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.
If the maintainers are open about their use of it and attribute the code made in this fashion properly, there’s far less of a problem. If people don’t like it they can stop using the project and/or fork it to only have human-made code in their version. That’s their choice in FOSS. The jerk reaction and obfuscation makes it far bigger of a problem than this should have been. I don’t trust people when they react to criticism in this fashion. They would have done better just stating the topic was off limits before they lost their cool.
I certainly agree with your point on the jerk reaction, but given some of the guttural hate people have for AI, even though I don’t agree with his tactic to deal with it, I can certainly see the frustration.
Using AI to help code doesn’t necessarily mean completely vibe coding.