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[–] 6 points 5 months ago (1 child)

I wonder how that policy change affects library usage, because while I've still never felt a need to code anything using an LLM, I rely on e.g. Valibot for input validation.

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago
    [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    I wonder where they place the line. Many IDE's today use machine learning for autocomplete, it would be difficult to have a 100% AI free piece of software.

    I once asked ChatGPT to find a bug in a piece of code that wasn't working. It found it and I fixed it now that I knew what the problem was. Does that count as AI-assisted even if I didn't use any AI generated code?

    I don't like the arbitrary exception for "well established" projects. It sounds like they want to keep their cake and eat it too. Ban AI while not losing any big popular projects. As most big popular projects will have some form of AI assisted content. If they are principled they should ban it for everyone. As it is, what they saying is that AI slop is welcome as long it's in a popular project.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    So caliber is getting booted?

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  • 70 comments in c/linux@programming.dev view that post
    [–] 63 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    Based. This is great news.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    I would say yes and no. I don't think it's entirely horrible as a programming assistant. I used it just a week ago to perform a series of UI upgrades. I probably wouldn't have learned anything doing it myself, just mindlessly following the upgrade guide until it's all done. It would've taken me a day at least, between meetings and other distractions, but an agent did it for me, unattended, in about 5 min. I still verified functionality afterwards and fixed a couple tests.

    In some respects it kind of feels like the argument I had with a coworker over the use of Lombok (a tool for injecting common but often tedious coding patterns in Java). I was on the side of not using it because some of the patterns are important to understand and not understanding the implementation can lead to misuse of them. Eventually I decided it was a "necessary evil" and that using stuff like that could free me up for tackling the stuff that is completely unique and wouldn't be found in any library. The fun stuff.

    I still hate data centers and AI revenge porn and AI scams and people that replace perfectly functioning tools and experienced workers with AI bots that aren't nearly as reliable. But I don't think it's an inherently bad technology.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago

    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?

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 36 points 5 months ago (12 children)

    How can they tell if it's AI-assisted?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (11 children)

    if you are remotely a dev, you know first sight

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  • [–] 26 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    no, as someone whose entire job is code reviewing ai slop you LITERALLY know at first sight just by looking at it what is written by an LLM and what is written by a real person.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago

    as someone who has a similar job, i don’t think it’s so obvious. there’s a lot of middle ground between an AI slop PR and artisanal, hand-crafted code. if i use a library or algorithm or pattern suggested by ChatGPT or use Copilot to autocomplete a simple function or have Claude generate test cases, that’s all “AI assisted”.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    Sure, but that's not what this is about. This isn't just banning AI-written code, it's banning AI-assisted code. If you even use a Google Gemini "AI-summary" at the top of your search results for something simple like the name of a function, then your code is AI-assisted.

    There's no way anyone can detect that. And banning it is silly.

    But the point is, imho, that if nobody can tell if it's AI-assisted, then who cares? This is more for them to fire a warning shot that you'd better be sure your AI-assisted code is good enough to pass, or they can reject or and, potentially, ban you without notice.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago*

    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

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 5 months ago

    And yet another reason to use it instead of snap.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Well, I was already sold on flatpaks, but now Flathub is going to be my main repo.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    Good. I hope this puts a dent in the number of new projects that use AI. I also hope Flathub implements a system to clearly flag existing submissions that have used it.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    I wasn't a fan of flathub or flatpacks but this gives a glimmer of hope that there's at least a glimmer of hope for it.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    If ChatGpt is telling me how good I am while I code, is that AI assisted coding?

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    But my app I'll have no idea how to maintain?!

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I'll just say that assuming this policy excludes vulnerability/pen testing like Mozilla with Mythos then this is seriously going to be an extremely naive PR (public relations) only move. Obviously actual programmers not bot laziness for coding is essential for software people rely on and I get allowing vibe coding also destroys programmer (and general LLM user's) brains but to keep up with our now LLM real world reality you need to be realistic not just virtue signalling for purity.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    Nah, it's really not necessary. I'm senior dev at a large software company you've absolutely heard of and I'm just as productive as my colleagues who use LLMs. My tasks usually take fewer PRs as well, since there are fewer bugs that need to be fixed.

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

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    And I reject everything on flatpak

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    [+] -20 points 5 months ago (18 children)

    So basically nothing written in the past 3 years? lol

    People have zero goddamn clue how much code is ai assisted (almost everything written since 2023)

    AI assistance has been opt out for years. Deal with it.

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  • [–] 22 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    You must accept the mountain of garbage, because the mountain has grown so very high, and we can't figure out how to shut down the garbage generator. We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Just learn to live in garbage.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (14 children)

    Weird line of shit to pull out of your ass. No, most code since 3 years ago wasn't written by ai. I'm a developer on a team and probably way less than 5% of our code is written by ai, and most of that is in the past few months.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (10 children)

    What IDE do you and your team use.

    If you use any mainstream IDE, you've probably been unwittingly including AI generated code for years now.

    Unless your whole team is using vim or something, yeah, I hate to break it to you but massive chunks of your codebase actually were AI generated.

    Only one I know of that still isnt aggressively doing this is Eclipse, but even Java devs very often use IntelliJ instead.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    Auto-complete doesn't count as "ai generated". It's almost a stretch to call it "ai assisted".

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (8 children)

    And this is what Im talking about when I discuss this.

    People are completely clueless now how entrenched they are, they hand wave it away despite the avg dev autocompleting easily half their code, totally unaware its AI generated.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (7 children)

    "generated" is not accurate. You need to learn how to use words before you get mad at people about them.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    It is 100% accurate, it sounds like you just are completely unaware of the fact the autocomplete on a bunch of popular IDEs for the past couple years is AI gen backed.

    It literally sends your code as tokens to their server and prompts an LLM to FITM generate code, then sends that back to your IDE which then prompts you with it as a tab complete.

    Its been like that for easily 2 years now.

    People have such a little clue about this, they are constantly shocked to find it out.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (5 children)

    By that definition search engines have been "ai" for decades. We would have never said "my search query was ai generated" because that would've been confusing, misleading, and simply inaccurate to the understanding virtually everyone would have of that phrase.

    What's so fucking silly about this is you'd rather be technically accurate than care about the big picture. No, helping me type a variable name is in no way comparable to barfing out an entire function that does something complex.

    What exactly are you trying to prove? That everyone who isn't arguing your same technicality is an idiot? "Ai generated your auto-complete, so samesies!!! What are y'all even worried about?!"

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (4 children)

    We would have never said “my search query was ai generated”

    It sorta sounds like you just have no clue how things work.

    Search Engines use whats called semantic search on a vector database to find string values that start with what you typed, for suggesting their autocomplete options as you type.

    Zero AI is involved in that process.

    You just sound completely naive to how any of this stuff works, have you ever built any kind if search autocomplete systems for a website? Its fairly well established how you do it, postgres straight up has a built in way to handle it smoothly.

    I think you are just speaking exceedingly out of your depth here.

    No, helping me type a variable name is in no way comparable to barfing out an entire function that does something complex.

    It literally is exactly the same thing, its the exact same api endpoint getting invoked, its sending your tokens, and its AI generating an autocomplete for you to suggest what you type next.

    Its the literal exact same backend, its just generating the suggestions in smaller bite sized chunks.

    You've now repeatedly outed yourself as not having a single clue how stuff works. You are either a very junior dev still, or just straight up a hobbyist amateur.

    Either way, you are speaking deeply out of depth on where your knowledge is. You are making a fool of yourself and you are digging the hole deeper and deeper with every post.

    Just take the L dawg and bow out, you dont know what you are talking about.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Have you ever heard the expression, "missing the forest for the trees"?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    Not applicable here. People are just utterly oblivious to how hard the avg dev is actually vibe coding unknowingly or uncaringly by just tab accepting autocomplete over and over.

    I work in the industry and I proctor interviews, and see it first hand constantly.

    I have many funny stories about obviously out-of-their-depth devs who just spam accepted the AI autocomplete results and went way off the rails mud interview, abd then twisted themself into a pretzel trying to to justify it.

    Id laugh if it wasnt an exhausting waste of an hour of my life everytime it happens.

    And it happens a lot.

    So yes, its fuckin AI generated, and yes, devs are using it immensely more than ppl realize, and yes, a huge amount of those devs dont even know its AI

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Yeah, this was pretty clearly a "I'm smarter than everyone else" thing from the start but now you've plastered it on a billboard. I won't be interacting with you again. Good luck finding someone "smart" enough to talk to.

    PS "It literally is exactly the same thing" kinda tells everyone you aren't as smart as you think you are... "It uses the same API endpoint!" somehow means "I was typing and something helped me === I asked a robot to do my entire job for me"... lol

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    ai assistance isn't opt out dipshit, my keyboard doesn't ask the AI before sending letters to my screen which is literally all that happens when I code. I have never even interacted with AI coding programs, you would have to intentionally download one in order for that.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    ai assistance isn’t opt out dipshit, my keyboard doesn’t ask the AI before sending letters to my screen which is literally all that happens when I code.

    If you use any of the popular mainstream IDEs, and have ever accepted a tab autocomplete, you actually have precisely done that.

    If you use neovim or etc though then fair enough. Also props for using the best IDE :p

    But if you VS code and have ever accepted a tab autocomplete... yes you were using AI friend lol

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  • [+] -18 points 5 months ago (15 children)

    That's ... incredibly stupid. It will also make Flathub completely irrelevant shortly since app developers won't change what they're doing just because Flathub throws a hissy fit.

    /had an LLM-assisted PR merged into an open source project yesterday

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  • [–] 31 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    Really? Llm code can not confirm to open source licences.

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  • [–] -3 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I thought llm code was all public domain? Which I guess that means it can't be under an open source license.

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  • [–] -3 points 5 months ago

    Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is based off of public domain sources but it is nevertheless under copyright itself. So even if the output of LLMs was public domain (not something that has been clearly or universally established) that doesn't mean a project incorporating it would have to be. Public domain is not "viral."

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    The policy allows for exceptions, which may be granted for mature, well-maintained projects

    basically the project has to have a history of being maintained well already to get exemption.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] -4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Foss kicking itself in the face. Year of the Linux desktop any day now.

    Over confident devs who can't figure out the delta between entire companies replacing humans and the reality of a force amplifier that'll turn devs into architecture/operators outside a small niche of actual hardcore coders.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Over confident devs who can't figure out the delta between entire companies replacing humans

    They're firing humans. "Replacing" implies something else is doing their jobs.

    a force amplifier that'll turn devs into architecture/operators outside a small niche of actual hardcore coders.

    Is this "force amplifier" in the room with us right now?

    Year of the Linux desktop any day now.

    "Year of the Linux desktop" is a meme. Nobody cares if someone uses Linux, Mac, or Windows. All anyone wants is decent support for software on Linux as well. That being the case, it takes a special kind of masochism to use Windows these days.

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