someone else on here analogized this perfectly: coding with AI is like solving a solved puzzle. you engage other neural pathways to get the result you want, but "the thing" that made me love doing this for work is completely removed.
Nah; I could see any of the modern models blazing through that challenge.
What might be better is an option that developers can enable which disables new PRs by API. This way, outside contributors can still create new PRs if they're willing to spend a few seconds doing it in the browser.
That would be a huge loss IMO. Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.
Then there's the security concerns that this change would introduce. Forking a codebase is easy, but so are supply chain attacks, especially when some projects are being entirely iterated on and maintained by Claude now.
> Anyone being able to contribute to projects is what makes open source so great. If we all put up walls, then you're basically halfway to the bad old days of closed source software reigning supreme.
Exaggeration. Is SQLite halfway to closed source software?
Open-source is about open source. Free software is about freedom to do things with code. None is about taking contributions from everyone.
For every cathedral (like SQLite) there are 100s of bazaars (like Firefox, Chrome, hundreds of core libraries) that depend on external (and especially first-time) contributors to survive (because not everyone is getting paid to sling open-source).
Is there a reason that you chose SQLite for your counterpoint? My hot take: I would say that SQLite is halfway to closed source software. Why? The unit tests are not open source. You need to pay to see them. As a result, it would be insanely hard to force SQLite in a sustainable, safe manner. Please don't read this opinion as disliking SQLite for their software or commercial strategy. In hindsight, it looks like real genius to resist substantial forks. One of the biggest "fork threats" to SQLite is the advent of LLMs that can (1) convert C code to a different langugage, like Rust, and (2) write unit tests. Still, a unit test suite for a database while likely contain thousands (or millions) of edge case SQL queries. These are still probably impossible to recreate, considering the 25 year history of bug fixing done by the SQLite team.
The issue here is that LLMs are great for hobbyist stuff like you describe, but LLMs are obscenely expensive to run and keep current, so you almost HAVE to shove them in front of everything (or, to use your example, spread the diarrhea into everyone elses kitchens) to try and pay the bill.
That would've happened regardless. But the alternative --- zero moderation, 100% free speech --- is how you get flamewars and spam like Slashdot and tons of other forums before it suffered from.
Everything kind of fractured apart and now those niche communities are building up again elsewhere.
Discord has a lot (looking at my discord I see, gaming, programming, clothing/fashion/aesthetic, language, dnd, music, keyboard / hardware, dance, etc... communities).
I've noticed a lot of the major reddit communities have matching communities in the fediverse, specifically the ones with old reddit-like UIs. (lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, mander.xyz, etc...).
I've also noticed a lot of web-standards / browser developers and some gamedevs moved to twitter-style fediverse sites (e.g. mastodon.social, indieweb.social, infosec.exchange, hackyderm.io, floss.social, fosstodon.org, etc...).
---
I think the fediverse is working well for the niche communities for three reasons:
- Having that little bit more initial friction to learning how the fediverse works has made it better since it keeps out the low quality spamming users.
- Niche communities can only grow organically within their own spaces (since forcing them makes them seem inauthentic).
- The big plus of the fediverse is being able to follow/interact with users/communities across the boundary of being on another website. So it doesn't matter if a niche community you want to follow springs up on another website, you can follow them and participate from the website you already use.
For example: the old reddit-like communities that I follow (listed above) appear in a single feed in my programming.dev account (since that's the first one I joined), and the old twitter-like communities I follow appear in a single feed in my mastodon.social account (since that's the first twitter-like one I joined).
I don't think an alternative exists. Reddit was very unique. The last great BBS (in a sense) that non-Internet natives "got".
Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible, it was an extremely reliable place to get perspectives from real people about loads of things. It's still useful for this purpose, but the same level of trust isn't there.
Now that social networking a la short-form video is "it" right now, I'm not sure if something text-based will thrive again like Reddit did. (People have been trying to make Lemmy the thing, and it's less popular than Mastodon.)
>Before astroturfing on Reddit at scale was possible
It has become so difficult to tell what is karma farming and what is people not bothering to search before asking.
In a strange way, what already started happening to the "other side" of Reddit six or so years ago with the emergence of OnlyFans turning that into a place where people just want to sell you was a precursor to this.
Society is a Ship Theseus; each generation ripping off planks and nailing their own in place.
Having been online since the late 80s (am only mid 40s...grandpa worked at IBM, hooked me and my siblings up with the latest kit on the regular) I have read comments like this over and over as the 90s internet, 00s internet, now the 2010s state of the "information super highway" has been replaced.
Tbh things have felt quite stagnant and "stuck" the last 20 years. All the investment in and caretaking of web SaaS infrastructure and JS apps and jobs for code camp grads made it feel like tech had come to a standstill relative to the pace of software progress prior to the last 15-ish years.
I've been hitting this a lot lately in Kagi. I'll search for instructions on how to do a thing and some random website will have nothing but _hard_ AI slop going off about the thing I was looking up.
It must be easier than ever to build content mills these days.
Not surprising. Many folks struggle with writing (hence why ChatGPT is so popular for writing stuff), so people struggling to coherently express what they want and how makes sense.
But the big models have come a long way in this regard. Claude + Opus especially. You can build something with a super small prompt and keep hammering it with fix prompts until you get what you want. It's not efficient, but it's doable, and it's much better than having to write a full spec not half a year ago.
This is exactly it. A lot of people use it that way. And it's still a vast improvement, but they could also generally do a lot better with some training. I think this is one of the areas where you'll unfortunately see a big gap developing between developers who do this well, and have the models work undisturbed for longer and longer while doing other stuff, and those who ends up needing a lot more rework than necessary.
> Claude + Opus especially. You can build something with a super small prompt and keep hammering it with fix prompts until you get what you want.
LOL: especially with Claude this was only in 1 out of 10 cases?
Claude output is usually (near) production ready on the first prompt if you precisely describe where you are, what you want and how you get it and what the result should be.
reply