since I knew he didn’t know any Chinese or Japanese personally, he said, that when he sees an Asian girl, he just knows, if he likes her, she is Japanese , if he doesn’t like her she must be Chinese (and no, he didn’t talk to any of them to confirm his “genius” theory… Hey, we were both young, talking to girls was difficult, even more difficult than realising there are a lot more Asian countries than just two)

What I meant is: it’s stupid, if you recognise AI assisted code because it’s bad, maybe just say that you don’t accept shitty code

What if I’m in-office dev?

That is an absolutely terrible standard. In fact, that’s technically not even a standard. The “I know it when I see it” measure is literally the logic used in censorship. It allows cognitive biases to seep in with no check. A lack of hard metrics means that there’ zero ways there can be any objective consistency. And finally, this kind of rationale makes the biggest sin that I can think of, “non-falsifiability”.

Whatever people’s opinion on AI are or are not. This logic should wholly be rejected in every instance it is brought forth. It is literally the antithesis of rational thought.

I’m no competent, or no professional, dev, yes, but I absolutely cannot tell if it’s AI generated, let alone AI assisted(whatever that is) code.

That only was the case with ChatGPT3.x era.

My point is that AI assisted just means you got an idea or a first draft from it. The finished product is still your code. Not the same as AI generated, which is more obviously slop.

Not that I’m defending it. I abhor all this AI gas lighting.

Ai Bros always insist that its inevitable

So does the dude who introduced this policy btw. They did this because they’re flooded with low-quality PRs, not because AI only produces slop.

The issue is, I don’t think the generative is here to stay. But it’s clear the industrial stuff has solidified. Wifi 7 has AI on an NPU as part of the spec. Because when it can learn the radio signals in the air and the interference it needs to avoid, you get vastly better wifi. BGP is a great protocol for routes between ASes, but it’s dumb protocol, it relies on static rules and metrics. AI overlays are making better routing choices based on learned patterns of traffic, ISPs have seen gains by better optimization.

The industrial grade AI has an objectively proven track record. People can downvote me all they want, none of that matters in the light of fact. AI is in a lot of programming. The stuff that’s proven is the boilerplate. The industrial AI. The generative AI where you ask a few words and get a wbesite, yeah that’s smoke and mirrors. Bridges aren’t useful while they’re being built, they’re only useful after they’re built.

Just like we saw wizards to churn code out back in the day, we’re going to see that with AI in coding. Is the AI going to code at least 50% of the program? Not likely. But having a ban on even 1% AI in code is just unrealistic. One, it denies the reality that we’re already using some AI in tech and coding. Two, you better believe that bad actors are going to be using AI to punch holes in software. And three, it’s completely unenforceable. Flathub lacks the staff to actually police that policy and so it’s going to devolve into Flathub chancing rumors and “hints” on which program has AI in it or not.

And it’s silly because when we have tools and use them correctly, they make our lives easier. Is the 100% generative AI garbage at coding, absolutely. But things like technical documentation, generating API docs, commenting DDL, and so on. Things that we programmers aren’t paid enough for. We talk about commenting our code, who here has time to do that properly? We keep trying to invent all kinds of new ways to “auto-doc”. But now we have a generic documentation generator.

How do you know nobody has used autocomplete in an IDE in recent years? Because even that uses LLMs.

They probably think that every intellisense or code completion is AI.

That’s my personal view as well and so all apps I write are “licensed” as CC0. Other maintainers are taking a different view.

Citation needed, I’ve never heard that before and I’m seeing plenty of evidence of people behaving otherwise.

Having a policy against bad apps is fine - but that’s not what this policy says.

It’s trivial to write a good app using LLM aids - but that new app won’t have such a history.

So, something that pulls a Blender is excusable?