A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. 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.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
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. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
It’s similar, but it’s not the same thing.
Anyone can have an AI “write code”, but ultimately, you’re still responsible for the output of the AI and ensuring that the end result is good. If you are a competent developer, you know things like testing, storage, security and safety (especially when dealing with sensitive data like user data), backups, monitoring, etc along with understanding each line of code. AI will never be perfect because humans aren’t perfect either, AI requires code review just like humans require code review. If you aren’t a programmer, you won’t be able to review the code AI writes, and mistakes will be missed, just like not reviewing human-written code because humans make mistakes too. I don’t see that ever changing because no software is perfect, there will always be bugs no matter what (once the software is complex/sophisticated enough).
AI does generate societal damage, but that’s mostly because of how companies abuse it and less because of the technology itself.
That’s my thoughts on AI and especially AI coding. That ended up being much longer than I expected and there’s more to it but you get the idea.
I never said anything about not reviewing the code. You still need to review it and test it and all that. But using a tool to generate the code isn’t the end of the world. It’s just the next iteration of how we tell computers what to do. Saying no ai code seems like a recipe for failure.