Does everything have to be a god damn culture war now?! I really don't give a fuck how people do their work. Judge the outcome not the workflow. No one gave a damn how sloppy some developers hacked together solutions that are widely used. But suddenly it's an issue if coding agents are used? WTF.

Stop the damn polarization for completely irrelevant things; we get polarized enough for political reasons; we don't have to bring even more dissent into our communities and fuck each other up with in-fighting.

you can criticise them but ultimately they are a unpaid developer making their work freely available to the benefit of us all. at least don't harass the developer.

I mean, I get if you wanna use AI for that, it's your project, it's free, you're a volunteer, etc. I'm just not sure I like the idea that they're obscuring what AI was involved with. I imagine it was done to reduce constant arguments about it, but I'd still prefer transparency.

Somehow hiding the code feels worse than using the code. This whole thing is yuck.

Yeah, this is actually one of the good things a technology like this can do.

He's dead right, in terms of slop, if it's someone with training and experience using a tool, it doesn't matter if that tool is vim or claude. It ain't slop if it's built right.

I think the simple fact is that some of the people in this thread don't understand is that the people they're asking to vet the code don't know how.

They may mean that the people who can vet code should do so before making a fuss about the AI written portions of it, but I don't know that most of the people in opposition to their comments understand that context.

I haven't coded anything since the 90's. I know HTML and basic CSS and that's it. I wouldn't have known where to start without guides to explain what commands in Linux do and how they work together. Growing up with various versions of Windows and DOS, I'd still consider myself a novice computer user. I absolutely do know how to go into command line and make things happen. But I wouldn't know where to start to make a program. It's not part of my skill set.

Most users are like that. They engage with only parts of a thing. It's why so many people these days are computer illiterate due to the rise of smartphone usage and apps for everything.

It'd be like me asking a frequent flyer to inspect a plane engine for damage or figure out why the landing gear doesn't retract. A lot of people wouldn't know where to start.

I fully agree that other coders on the internet who frequent places like GitHub and make it a point to vet the code of other devs who provide their code for free probably should vet the code before they make assumptions about its quality. And I fully agree that deliberately stirring shit without actually contributing anything meaningful to the community or the project is really just messed up behavior.

But the way I see it there's two different groups and they have very different views of this situation.

The people who can't code are consumers. Their contribution is to use the software if they want, and if it works for them to spread by word of mouth what they like about it. Maybe to donate if they can and the dev accepts donations.

If those people choose to boycott, it'll be on the basis of their moral feelings about the use of AI or at the recommendation of the second group due to quality.

The second group are the peer reviewers so to speak and they can and should both vet the code and sound the alarm if there's something wrong.

I suppose there's a third subset of people in the case of FOSS work who can and often do help with projects and I wonder if that is better or worse for the reasons listed in the thread like poorly human written code and simple mistakes.

Humans certainly aren't infallible. But at least they can tell you how they got the output they got or the reason why they did x. You can have a rational conversation with a human being and for the most part they aren't going to make something up unless they have an ulterior motive.

Perhaps breaking things down into tiny chunks makes AI better or it's outputs more usable. Maybe there's a 'sweet spot".

But I think people also get worried that what happens a lot is people who use AI often start to offload their own thinking onto it and that's dangerous for many reasons.

This person also admits to having depression. Depression can affect how you respond to information, how well you actually understand the information in front of you. It can make you forget things you know, or make things that much harder to recall.

I know that from experience. So in this case does the AI have more potential to help or do harm?

There's a lot to this. I have not personally used Lutris, but before this happened I wouldn't have thought twice about saying that I've heard good things about it if someone asked me for a Heroic launcher style software for Linux.

But just like the Ladybird fork of Firefox I don't know that I feel comfortable suggesting it if this is the state of things. For the same reason I don't currently feel comfortable recommending Windows 11 or Chrome.

There are so many sensitive things that OS's, and web browsers handle that people take for granted. If nobody was sounding the alarm about those, I feel like nothing would get better. By contrast, Lutris isn't swimming in a big pond of sensitive information but it is running on people's hardware and they should have both the right to be informed and the right to choose.

AI is immeasurably shitty, both in terms of code quality and of morality. The fact that this developer is hiding his use of it from his community is despicable. I will never use Lutris again, nor will I allow PRs from this developer on any repos of mine. Fuck AI, and fuck strycore (deceitful bastard and Lutris "developer").

If he's using like an IDE and not vibe coding then I don't have much issue with this. His comment indicates that he has a brain and uses it. So many people just turn off their brain when they use AI and couldn't even write this comment I just wrote without asking AI for assistance.

To admit some context: My company has strongly encouraged some AI usage in our coding. They also encourage us to be honest about how helpful, or not, it is. Usually, I tell them it turns out a lot of garbage and once in a while helps make a lengthy task easier.

I can believe him about there being a sweet spot; where it's not used for everything, only for processes that might have taken a night of manual checks. The very real, very reasonable backlash to it is how easily a poor management team or overconfident engineer will fall away from that sweet spot, and merge stuff that hasn't had enough scrutiny.

Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged on the senate floor that in a perfect world, where AI is owned by people invested in world benefit, moderate AI use could improve many people's lives. It's just sad that in 99.9% of cases, we're not anywhere near that perfect world.

I don't totally blame the dev for defending his use of AI backed by industry experience, if he's still careful about it. But I also don't blame people who don't trust it. It's kind of his call, and if the avoidance of AI is important enough to you, I'd say fork it. I think it's a small red flag, but not nearly enough of one for me to condemn the project.

Worth mentioning that the user that started the issue jumps around projects and creates inflammatory issues to the same effect. I'm not surprised lutris' maintainer went off like they did, the issue is not made with good faith.

Every extra person using all these AI tools is only adding to the issue.

No, literally the opposite. They are going to do this until it is not financially viable. The more frugal and conscientious people are with their AI, the longer it is financially viable. If you want to pop the bubble, go set up a bot to hammer their free systems with bogus prompts. Run up their bills until they can't afford to be speculative any more.

These AI people are so delusional. They contradict themselves immediately.

But I have over 30 years of programming experience

Then you don't need AI.

In many ways, it couldn't have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn't AI that laid off thousands of employees, it's deluded executives who don't understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.

??? The common denominator is AI. By using it you are part of the problem. All mainstream AI is trained on stolen data.

I'm not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don't like depending on cloud services.

Then don't?

There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves.

The "tools" require large amounts of storage, RAM, electricity, water etc etc. The only tool is the end user.

Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not.

So they are just an asshole and their excuse finding is just irrelevant.

Tbh I agree, if the code is appropriate why care if it’s generated by an LLM