https://github.com/ZDoom/gzdoom/commit/584af500736b0317e42824f39285ed3d954fc4e2

autodetection of dark mode. The Linux solution was provided by ChatGPT and needs to be reviewed before being deployed.

The commit in question.

Like I don’t hate all AI coding but there are legit questions about using it in GPL projects.

Also “hey ChatGPT said this works but fuck if I know” is a big no no when coding. You still own what you ship and need to understand what you’re actually pushing.

The fork is called UZDoom and it's already in the AUR. I read the Slashdot story on this today, and there's a little more going on here. AI code grosses people out, but the bigger issue is that it's being used in a GPL3 project which kind of isn't allowed. The lead dev was also being a bit of a twat and not cooperating with the community. Long live UZDoom!

One of the very first commits on the forked project UZDoom was to disable billinear texture filtering by default. That was a default setting that many in the Doom community wanted changed but Graf (the original maintainer) insisted on keeping it enabled.

Due to some disagreements—some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades—with how collaboration should work, we’ve decided that the best course of action was to fork the project

Okay, that was always allowed!

Programming is the weirdest place for kneejerk opposition to anything labeled AI, because we've been trying to automate our jobs for most of a century. Artists will juke from 'the quality is bad!' to 'the quality doesn't matter!' the moment their field becomes legitimately vulnerable. Most programmers would love if the robot did the thing we wanted. That's like 90% of what we're looking for in the first place. If writing 'is Linux in dark mode?' counted as code, we'd gladly use that, instead of doing some arcane low-level bullshit. I say this as someone who has recently read through IBM's CGA documentation to puzzle out low-level bullshit.

You have to check if it works. But if it works... what is anyone bitching about?

The article mentioned there is a long history of forks in the open source Doom world. It seems the majority of the active developers just moved to the new repository.

Seems to me that the sole focus should be on the quality of the code being submitted. I don't really care how it was made, the question is whether the code is clean, if it's doing what was intended, if it has tests.

Great comment on there links two code comment threads I found significant and interesting.

While it was primarily about ethics, it should also be noted that the code was described as being "impressively wrong", as well as not actually compiling. I mean, it basically checked if a theme was dark by if it had the word "dark" in the name - which is not a good heuristic - when better ways of doing it exist.

They wrote

Feel free to fork the project under a

(yes, the sentence ends with the 'a')

The ZUDoom GitHub project description says

UZDoom is a feature centric port for all Doom engine games, based on ZDoom, adding an advanced renderer, powerful scripting capabilities, and forked under a

It ending with 'forked under a' is probably a reference to that comment? lol, nice reference joke, but I hope they change it after a while, because as a description it's quite confusing.

Ah, I wondered what the issue was why this new fork is created. Ai. OK, I mean its totally fair and understandable reason. I'm just glad there was no malicious intent or toxicity going on. This is just forking over disliking the direction, because of technical reasons. Gives me much more confidence over UZDoom now. :-) Especially given the reason "inserting untested AI-generated code".