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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

The emulation space is particularly bad about this because there are a lot of semi-technical and "well meaning" users who will do anything to get their games to play better and AI gives them a way to make it seem like they are doing something useful, without being able to judge the quality of the output they are producing.

One of the projects I work on recently had a guy drop by and explain that he wanted to use Claude to clean up our backlog and he absolutely could not fathom why I kept bringing up that we would only accept PRs that reduced our work instead of increasing it. "Do you know what Opus 4.7 is?" "Why are you so close-minded?". Unfortunately it is very hard for these users to understand that the thing they are using has a bar for quality and the bugs that still slip through cannot be solved by waving a magic wand at it.

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A good argument to use could be: I can use Claude myself, so I will if I need to, but you using Claude on my behalf doesn’t save me any work, it just introduces another layer of noise into the mix. (Yes calling the guy “noise” haha)

Yeah I basically said this and the guy claimed I didn't understand what he was offering

Over the last month, I've been using Claude to assist in some things that were at the edge of my ability (or maybe just a hair's breadth beyond it). I've added features to open source projects that everyone's been waiting years for. I always fork it telling myself that I want to be able to submit PRs, but really I'm just making the changes for myself, since I don't even have the nerve to show it off.

If these people can make changes to the emulators that will actually make the games more playable for them, the changes don't have to go back into the official project. It works for them and makes things better.

Right now, I've been working on some changes to the mkv container spec to have embedded scripting cable of doing Black Mirror: Bandersnatch in interactive mode. VLC and mpv. I've already added mutable torrent support to Transmission, and it works. But yeh, if someone took a look at it who really knew the code, they'd see it was AI slop and do a hard pass.

You could use your changes to show that a feature is useful, but not do a PR. The specific code is no longer that important.

In era of AI, prompts are the source.

There's another person who for a long time wrote kind of hacky patches to work around bugs (e.g. disabling multithreading to avoid a longstanding race) and now he's using AI to fix everything in his own fork. I guess he can do that? We haven't really been able to use any of his changes though.

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