@cwebber that's progress compared to when I started accepting PRs from people, got weird patches, no longer understood my code base and had nothing to explain it to me.

@cwebber there'a story behind this

@cwebber
My thoughts as well. If you let AI do the fun bits of your work, only the dull stuff remains.

@cwebber @jonmsterling
The fantasy seems to be of a 'master and emissary' relationship.

Even that image looks ambiguous, reversible, and unhealthy.

Seneca the younger quotes a Roman proverb that seems to have been very familiar to his audiences – totidem hostes esse quot servos – "you have as many enemies as you have slaves"

@cwebber I've another perspective on the subject: what if it isn't a choice but a market imposition? From this other perspective, realize that everything changes. You see: due to market imposition, we eat food with extremely problematic pesticides.

@cwebber
I sometimes try to make chatgpt reproduce code that I regularly write. It is a complete shitshow. The LLM was clearly not trained on my programming style. 🤣

@cwebber somehow my mind just doesn't comprehend the idea of shipping code you don't understand and can't explain

@cwebber what does not “work” for me writing a whole bunch of words in markdown files (skillz), that may or may not be considered during the probabilistically derived “automation pipeline”.
The current experience with this technology is like only eating one specific dish, that’s not something you would ever choose, forever!

I’d rather “craft the material (code)” that complies with my personal choices and preferences - https://mastodon.social/@dahukanna/117033262505541514

@cwebber The entire industry, but probably Free Software in particular, is almost certainly going to need to invest in some form of addiction treatment for this. They're irritating and we all knew exactly where their path would end, but the alternative to helping them is hoping to recruit new people into a devastated landscape...

(And we should probably standing behind our software instead of loudly disclaiming responsibility in licenses, and so many other things to get things back working...)

@cwebber related predictable situation - you became dependent on this entire workflow and it stopped being subsidized and you're now stranded because this workflow isn't [yet?] backwards-compatible with coding by hand.

@cwebber The worst part of this is that these projects will inevitably end up eating into the tiny resource pools (contributors, donators, translators, etc) of the greater Open Source world that has been struggling to stay alive forever.

@cwebber It is a bit more nuanced. I personally dislike the programming itself. I review the code, I use agents as a "more capable" grep or for bulk edits. I use them to bootstrap small projects and monitor the process. They have their uses _in programming_.

But software engineering is much, MUCH more than just programming. And people who are eager to outsource their brains were already dangerous before, but nobody had handed them the tools to destroy.

@cwebber

A widely used FOSS project I've been contributing to started to overly rely on LLM, especially for fixing bugs on systems they're not familiar with (e.g. FreeBSD).

When I offered to help (without LLMs of course), they simply replied "no thanks, but can review the (LLM-authored) code if you like".

I don't know what to say anymore, or if I should keep contributing to or even use that project. Sure, maintaining a FOSS project is cumbersome, but it doesn't have to come to this...

@cwebber tbf if they're burnt out I'd suggest the LLM doing the fun stuff for them isn't the problem. If it was the response would be boredom not burn out imo. Being burned out sounds like not knowing how to take a day off to me. I believe I see this a lot in engineers who don't know how to do anything else (this was me at one point)