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Comment by duskdozer | Hacker News Reader

I was really pleased finding this last year, but I guess it's time to look for an alternative. I don't get why everything has to have AI shoved into it

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Not to detract from your point, but I decided Atuin was feature complete enough for my liking over two years ago, and have been running the last v17 release ever since with zero problems.

You can still keep everything you like about the tool without issue, and to the devs’ credit, the sync server is some of the easiest software to self-host possible.

It’s optional- you can choose to opt in or not.

Its also the Repo. There's a lot of AI-guided commits. I'm all for using AI in a reliable and safe environment, but letting Claude steer just leads to garbage

I took a look at the repo, but i didn’t see any garbage commits / evidence of sloppy vibe coding.

Care to elaborate? Also, don’t you trust that an author knows what they’re doing with AI in the same way as trusting them with their regular code writing skills?

I’ve read and used some of the author’s software. I trust them to make good judgement of using AI.

Using AI to code doesn't automatically mean bad code. Although I suspect the majority of AI code will be subpar.

So to be clear. You have no tangible complaints about the software or its quality, but you are dismissing it because of the potential for poor quality, because AI was assisting?

That's a poor argument that doesn't change the fact that any feature requires maintenance time and effort which for some users could be better invested in features they actually use, in improving overall stability, reliability, performance, etc. The more such unused features a product has, the less relevant it is for those users.

The question is, was adding "AI" to this product requested by most users, or was it done to tick off a marketing checkbox and capitalize on the hype?

What stability, reliability, and performance problems are you hitting with Atuin?

I posted a longer comment upthread, but I’ve been self-hosting and running an old version for over two years now, and haven’t had any recurring problems on those fronts. It’s pretty damn stable software and everything they’ve been doing lately has just been extra features and gloss.

It's open source software, so this attitude of "the work hours have to be spent how I want them to be spent" feels rather icky to me.

There's also a very weak souled scarcity mentality. It feels like you are working to take umbrage, to come up with outrage. Some users do find these features good and useful. That should be celebrated. Demanding features not be present? That's so condescending.

OSS is not immune to enshittification, and, in fact, is prone to it. It's not entitled to have the opinion that a piece of software might be heading in the wrong direction. Paying for software doesn't somehow buy you this right. What's icky to me is the idea that the opinion of users who support the author financially is more valuable than of those who don't, which goes against the entire ideal of open source.

Besides, VC-funded OSS often prioritizes the needs of its shareholders rather than its users. If you find these features useful, that's great. But there's no reason that they should be universally celebrated. The authors might want to listen to all viewpoints.

“I want this feature” and “I want this feature to not exist” are fundamentally incompatible viewpoints when applied to any given feature. It seems like adding that feature and making it opt-in is a good middle ground. The people that want it can have it and the people who don’t want it can pretend it doesn’t exist. This outcome seems like the result of listening to all viewpoints, so I’m not sure what problem you’re trying to point out.

Atuin is open source. You dont like their new release? Fork the previous repo, and customize it however you want. That's the whole essence of open source.

Right, though looking at the release notes it seems like the AI part at least is opt-in... for now.

For now. But looking at the repo, they're already having commits done by claude.

I looked at the repo and couldn’t even find an example, so it can’t be that many of their commits. But also: this is ridiculous. Whether the commit appears as done by Claude or not is a setting you can change. If they turned it off, you’d never even notice.

These are great developers and they’ve built an incredible tool. I use it a hundred times a day. It is very odd and dogmatic to think that because you saw a commit authored by Claude, whatever skills and qualities let them build something so good are now being thrown out.

Edit: I found one: https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin/pull/3231

Please, tell me where the bad code is in that PR. I see 200 lines of extremely straightforward Rust and 500 lines of tests for it.

And this is bad why?

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