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Comment by hypfer | Hacker News Reader

What confuses me about this stance is that LLMs are basically indistinguishable from any mid-to-low-tier dev.

And those we've let into our codebases with no concerns. Hell, some even threw parties inviting in more of them.

At least LLMs don't call HR on you when you rightfully tell them that they're full of shit. Though.. well. Claude probably might.

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Godot's recent announcement spelled something out clearly: when a mid-tier rando contributes, you can provide feedback to that person and possibly help them grow into being a senior contributor or even a maintainer. That possibility of helping the human behind the code is part of the motivation for doing open-source. Mentoring shitty devs is itself giving back to the community, in a different form than the code itself is. And that is qualitatively different than giving feedback to an LLM.

I think I'm also going to refer people to the Godot foundation's statement on this from now on. Too often people try to lay it out like a moral conundrum, or some kind of purity test for "real" programmers vs larpers, but that's all just lips flapping. Meanwhile there are real-life practical consequences that follow taking AI contributions, and the Godot foundation has done a great job articulating what those things are. It's very nice for there to be a voice like saying these things.

That is a good point indeed.

I am wondering though if that was really the world we were living in just before chatGPT launched, given that the whole OSS thing was already harvested super hard.

The "mentoring opportunities" often were just extracting free consulting out of experts + building a portfolio for getting hired by big tech.

Would we really want to go back to that?

So I agree with the idea but only in a vacuum, I think.

LLMs are worse at programming than any dev I've ever worked with. Yes, even $latest_model. They have no understanding or ability to reason, and they make mistakes no human would make. They are, in short, bad at programming.

I've seen developers pushing code repeatedly to car engine firmware with for-loops that weren't even valid C syntax, have yet to see a modern LLM do this kind of mistake

If I had coworkers with the ability to program like Sonnet 3.7 did, I'd be extremely happy. In reality, I can probably count 1-3 people like that, out of many over the years. Honestly, pair programming with Opus is better than any pair programming I had with a human, especially at understanding the reasons behind my designs.

You've not worked with average developers then, or this is a purely reactionary/emotional statement.

In my experience it's always been easier to work with terrible human programmers because the terribleness of their code is inherently bound to human comprehension. Of course I've seen some absolutely massive messes created by humans. But generally if a human wrote it then a human can understand it. Also it takes an amount of time and effort for a human to create this kind of mess which tends to actually be more effort than what a more experienced person will expend to fix what is wrong with it. LLMs flip all this on it's head. Plus there's the thing the Godot statement talks about. I have a completely different willingness to help a struggling noob rise through the same trajectory I did, compared to fixing someone else's LLM code.

I know what you mean regarding the class of mistakes, but strong disagree on the "worse" part.

Or rather I envy you for your experience with humans so far.

> What confuses me about this stance is that LLMs are basically indistinguishable from any mid-to-low-tier dev.

I disagree. Behind an LLM sits a developer. They steer the LLM. For them, directions to the LLM is the preferred form of modification of the software. The output of the LLM is not a preferred form anymore. This poses a huge problem for free software, especially when the LLM that translates preferred form into "source code" is not FOSS.

The low-tier dev was not used in this way.

This. So many assumptions. If you disclose you used an LLM, it is immediately assumed all of it is done by an LLM.

If there is a bug, its because you are a lazy piece of shit, not because humans make mistakes, and you missed it. It is branded slop.

We're living in interesting times, socially, OSS will die because of this.

Contributors are dwindling, and will continue to do so. If you want to play in your sandbox, please do. Don't open-source, keep it to yourself.

I think you're wrong. And I think that FOSS is our last best hope to keep software under the control of the individual.

The sloppers are diving head-first into a world where not knowing how a basic idea translates to code is embraced. This is not true of every slopper, but it is true of enough that sloppers are a threat.

I hear you, but again there are a lot of assumptions in this statement: "sloppers are diving head-first into a world where not knowing".

The problem is you've redefined LLM-coding as slopping. "This is not true of every slopper".

I find your comment here interesting. The parent never called out LLM-coding, they said "sloppers". If we take that choice of word as deliberate, it stands to reason there's a distinction there between "sloppers" and LLM assisted coding in general. You quoting "This is not true of every slopper" as proof they are equating the two seems like a weakly defended assertion. It's entirely possible there are 3 broad classes of LLM users in the parent's explicit and implicit beliefs. The thing is, you don't know any more than I know. You are attributing a held belief to someone that you inferred from incomplete information. That being said, if you based your assertion on external, unreferenced knowledge, then you could potentially know they hold that belief.

I'd venture to say that a large number of developers are using LLM tooling at this point. Not all of those developers are out there generating massive, poorly engineered PRs and wasting project maintainer time. For me there are at least those 3 broad categories of user of LLMs for software development, maybe more if I sat and thought about it for a while.

Indeed. I wouldn't call everyone who uses LLMs to generate code a slopper. But I'm afraid that there are so many sloppers that they pose a real danger to the ecosystem, especially considering the amount of code they generate. A volunteer project has limited resources, and I can totally understand why it doesn't wanna use those to separate the wheat from enormous amounts of chaff. If that's the case, an outright ban might be a smart move.

Note that a ban on LLM-generated code is not a prohibition on other forms of LLM-based assistance. Those other forms don't incur a direct burden on the maintainers.

The article is about LLM code. I’m sure you can condense the many lines into less than 5 lines. I’m not sure what you are trying to say.

If reading 1 and a half paragraphs is too much, then I guess we shouldn't try to communicate.

It isn’t what I said. I’d rather communicate with people who do not use 3 words where 1 would do.

This conversation does not exist primarily for your benefit though.

Fair enough, but I was addressed directly, so I'm sure I can leave my 2p.

> OSS will die because of this

OSS will not die.

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