As much as I like Tildes and understand the premise that we should all be trying to consider each others' opinions, I'm saddened by how people on here seem to not only accept genAI programming so readily, but also completely dismiss ethics when justifying why they do so.
There's a few people on here implying this would only be relevant if it only excluded vibe-coded projects, not AI assistance. That only the resulting product matters. Did we forget everything we were criticizing large models for in the first place? Do we just not care that the tool itself is based on stolen work? That continued use and support of it is actively destroying the environment for little benefit? That its growing commodity is causing a general decrease in individual knowledge and learning capacity? That it's making the industry of IT that most of the people commenting belong to worse to be a part of? Like, surely, a bit more than just the result matters here?
Ethics matter. Call it a purity contest or virtue signaling or whatever, I don't care. Trying to do something good to push against the bullshit even if it's imperfect and still has to rely on tech that does use it to exist and be effective is still better than doing nothing at all. This is a good thing and I have no criticism to make of it.
Yo š I'm personally trying to tone down how much confrontation I cause in this space, but I wanted to minimally note my disapproval. Framing this as a black and white ethical issue equally saddens me, since that same absence of nuance and appeal to morality has been used to justify atrocious actions throughout history. And it erases any good that the tools can accomplish. Furthermore, given the amount of personal attacks I get whenever I mention LLMs/AI here, I sincerely doubt that there's a majority of people who agree with me -- you are almost certainly in the majority. I'd imagine people who hate this have artificial intelligence filtered out of their tags, or otherwise avoid the topics.
(edit: sigh ... I had hoped this wouldn't be exemplary'd. For anyone reading this, fwiw, the person was pleased with the notion of trying to keep conversations calmer. It wasn't an AI thing)
Framing this as a black and white ethical issue equally saddens me
I was going to give an exemplary label because of this, but I wanted to show publicly why I 100% agree with your point.
I'm so, so, so tired of this 0 or 1 attitude. You're either 100% in favour of something, or 100% against it. It feels like nowadays on the internet you can't stand somewhere between both. This attitude I feel is more destructive in the long run.
I, for example, think:
Image and Video Gen AIs overall are more bad than good, because of the impact they have on real artists and the dangerous potential for misinformation (which I feel it's only going to get worse as these models get better)
Still, from a purely technical stand point, I'm blown away by these things. Think about it: we "taught" sand to make videos! How cool is that!?
These models were and are being trained without consent, and people are rightly pissed off about it. I'm not an artist but I want to make video games, I would also be pissed off as well if someone used my games without consent
But these models are a genie that are out of the bottle now. Are we supposed to pretend they don't exist? Should the americans 70 years ago pretended jet engines weren't a thing because the Nazis invented them? I don't think so.
I'm fatigued as well about almost every company wanting to shove AI into every single piece of software. It's nuts, it's stupid, I'm against it. It's a privacy nightmare as well and the wet dream for Google and others.
LLM's allowed me to finally make my own homelab and troubleshoot some niche things on Linux. I'm building something I always wanted to have at home, and I'm learning new skills as I go along.
On the other hand, I do feel the "temptation" of offloading thinking process to the model. I've been disciplined to always thinking of the solutions myself and let the LLM execute, but I imagine many people are not doing the same (be it in coding context or others). I worry if/when these companies decide to influence the public opinion, if they aren't already.
I have a lot more thoughts, but these zigzag of thoughts should be good enough to illustrate my point. No one will ever convince me that these things are the best thing ever - we shouldn't underestimate some of the societal dangers these could potentially have. But neither will no one ever convince me that my own experiences are wrong, and that LLMs didn't have some good outcomes for my own skills and work.
I was going to give an exemplary label because of this [...]
Thank you very much for not doing that š I feel that it needlessly escalates tensions on a topic that needs to be discussed (as noted in your comment!).
For my part, I've been wishing for years that the temperature would come down far enough to talk about effective resistance against all this -- job loss via automation, devaluing of the arts, legislative reform, etc. But that requires acknowledging that the problem exists, and dispassionately analyzing the space for asymmetries to be exploited in favour of the common people.
We need to be organizing workers, pressuring local governments, and pushing our vision of what a future with these tools should look like -- not de-facto rolling over and allowing OpenAI/Anthropic/Microsoft/Google to decide for us. Endlessly debating about data centres and morality cannot un-create the idea of a transformer, or delete every open weight model on the internet, but I firmly believe that the window of opportunity remains open for deciding whether the world on the other side of all this is a good one. For whatever definition we -- not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei -- decide "good" is.
I haven't posted on here a lot about LLM stuff, but I keep reading most of it...or at least, most of the threads on it, which have not been great for me mentally.
I think I'm fairly anti-ai, but I have a hard time really examining my position because I know how emotionally biased I am in it.
I am not an artist. I have never been very "creative", but I love the thought of being creative.
I loved legos growing up, and I think most of that is because it let me put things together
in ways that were creative and showing creativity, but did not require me to be "good" at it.
I was never able to get into drawing or anything like that in the same way, and I've always
loved reading comics and seeing what artistic people are able to create.
I went to school for programming, because I truly love writing code & seeing things happen as a result.
To me, programming has been my "creative" output. So I find myself biased against LLMs generating code, for what I imagine are the same emotional reasons as a lot of artists, but not necessarily the reasons that get sympathy or could actually have legal repercussions (e.g. training on stolen art).
But also I struggle with it myself, becuase like, am I gatekeeping? Am I against it because it was my "special thing" that many others couldn't do? I don't think so, but maybe there's some of that to it as well, as to why I don't like it. But like, at the same time, I'm glad to hear that it has helped you be able to set up a homelab and troubleshoot stuff on Linux.
I think it is great that people are now able to customize software and make tools and stuff that are useful to them, that they would never have been able to "before LLMs". Except, if I look at this from the art angle, I'm not sure how consistent my view is here?
I've never really been good at putting my feelings into words, and I certainly haven't gotten any better at it. It just seems like most of what I have been good at, are things that now people are using LLMs for.
and I don't know where that leaves me.
I'm going to keep avoiding LLMs for the things I enjoy doing, which is...most of the things I do,
and it does frustrate me seeing LLMs continually invade those things, and it is sometimes saddening
when I see others using LLMs for the things I enjoy doing. I don't think others should necessarily
not use them for those things, because if they don't enjoy doing them, sure, automate it away.
But like, it is much, much too late to put the genie back into the bottle, so all I can really do is personally protest by avoiding using them where I can. And I don't know whether I'm doing that for ethical or emotional reasons, but I'm also not really sure it matters.
I do really appreciate your take here, as well as from @kacey. I like being able to have some of these nuanced conversations around LLM uses, (or at least, read other peoples nuanced takes when I don't feel like commenting).
Do we just not care that the tool itself is based on stolen work?
No I never cared about that. Specifically in the case of code generation I think it's not such a clear cut case. The models are trained on freely distributed copylefted code. Does that mean the resulting AI generated code should be copylefted as well? Maybe. I don't really care if a judge decides AI generated code is all AGPL now. I'd actually be ecstatic if I could make legally enforceable requests to every SaaS company around the world to hand over their now poisoned source code. I'm more than happy to have contributed my public code on GitHub to the model's training data. I've gotten more out than I put in. For image and video generation (which aren't tools I use anyway) there's a much stronger argument against it as so much more of the training data wasn't meant to be freely distributed and copied.
That continued use and support of it is actively destroying the environment for little benefit?
Fair point. And it's a shame because it's mainly an issue of electricity sourcing. It doesn't need to have its current carbon footprint. We should be running 100% renewable electrical grids by now. We are at least making good progress as a species on that. Solar is incredibly cheap, battery tech is improving. I personally wouldn't mind if datacenter expansions were limited by whether they could run off of clean energy.
That its growing commodity is causing a general decrease in individual knowledge and learning capacity?
Depends on the person. I'm able to do new things and learn in the process using these tools. I just finished a project which I will write up and share on Tildes soon. I used LLMs heavily throughout the process (for CAD, programming, data science). I could have done everything by myself, but it would have taken more hours to do so. It's not a kind of project I'd ever done before and I'm quite proud of it.
That it's making the industry of IT that most of the people commenting belong to worse to be a part of?
I'm outside of the software employment world at the moment. Thanks to LLMs I'm hoping to get into a niche area of automated manufacturing soon. I'm highly confident I can build my own CNC machine (not a CNC mill to be clear) given the availability of the basic components/modules/plans online combined with my knowledge and LLMs to fill in the gaps. It helps I have both an industrial warehouse and a makerspace to help me. One aspect I hope to see a tremendous uplift in is patching CNC firmware with LLMs to implement my customizations. Something that could have been a couple weeks of learning will probably be accomplished in a couple of hours. Sure I won't have a personal deep knowledge of the firmware - but I don't think I'll need to. When you build a more standard CNC device you usually don't need to know how the firmware works.
Edit: Honestly if you're someone with technical skills right now I think stretching your capabilities through LLM assistance is a goldmine. Things where you'd typically need to work on a small team (or just be skilled in many areas) can now be accomplished for nearly free as a solo entrepreneur. The LLMs from the top labs are currently subsidized. They only recently got good enough to use in this way. Now's the time to act!
Thanks to LLMs I'm hoping to get into a niche area of automated manufacturing soon.
:fist_bump_emoji: samesies
[...] right now I think stretching your capabilities through LLM assistance right now is a goldmine. Things where you'd typically need to work on a small team (or just be skilled in many areas) can now be accomplished for nearly free as a solo entrepreneur.
low key worried that someone cloned me now XD and yeah, been banking on this since late last year, so I'm stoked to see it coming to fruition. Hopefully plans work out and I can meaningfully dig into this over the winter.
(edit) only thing I'd note is that local models have been consistently trailing frontier models by ~6-12 months in coding capability, at least, for a couple of years. So there's a possibility that losing those subsidies -- when the market corrects -- will barely be a speed bump. Fingers crossed ...
Iām planning to start in October. In the end Iāll have a machine that will likely have no equals around the world. Iāll be able to take orders online from a beautiful website with 3D previews and have something produce a real life equivalent. This will take something that normally would involve human labor and do it for cheap. I can lower the price dramatically, expanding the pool of customers. I plan to make multiple websites targeting different product types but all handled with the same machine.
I have actually made some of these widgets by hand and thereās demand. But I realized the prices Iād want to charge are too high. So automation is coming to the rescue.
That sounds really exciting! And yeah, super similar to what I'm aiming for as well (down to the labour price as a factor as well), so I selfishly hope you share some details about your process XD I've always hoped that someone else would land on this train of thought, too, since I've felt quite mad being the only person in the room who's bringing it up.
Well thatās kind of the entire point of automation. I think Iāll also be able to achieve higher levels of consistency, quality, and with less time per widget. I havenāt done anything yet so I canāt say exactly what Iāll do. But you can bet your ass Iāll be using a lot of 80/20 extrusion!
Mmhm! One of a couple leaps of faith from my perspective is (was?) whether the R&D for developing those automated manufacturing systems would be too time intensive/specialized, since that cost of that needs to get amortized into your eventual product. Hence why I'm attempting to move somewhere with a much lower cost of living, in order to buy myself more swings at the bat so to speak š . Additionally, although manufacturing automation/higher throughput machine design is well established at the mid to high scale, it's unclear whether there are unforeseen challenges that would slow down development and deployment at the low end ... there's a whole spiel there that I'm wholly unqualified to talk about, but that I'll hopefully take a bite out of soon enough. Looking forward to 2027! XD
And good luck to you as well! If you're based in America, hopefully you can find a local source for your aluminum extrusion too š
The warehouse I mentioned is actually full of a ton of old 80/20 from a defunct robotics startup. So itāll be free! There are also a ton of cameras and optics there which were made for machine vision.
I'm saddened by how people on here seem to not only accept genAI programming so readily, but also completely dismiss ethics when justifying why they do so.
Sorry if I'm being presumptuous but I think what you might mean here is that the denouncing of LLMs isn't as unanimous as you'd like. I'd say there's a pretty even mix of sentiment about AI on Tildes, with hate edging out non-hate.
The second part of the quote is frustrating. It's blanket assigning a binary sentiment to a large group of people. All anyone can do with that is disagree or ignore it, it's too generalized to be true.
It's far more nuanced. For example, I think AI tools are incredibly useful for some things. Game changing. And I hate that a world changing technology is ultra-capitalized from the start. With the internet we had decades of exploration before the worst of the enshittification set in. That's unlikely to be the case with AI.
And the evironmental concerns are real (if often overexaggerated) and I care about that deeply, I think most people do. I also dislike the potential for AI to contribute to wealth inequality and consolidated control. However, like the internet, AI also increases individual capability. One person, or small groups of people, can accomplish much more than they could before. Sometimes more effectively than big organizations.
Here's the thing: It's not going to go away. It doesn't matter what you think, or I think. If we could somehow burn down all the big AI labs, people would advance the tech in their garages. A new round of funding would launch countless startups in the space. That's because the tech is genuinely useful. There was a lot of emotionally motivated writing about how LLMs don't really help anyone, and anyone who thinks they do is just deluding themselves, in 2024 and even early 2025 but that's painfully outdated. It's only people with no expertise in any of the fields where AI has value that are saying that kind of thing now.
I have nothing against a website listing AI free options. I think it's great, bring on the demand for artisanal, entirely hand crafted, options.
But also the reality is that, in the field of software engineering at large, AI assisted (as opposed to wholly vibecoded) development is already the rule rather than the exception and nothing is going to change that.
A lot of these issues feel like they're because we're in the transition from the "legacy" world into the post-AI world. During the transition, everything feels broken. There's an adaptation. It's pretty obvious with the current pass that's happening in cyber security.
In terms of stolen work, since I've started learning about Linux and free software, I've always felt like the current system was broken. https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/forums/copyright/index_transcript.html The culture change that AIs bring seem to me to be something that will be positive.
For the environment impact, I guess I got magical thinking, but I feel like it's the only way to speed up research to save the earth.
In terms of benefit, I'd disagree, the company I work for, for example, uses it to save lives.
I don't think my response is that good, but I didn't have time to think it through fully. Will probably revisit it later. These are my general ideas.
In terms of stolen work, since I've started learning about Linux and free software, I've always felt like the current system was broken. https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/forums/copyright/index_transcript.html The culture change that AIs bring seem to me to be something that will be positive.
LLMs as they are right now (opaque closed-source models, tightly controlled and guarded by billionaire-owned corporations) are the complete antithesis to FOSS ideals. They are an extreme shift in the opposite direction of what you're implying here.
For the environment impact, I guess I got magical thinking, but I feel like it's the only way to speed up research to save the earth.
You are correct, this is 1000% magical thinking. Even if it were feasible that predictive text generating engines could somehow come up with a solution to our climate problems, none of these companies are currently or will ever bother actually putting any kind of meaningful resources behind that kind of research, because it won't increase their profits (and I mean, realistically they probably know that the idea is absurd to begin with).
The current versions of LLMs are opaque, but there's a consensus that we're in an AI bubble which could pop at any time. The open models will be run on cheaper and cheaper hardware overtime. But I didn't mean it that way only, there's a part about how it's a good tool for compacting knowledge. Also last time I checked, the output from LLMs couldn't be copyrighted.
It's not the predictive text that would necessarily discover something of value (though in math they are making some pretty significant breakthroughs without much guidance), but its ability to speed up research and how researchers use it as a tool.
LLMs as they are right now (opaque closed-source models, tightly controlled and guarded by billionaire-owned corporations) are the complete antithesis to FOSS ideals
The thing about the frontier models is that theres no real secret sauce. They advance mostly based on throwing raw compute power into training, which is why all of the frontier labs have similar performance. Those models get distilled, and cheaper Chinese and open source models see similar performance within six months to a year. Openai, anthropic and Google are controlled by billionaire run corporations, LLMs as a whole aren't though.
One of two things is going to happen. We're going to see increasingly diminishing returns, where in order to get any improvement, more capital and power than exists on the planet is required, and open source competitors will close the gap and catch up. Or, these models will never stop getting significantly better, in which case we're likely fucked as the technology dominates the human race.
I think the former is the more realistic option, but I don't see anything besides harsh multilateral government enforcement of a total ban being feasible if it's the latter.
For the environment impact, I guess I got magical thinking, but I feel like it's the only way to speed up research to save the earth.
If I were you I'd be concerned it's a way to subconsciously bury my head in the sand, as there isn't any research required (which, to be clear, isn't the same as saying we shouldn't do any). Perhaps the biggest impediment to environmental progress is the lack of any consensus that we should make progress. In this I'd say AI is on balance an impediment, as well as being environmentally detrimental directly.
For the environment impact, I guess I got magical thinking, but I feel like it's the only way to speed up research to save the earth.
As a wee note, afaik the only research area of note is direct air carbon capture. Everything else seems addressable with current day technology, but it runs into social problems (people despise change) and class problems (currently wealthy folks operating companies dislike the prospect of uncertainty or reduced profits). R&D expenditure seems minimal beyond stuff like advancing fusion energy research, but that is slow because it takes a long time to build reactors and validate theory afaik.
Tired of AI slop? clankerfree is a resource that indexes projects that the authors self-certify as not containing or utilizing generative AI or LLM technology.
Trust meā¢ļø?
Anyway, not for me. I don't have an issue with AI assisted coding.
Vibe coding though, yes. Different story. I avoid those projects by default.
AI assisted:
I designed the code, with or without iterating in a solution with an LLM or another human. I may have accepted "autocompletions" provided by an LLM, or used a tool like Claude Code to describe a function and accepted a whatever it generated (after reviewing it and understanding how it works). I may even so large scale refactors using the same tools, but all under my review and guidance.
Vibe coded:
I described an end goal and let an LLM agentically / iteratively design and write it autonomously with minimal review or understanding of the underlying code.
The former is using tools to speed up my own workflow.
The latter is outsourcing entirely and blindly trusting something works as intended and is of good quality.
The way I see it is: it's the exact same as Google or StackOverflow. We don't say software is "Google assisted" because you searched online to find an answer. LLMs are the same, but much more specific and faster. It can parse out documentation in minutes that would normally take hours.
AI assistance refers to any level of AI tool involvement, including but not limited to Intellisense, Intellicode, use of chat clients, coding agents, or AI-driven search results. The programmer is still looking at the code itself, and is considered the author of it and responsible for it. The vast majority of code today is AI assisted.
Vibe Coding is defined as working entirely through prompts, and not interacting with the code at all. It was coined by Andrej Karpathy last year. He wrote:
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Purity test, if you ask me[1]. Yes, of course, Vibe coding is bad, nobody's contesting that, but there's nothing wrong with using AI in your coding projects provided you could conceivably do the same work yourself, given enough time. To me, Linus Torvalds was correct on this issue.
I really feel like these project lists, but especially Codeberg as a whole, wants to desperately feel better than everyone else. And you know what? Fine, they're better. Gold star. You get to go to heaven because you didn't use it. There you go. Congrats. But provided the project is good and the operator knows what they're doing, there's no substantive difference between good hand-written code and AI-assisted code.
[1]: Also evidenced by the fact that to get on this list, you need to post on Mastodon about your project. What, no Mastodon? No ActivityPub? Well, then you can't be serious about open source software, clearly.
I wonder how these projects would stand up to the watermarks that are being applied. Itās one thing to say, and possibly believe, that your project doesnāt have any LLM code in it, but if there are unknown outside contributorsā¦ and of course the library ecosystem is riddled with LLM code, so if you vendor any of those libraries you may unwittingly add it in yourself. Itās like microplastics these days.
Cute but the whole Git platform is vibe coded at this point I donāt know how anyone would actually avoid all vibe coded platforms.
Also, the software to tell teachers if a paper is LLM generated kinda sucks, I donāt see how this could be better.
Ive been collecting used books because anything published after about 2023 was at least edited by an LLM, if not written by one, and theres no way to tell for sure other than just trusting everyone involved.
All of them, github, bitbucket, gitlab, every single service that hosts git repos is vibe coded now.
So if youāre trying to use Git, youād have to set up your own remote if you wanted to avoid vibe coded projects.
On top of that:
Microsoft services are vibe coded, Google services, Apple services, your banking apps and websites, Doordash, Uber, Lyft, all online ordering apps, all social media, all entertainment services, all that shit has been vibe coded for the past two years.
I know the point is probably so that when youāre building a project you can avoid using other peoples vibe coded libraries because they may be more prone to breaking, but if youāre gonna do that you gotta host your own Git remote and I donāt even know what flavor of Linux has no vibe coded pieces in it. Everything has this shit in it.
Trobador | 17 hours ago
As much as I like Tildes and understand the premise that we should all be trying to consider each others' opinions, I'm saddened by how people on here seem to not only accept genAI programming so readily, but also completely dismiss ethics when justifying why they do so.
There's a few people on here implying this would only be relevant if it only excluded vibe-coded projects, not AI assistance. That only the resulting product matters. Did we forget everything we were criticizing large models for in the first place? Do we just not care that the tool itself is based on stolen work? That continued use and support of it is actively destroying the environment for little benefit? That its growing commodity is causing a general decrease in individual knowledge and learning capacity? That it's making the industry of IT that most of the people commenting belong to worse to be a part of? Like, surely, a bit more than just the result matters here?
Ethics matter. Call it a purity contest or virtue signaling or whatever, I don't care. Trying to do something good to push against the bullshit even if it's imperfect and still has to rely on tech that does use it to exist and be effective is still better than doing nothing at all. This is a good thing and I have no criticism to make of it.
kacey | 16 hours ago
Yo š I'm personally trying to tone down how much confrontation I cause in this space, but I wanted to minimally note my disapproval. Framing this as a black and white ethical issue equally saddens me, since that same absence of nuance and appeal to morality has been used to justify atrocious actions throughout history. And it erases any good that the tools can accomplish. Furthermore, given the amount of personal attacks I get whenever I mention LLMs/AI here, I sincerely doubt that there's a majority of people who agree with me -- you are almost certainly in the majority. I'd imagine people who hate this have
artificial intelligencefiltered out of their tags, or otherwise avoid the topics.(edit: sigh ... I had hoped this wouldn't be exemplary'd. For anyone reading this, fwiw, the person was pleased with the notion of trying to keep conversations calmer. It wasn't an AI thing)
JCAPER | 13 hours ago
I was going to give an exemplary label because of this, but I wanted to show publicly why I 100% agree with your point.
I'm so, so, so tired of this 0 or 1 attitude. You're either 100% in favour of something, or 100% against it. It feels like nowadays on the internet you can't stand somewhere between both. This attitude I feel is more destructive in the long run.
I, for example, think:
I have a lot more thoughts, but these zigzag of thoughts should be good enough to illustrate my point. No one will ever convince me that these things are the best thing ever - we shouldn't underestimate some of the societal dangers these could potentially have. But neither will no one ever convince me that my own experiences are wrong, and that LLMs didn't have some good outcomes for my own skills and work.
kacey | 12 hours ago
Thank you very much for not doing that š I feel that it needlessly escalates tensions on a topic that needs to be discussed (as noted in your comment!).
For my part, I've been wishing for years that the temperature would come down far enough to talk about effective resistance against all this -- job loss via automation, devaluing of the arts, legislative reform, etc. But that requires acknowledging that the problem exists, and dispassionately analyzing the space for asymmetries to be exploited in favour of the common people.
We need to be organizing workers, pressuring local governments, and pushing our vision of what a future with these tools should look like -- not de-facto rolling over and allowing OpenAI/Anthropic/Microsoft/Google to decide for us. Endlessly debating about data centres and morality cannot un-create the idea of a transformer, or delete every open weight model on the internet, but I firmly believe that the window of opportunity remains open for deciding whether the world on the other side of all this is a good one. For whatever definition we -- not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei -- decide "good" is.
Zorind | 10 hours ago
I haven't posted on here a lot about LLM stuff, but I keep reading most of it...or at least, most of the threads on it, which have not been great for me mentally.
I think I'm fairly anti-ai, but I have a hard time really examining my position because I know how emotionally biased I am in it.
I am not an artist. I have never been very "creative", but I love the thought of being creative.
I loved legos growing up, and I think most of that is because it let me put things together
in ways that were creative and showing creativity, but did not require me to be "good" at it.
I was never able to get into drawing or anything like that in the same way, and I've always
loved reading comics and seeing what artistic people are able to create.
I went to school for programming, because I truly love writing code & seeing things happen as a result.
To me, programming has been my "creative" output. So I find myself biased against LLMs generating code, for what I imagine are the same emotional reasons as a lot of artists, but not necessarily the reasons that get sympathy or could actually have legal repercussions (e.g. training on stolen art).
But also I struggle with it myself, becuase like, am I gatekeeping? Am I against it because it was my "special thing" that many others couldn't do? I don't think so, but maybe there's some of that to it as well, as to why I don't like it. But like, at the same time, I'm glad to hear that it has helped you be able to set up a homelab and troubleshoot stuff on Linux.
I think it is great that people are now able to customize software and make tools and stuff that are useful to them, that they would never have been able to "before LLMs". Except, if I look at this from the art angle, I'm not sure how consistent my view is here?
I've never really been good at putting my feelings into words, and I certainly haven't gotten any better at it. It just seems like most of what I have been good at, are things that now people are using LLMs for.
and I don't know where that leaves me.
I'm going to keep avoiding LLMs for the things I enjoy doing, which is...most of the things I do,
and it does frustrate me seeing LLMs continually invade those things, and it is sometimes saddening
when I see others using LLMs for the things I enjoy doing. I don't think others should necessarily
not use them for those things, because if they don't enjoy doing them, sure, automate it away.
But like, it is much, much too late to put the genie back into the bottle, so all I can really do is personally protest by avoiding using them where I can. And I don't know whether I'm doing that for ethical or emotional reasons, but I'm also not really sure it matters.
I do really appreciate your take here, as well as from @kacey. I like being able to have some of these nuanced conversations around LLM uses, (or at least, read other peoples nuanced takes when I don't feel like commenting).
teaearlgraycold | 16 hours ago
No I never cared about that. Specifically in the case of code generation I think it's not such a clear cut case. The models are trained on freely distributed copylefted code. Does that mean the resulting AI generated code should be copylefted as well? Maybe. I don't really care if a judge decides AI generated code is all AGPL now. I'd actually be ecstatic if I could make legally enforceable requests to every SaaS company around the world to hand over their now poisoned source code. I'm more than happy to have contributed my public code on GitHub to the model's training data. I've gotten more out than I put in. For image and video generation (which aren't tools I use anyway) there's a much stronger argument against it as so much more of the training data wasn't meant to be freely distributed and copied.
Fair point. And it's a shame because it's mainly an issue of electricity sourcing. It doesn't need to have its current carbon footprint. We should be running 100% renewable electrical grids by now. We are at least making good progress as a species on that. Solar is incredibly cheap, battery tech is improving. I personally wouldn't mind if datacenter expansions were limited by whether they could run off of clean energy.
Depends on the person. I'm able to do new things and learn in the process using these tools. I just finished a project which I will write up and share on Tildes soon. I used LLMs heavily throughout the process (for CAD, programming, data science). I could have done everything by myself, but it would have taken more hours to do so. It's not a kind of project I'd ever done before and I'm quite proud of it.
I'm outside of the software employment world at the moment. Thanks to LLMs I'm hoping to get into a niche area of automated manufacturing soon. I'm highly confident I can build my own CNC machine (not a CNC mill to be clear) given the availability of the basic components/modules/plans online combined with my knowledge and LLMs to fill in the gaps. It helps I have both an industrial warehouse and a makerspace to help me. One aspect I hope to see a tremendous uplift in is patching CNC firmware with LLMs to implement my customizations. Something that could have been a couple weeks of learning will probably be accomplished in a couple of hours. Sure I won't have a personal deep knowledge of the firmware - but I don't think I'll need to. When you build a more standard CNC device you usually don't need to know how the firmware works.
Edit: Honestly if you're someone with technical skills right now I think stretching your capabilities through LLM assistance is a goldmine. Things where you'd typically need to work on a small team (or just be skilled in many areas) can now be accomplished for nearly free as a solo entrepreneur. The LLMs from the top labs are currently subsidized. They only recently got good enough to use in this way. Now's the time to act!
kacey | 16 hours ago
(I'm not OP)
:fist_bump_emoji: samesies
low key worried that someone cloned me now XD and yeah, been banking on this since late last year, so I'm stoked to see it coming to fruition. Hopefully plans work out and I can meaningfully dig into this over the winter.
(edit) only thing I'd note is that local models have been consistently trailing frontier models by ~6-12 months in coding capability, at least, for a couple of years. So there's a possibility that losing those subsidies -- when the market corrects -- will barely be a speed bump. Fingers crossed ...
teaearlgraycold | 16 hours ago
Iām planning to start in October. In the end Iāll have a machine that will likely have no equals around the world. Iāll be able to take orders online from a beautiful website with 3D previews and have something produce a real life equivalent. This will take something that normally would involve human labor and do it for cheap. I can lower the price dramatically, expanding the pool of customers. I plan to make multiple websites targeting different product types but all handled with the same machine.
I have actually made some of these widgets by hand and thereās demand. But I realized the prices Iād want to charge are too high. So automation is coming to the rescue.
kacey | 15 hours ago
That sounds really exciting! And yeah, super similar to what I'm aiming for as well (down to the labour price as a factor as well), so I selfishly hope you share some details about your process XD I've always hoped that someone else would land on this train of thought, too, since I've felt quite mad being the only person in the room who's bringing it up.
teaearlgraycold | 15 hours ago
Well thatās kind of the entire point of automation. I think Iāll also be able to achieve higher levels of consistency, quality, and with less time per widget. I havenāt done anything yet so I canāt say exactly what Iāll do. But you can bet your ass Iāll be using a lot of 80/20 extrusion!
kacey | 15 hours ago
Mmhm! One of a couple leaps of faith from my perspective is (was?) whether the R&D for developing those automated manufacturing systems would be too time intensive/specialized, since that cost of that needs to get amortized into your eventual product. Hence why I'm attempting to move somewhere with a much lower cost of living, in order to buy myself more swings at the bat so to speak š . Additionally, although manufacturing automation/higher throughput machine design is well established at the mid to high scale, it's unclear whether there are unforeseen challenges that would slow down development and deployment at the low end ... there's a whole spiel there that I'm wholly unqualified to talk about, but that I'll hopefully take a bite out of soon enough. Looking forward to 2027! XD
And good luck to you as well! If you're based in America, hopefully you can find a local source for your aluminum extrusion too š
teaearlgraycold | 14 hours ago
The warehouse I mentioned is actually full of a ton of old 80/20 from a defunct robotics startup. So itāll be free! There are also a ton of cameras and optics there which were made for machine vision.
post_below | 14 hours ago
Sorry if I'm being presumptuous but I think what you might mean here is that the denouncing of LLMs isn't as unanimous as you'd like. I'd say there's a pretty even mix of sentiment about AI on Tildes, with hate edging out non-hate.
The second part of the quote is frustrating. It's blanket assigning a binary sentiment to a large group of people. All anyone can do with that is disagree or ignore it, it's too generalized to be true.
It's far more nuanced. For example, I think AI tools are incredibly useful for some things. Game changing. And I hate that a world changing technology is ultra-capitalized from the start. With the internet we had decades of exploration before the worst of the enshittification set in. That's unlikely to be the case with AI.
And the evironmental concerns are real (if often overexaggerated) and I care about that deeply, I think most people do. I also dislike the potential for AI to contribute to wealth inequality and consolidated control. However, like the internet, AI also increases individual capability. One person, or small groups of people, can accomplish much more than they could before. Sometimes more effectively than big organizations.
Here's the thing: It's not going to go away. It doesn't matter what you think, or I think. If we could somehow burn down all the big AI labs, people would advance the tech in their garages. A new round of funding would launch countless startups in the space. That's because the tech is genuinely useful. There was a lot of emotionally motivated writing about how LLMs don't really help anyone, and anyone who thinks they do is just deluding themselves, in 2024 and even early 2025 but that's painfully outdated. It's only people with no expertise in any of the fields where AI has value that are saying that kind of thing now.
I have nothing against a website listing AI free options. I think it's great, bring on the demand for artisanal, entirely hand crafted, options.
But also the reality is that, in the field of software engineering at large, AI assisted (as opposed to wholly vibecoded) development is already the rule rather than the exception and nothing is going to change that.
Apos | 16 hours ago
A lot of these issues feel like they're because we're in the transition from the "legacy" world into the post-AI world. During the transition, everything feels broken. There's an adaptation. It's pretty obvious with the current pass that's happening in cyber security.
In terms of stolen work, since I've started learning about Linux and free software, I've always felt like the current system was broken. https://web.mit.edu/m-i-t/forums/copyright/index_transcript.html The culture change that AIs bring seem to me to be something that will be positive.
For the environment impact, I guess I got magical thinking, but I feel like it's the only way to speed up research to save the earth.
In terms of benefit, I'd disagree, the company I work for, for example, uses it to save lives.
I don't think my response is that good, but I didn't have time to think it through fully. Will probably revisit it later. These are my general ideas.
Rudism | 15 hours ago
LLMs as they are right now (opaque closed-source models, tightly controlled and guarded by billionaire-owned corporations) are the complete antithesis to FOSS ideals. They are an extreme shift in the opposite direction of what you're implying here.
You are correct, this is 1000% magical thinking. Even if it were feasible that predictive text generating engines could somehow come up with a solution to our climate problems, none of these companies are currently or will ever bother actually putting any kind of meaningful resources behind that kind of research, because it won't increase their profits (and I mean, realistically they probably know that the idea is absurd to begin with).
Apos | 14 hours ago
The current versions of LLMs are opaque, but there's a consensus that we're in an AI bubble which could pop at any time. The open models will be run on cheaper and cheaper hardware overtime. But I didn't mean it that way only, there's a part about how it's a good tool for compacting knowledge. Also last time I checked, the output from LLMs couldn't be copyrighted.
It's not the predictive text that would necessarily discover something of value (though in math they are making some pretty significant breakthroughs without much guidance), but its ability to speed up research and how researchers use it as a tool.
papasquat | 14 hours ago
The thing about the frontier models is that theres no real secret sauce. They advance mostly based on throwing raw compute power into training, which is why all of the frontier labs have similar performance. Those models get distilled, and cheaper Chinese and open source models see similar performance within six months to a year. Openai, anthropic and Google are controlled by billionaire run corporations, LLMs as a whole aren't though.
One of two things is going to happen. We're going to see increasingly diminishing returns, where in order to get any improvement, more capital and power than exists on the planet is required, and open source competitors will close the gap and catch up. Or, these models will never stop getting significantly better, in which case we're likely fucked as the technology dominates the human race.
I think the former is the more realistic option, but I don't see anything besides harsh multilateral government enforcement of a total ban being feasible if it's the latter.
lostwax | 10 hours ago
If I were you I'd be concerned it's a way to subconsciously bury my head in the sand, as there isn't any research required (which, to be clear, isn't the same as saying we shouldn't do any). Perhaps the biggest impediment to environmental progress is the lack of any consensus that we should make progress. In this I'd say AI is on balance an impediment, as well as being environmentally detrimental directly.
kacey | 15 hours ago
As a wee note, afaik the only research area of note is direct air carbon capture. Everything else seems addressable with current day technology, but it runs into social problems (people despise change) and class problems (currently wealthy folks operating companies dislike the prospect of uncertainty or reduced profits). R&D expenditure seems minimal beyond stuff like advancing fusion energy research, but that is slow because it takes a long time to build reactors and validate theory afaik.
JCAPER | 20 hours ago
Trust meā¢ļø?
Anyway, not for me. I don't have an issue with AI assisted coding.
Vibe coding though, yes. Different story. I avoid those projects by default.
chundissimo | 17 hours ago
Whatās your personal distinction between the two?
bugsmith | 16 hours ago
I'm not who you asked but here's mine:
AI assisted:
I designed the code, with or without iterating in a solution with an LLM or another human. I may have accepted "autocompletions" provided by an LLM, or used a tool like Claude Code to describe a function and accepted a whatever it generated (after reviewing it and understanding how it works). I may even so large scale refactors using the same tools, but all under my review and guidance.
Vibe coded:
I described an end goal and let an LLM agentically / iteratively design and write it autonomously with minimal review or understanding of the underlying code.
The former is using tools to speed up my own workflow.
The latter is outsourcing entirely and blindly trusting something works as intended and is of good quality.
kmcgurty1 | 13 hours ago
The way I see it is: it's the exact same as Google or StackOverflow. We don't say software is "Google assisted" because you searched online to find an answer. LLMs are the same, but much more specific and faster. It can parse out documentation in minutes that would normally take hours.
Wes | 16 hours ago
AI assistance refers to any level of AI tool involvement, including but not limited to Intellisense, Intellicode, use of chat clients, coding agents, or AI-driven search results. The programmer is still looking at the code itself, and is considered the author of it and responsible for it. The vast majority of code today is AI assisted.
Vibe Coding is defined as working entirely through prompts, and not interacting with the code at all. It was coined by Andrej Karpathy last year. He wrote:
delphi | 18 hours ago
Purity test, if you ask me[1]. Yes, of course, Vibe coding is bad, nobody's contesting that, but there's nothing wrong with using AI in your coding projects provided you could conceivably do the same work yourself, given enough time. To me, Linus Torvalds was correct on this issue.
I really feel like these project lists, but especially Codeberg as a whole, wants to desperately feel better than everyone else. And you know what? Fine, they're better. Gold star. You get to go to heaven because you didn't use it. There you go. Congrats. But provided the project is good and the operator knows what they're doing, there's no substantive difference between good hand-written code and AI-assisted code.
[1]: Also evidenced by the fact that to get on this list, you need to post on Mastodon about your project. What, no Mastodon? No ActivityPub? Well, then you can't be serious about open source software, clearly.
skybrian | 18 hours ago
I wonder if they will also refuse to use AI to scan for security bugs?
Not to worry, someone else will do it for them.
[OP] dsh | 20 hours ago
An index for software that is clearly marked that is made without the use of generative AI.
unkz | 19 hours ago
I wonder how these projects would stand up to the watermarks that are being applied. Itās one thing to say, and possibly believe, that your project doesnāt have any LLM code in it, but if there are unknown outside contributorsā¦ and of course the library ecosystem is riddled with LLM code, so if you vendor any of those libraries you may unwittingly add it in yourself. Itās like microplastics these days.
bonsai_angel | 11 hours ago
I let myself get tricked into responding to the top comment and then deleted it. Good little website. Happy to see GIMP on there.
snake_case | 20 hours ago
Cute but the whole Git platform is vibe coded at this point I donāt know how anyone would actually avoid all vibe coded platforms.
Also, the software to tell teachers if a paper is LLM generated kinda sucks, I donāt see how this could be better.
Ive been collecting used books because anything published after about 2023 was at least edited by an LLM, if not written by one, and theres no way to tell for sure other than just trusting everyone involved.
[OP] dsh | 18 hours ago
What Git platform? Git is just a version control tool. Did you mean Github?
streblo | 18 hours ago
Both git and Linux allow AI generated/assisted PRs.
snake_case | 16 hours ago
All of them, github, bitbucket, gitlab, every single service that hosts git repos is vibe coded now.
So if youāre trying to use Git, youād have to set up your own remote if you wanted to avoid vibe coded projects.
On top of that:
Microsoft services are vibe coded, Google services, Apple services, your banking apps and websites, Doordash, Uber, Lyft, all online ordering apps, all social media, all entertainment services, all that shit has been vibe coded for the past two years.
I know the point is probably so that when youāre building a project you can avoid using other peoples vibe coded libraries because they may be more prone to breaking, but if youāre gonna do that you gotta host your own Git remote and I donāt even know what flavor of Linux has no vibe coded pieces in it. Everything has this shit in it.
fxgn | 10 hours ago
Not Codeberg/Forgejo, which is what this site recommends.