- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.
We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.
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I am not a coder in any fashion but this is the make or break frontier for development, particularly FOSS and small scale projects.
AI is evil.
It is an ecological nightmare, socially and economically distructive, prompted on the theft of the knowledge and work of every creative endeavour any person as ever made and pointed at rendering pointless any future aspiration of individual creation someone may have.
The association has been made and it is not going away.
AI is a tool, like a hammer, and should be used as such. And like a tool should require training. The problem is people aren’t using it as a tool and rather look at the hammer and say “go build me a house”. That’s where the issue is. Does a hammer know how to build a house on its own? no. does AI excel at end to end builds? no. but people are using it for said end to end builds.
Devs, vibe coders, god knows who else still to this day fail to understand that AI doesn’t understand how to build things correctly. All the agents care about is getting to a solution as quickly as possible to retain a userbase. that’s it. will what ever it builds scale? no. will it be full of exploits? very likely. will it be able to refactor whatever it wrote? no because it will believe YOU wrote it. so upgrades/improvements to whatever are virtually impossible.
THEN you combine all that with the fact that EVERY AI’s training data, currently, is incredibly out of date. Tech moves too fast for it. So you have people building shit with libraries and what have you that are already out of date and they don’t know that.
It’s a tool like a gun, specifically purpose built to usher in a technofeudalist surveillance state. Not useful for anything else as is.
Guns are incredibly useful, just like LLMs and diffusion.
For literally one thing only. That was the point of my comment. Unfortunately AI can’t give you reading comprehension.
guns can be used for murder/self defense and hunting, but I suppose thst second one is less common outside Alaska
AI is not evil. It doesn’t have a consciousness. It doesn’t make decisions.
What is evil, are billionaire capitalists having full control over the technology.
What is evil, is the concept of closed-source.
What is evil, is stealing all creative works without attribution or compensation.
What is evil, is seizing essentially all the silicon to build these datacenters, then soak up all the electricity out of the grid and all the water out of the ground.
The problem isn’t the AI, itself. It’s the means that’s the problem…not the ends.
“Ai” isn’t inherently evil. It’s just a tool. An incredibly interesting and marvelous tool, in theory.
What we make of it and how we use it matters. Noone needs stupid chatbots. People should only be allowed to use them after graduating an exam of what they actually are and how they work. In the current state they’re 90% bullshit and harmful.
But LLMs surely have great and reasonable applications. People often fear what they don’t really understand. And LLMs really are a topic that often even “techies” don’t get, so why should a layman.
Yes, they are environmental Desasters. But try to substract all the trillions of silly nonsensical queries millions of people hammer into chatbots, that once were simple search-engine - queries. And it’s not THAT bad anymore.
I’m just going to quote myself, as I’m satisfied enough with the answer I wrote to another reply.
As it exists, as it was created, “AI” is evil. It consumes resources we can’t afford to waste and is currently supercharging our pollution indexes and creating what may be a catastrophic collapse of already very fragile and unbalanced social and economic realities. And because we are already into the sunken cost falacy fase, it will never be rewritten or rebuilt. Hopefully, it will collapse in such horrifying way it will create a cautionary tale, but we are not so lucky, so what we are left with is picking up the bits after it. This kind of system had to be developed inside laboratories, colleges, universities, research centers, to aid into very niche and specific fields of research, not made to be a mass consumption comodity as it is. But it was, unfortunately, not done that way.
You are confusing capitalism and ai. AI is just a tool. Capitalist will use any tool it can to hurt labor. This is currently born out by history recent and ancient. The luddites attacked the looms not because they were evil. But because the bourgeoisie were using them to exclude and attack labor.
That is a false equivalence.
The looms, the automated treshers, the tractor, whatever machine designed to a fullfil a task that displaced human labour wasn’t designed with the objective to render humans useless. There were periods of transition when people hurt, needlessly, if I may say so, but new occupations emerged.
This is not the same.
For the first time, we are faced with a technology that feeds off human achievement to be built and next states it can dispense and completely replace what enabled it to be put together to start. While consuming resources we can not afford to waste and returning nothing of value.
people are not entitled to employment, and machines are a great way to reduse the labour requirements.
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS Here you go, argue with GrapheneOS - it’s an open platform, go ahead and make a masto account and share your thoughts with them. Tell them what you think! The rep who handles their masto account is very well spoken and presents rebuttals of value so I advise you bring your A game.
I am not a coder in any fashion
You should use ai to learn 😁
I recommend https://chat.mistral.ai/chat as they use renewable power to train their models and are european 👍
Pass. Haven’t learn before, not interested in do it now. And if by some reason I wished to do it, I’d grab a few books on it.
You do know those books will also be AI generated, right?
If they’re just using it to find and patch bugs/exploits? Fine by me.
Vibe coding? Get the fuck outta here.
This is the key point.
From my reading that is not the limit in how they are using AI. It seems like they are accepting LLM generated code as inputs.
This pretty much compromises the whole project as far as I am concerned.
Considering Graphene’s entire reputation is staked on extremely precise definitions of security, this is a little concerning.
They’re the “best” (read: most secure) mobile operating system. If the best degrades, I don’t foresee some Graphene alternative stepping up very quickly (see also: cross-platform alternatives to Google-made Chromium and Google-funded Gecko)
is the linux kernel “the best”? because they are using AI tooling. Linus actually threatened to use LLM to maintain sparse if nobody stepped up…
is curl the best? because the creator of curl has also used/accepted LLM code…
if the creators of two of “the best” pieces of software ever made are accepting (NOT embracing or promoting… just accepting) LLM code… maybe it’s time for us to think about the possibility that this MIGHT be a useful tool instead of everyone just yelling “SLOP SLOP SLOP” everywhere…
If Vibe coding means people who don’t know how to code creating code… yeah, that’s kind of like giving people who don’t know how to paint an airless gun and 5 gallon bucket and telling 'em to go for it on this building here…
Even people who can code tend get worse over time the more and more they rely on “AI” to avoid having to think too hard.
Studies have shown doctors who rely heavily on “AI” are similarly affected.
People who rely too heavily on anything get brain atrophy with net negative consequence.
Those same tools can be used for learning and exploration and strengthening skills - all a matter of how they’re used.
People using calculators stop being able to calculate things and don’t even get me started in these evil “abacus” things that strip people off their short term memory! People using cheap paper to write whatever they want will not only have worse calligraphy but also write about whatever comes to their mind! Etc. etc. history is full of this.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all. Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code. LLMs are SO on steroids (actually trained on SO topics). So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.
There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source. Also: if OSS community did not use AI it would hardly stop it from continuing it’s growth in Enterprise. So there’s not much of a winning strategy there either.
Which brings us to GrapheneOS decision and given above reasons I think it’s a well-balanced decision.
OSS projects have already started to recognize that LLM is just a tool and how you use that tool matters a lot more than whether you are using said tool at all.
This tool is however not neutral but has a lot of steering and bias built in. Like an advisor who optimizes heavily for personal gain. For example, it constantly tells you that it knows it all and also that your ideas are the best thing since sliced bread. A lot of stuff around them is engineered to increase engagement and make you dependent on them. Precisely like social media which is full of “brain hacks” - no, this isn’t hyperbole, this is the name that engineers at Facebook gave to their creations. As social media, commercial LLMs are “addictive by design”.
Lets bring StackOverflow for analogy: we didn’t ban browsers for code development because one can navigate to StackOverflow and copy-paste some really crappy code.
Stack Overflow is a really good example. I am programming over 40 years, since 35 years as hired programmer, since 25 years on PhD level and I used Stack Overflow a lot to find interesting new angles on issues with seemingly obvious answers. Like “what is the most portable, clearest way to efficiently serialize message data in a C struct, given that type punning is only defined for some compilers and can lead to undefined behaviour”.
Stack overflow has typically various opinionated commented answers here, which gives you different angles and you can decide what is best in your case. This is crucial since a lot - one could say, almost all - of software engineering is about trade-offs.
ChatGPT is the know-all of stack overflow responders: It gives you a single smart-allecky answer and is purposefully built so it tries to take decisions out of your hands. It currently also makes a ton of suggestions of which some have a point, some might apply in other cases but not yours, and some are bullshit. If you let it run free you will easily get ten times more code than needed. And ten times more code means ten times more bugs - this is well-established.
So grabbing LLM to get a sense of direction or shape is an OK use in general, but copy-pasting it’s results blindly is silly and dangerous.
The thing is that commercial LLMs in practice are engineered to short-circuit your judgment and decision-making.
There’s a second argument that AI is ruining OSS communities which I believe is true, but refusing to accept AI code is a self-defeating action. Why? Because AI training needs unadulterated source of knowledge, one not tainted with AI and OSS communities rejecting AI would be that source.
First: These companies will siphon off open source code anyway, be it legal or not. That is outside of the influence of single open source developers or projects. Maybe a matter of high courts and civil society lawsuits to decide. And these will have to fight an uphill battle against the current political climate around favouring large companies in general and that kind of exploitative AI in particular.
But what projects do have influence over is the quality of their code base and what ingresses into it.
Further, it is to expected that the quality of commercial code bases continues to degrade at a rapid pace and also that companies will depend even more on open source infrastructure and libraries - and FOSS developers training the LLMs they use on anything that is new. Because the average commercial project or github project just will turn to shit. Companies will soon wistfully remember old times where Sturgeon’s law was a thing and when only 90% of all public code was shit, and not 99.999% . (Congratulations to that future five nines!).
There is an asymmetry between open source code and proprietary software: Open source code is protected by copyright law. Which GenAI vendor companies practically do ignore. Proprietary software is usually protected by copyright law, and also obfuscation by it being binary or behind server APIs. Currently, this works in favour of companies: They get to use GPL-proteced public code, but are not exposing their own, uh, creations. (And of course, LLM vendors will make the solemn pinky promise that they never ever will publish commercial code their customers are working on as LLM output (ask top-notch mathematicians how that worked out).)
But will this stay like this? Because another issue is that the same methods can be used to decompile binary code, and LLMs can also be trained on decompiled proprietary code. Which will, for example, make its many hidden security issues much more acute.
Agree 100% I was about to mention training the LLM on decompiled binaries, but you mentioned that too. I guarantee the Chinese models are already doing it.
Yeah, just one small problem, muchacho. Whenever a language recieves a breaking change you gotta retrain the model again, and a lot of your references are useless now. There is no “improving” it’s just a vicious cycle.
Your argument is that of peer pressure and not compelling.
“Join us or we’ll just steal your code anyway”
Here’s my rebuttal. Garbage in, garbage out. Most projects out there are trash. This tool doesn’t help you build good code, it helps you throw together a pile of trash. An actually helpful LLM would be one trained on the damn language itself and coding best practices. Almost everyone has lost the plot here. You DON’T want a massive LLM, the small specialized ones are good enough. So you can use it as auto complete, like the tech was intended.
You’ve made a few of erroneous conjectures which are orthogonal to my argument. But I’ll call out one: LLM is bad at code completion and it’s use not have to be limited to (final) code writing. Thus my theses on “what” vs “how”
Give me a break. Put down the thesaurus. You are the reason LLMs are so.useful. because, as one searches for a solution to the update that borked one’s servers, we find that 4 out of 5 forum threads on the topic devolve into jerks weaving unhelpful riddles, smelling their own farts and feeling superior.
You can achieve wealth and happiness way faster if you rob all other countries of their resources. But if it is feasible, must it still be done ?
Kind of the same thing with LLM. It’s not because you can that you should.
As you said, LLM is killing OS communities. It’s preventing people from working together, now they are all “I don’t need you, I can do it my way all alone”, and you get 50 clones or similar softwares, which aren’t finely tuned since it’s all LLM.
As you didn’t say, LLM has a huge impact on the planet, it costs a lot of electricity, it uses clean water which it evaporates in data center, but we don’t care because guess what, we have it in our hands and it’s so much fun to use ! And well, we ourselves are not responsible for the planet’s state, it’s the big bad company that create LLM, I’m just using it because otherwise, the other will do so !
What’s next ? After coding our own little games and softwares alone and ultra-quickly I mean.
Who pays the bills ? Who will pay the next one, and where is humanity going ? Not sure I want to know.
AI Searchers are quitting their jobs being scared of what they enabled Companies are being hacked by LLM without control People are losing their jobs because of LLM (and I think those are not the ones using LLM in the OS Community, because oh, the irony it would be)
Society clearly isn’t ready for any of this, and saying “don’t care” doesn’t make it fine.
Edit : this is cleary not on or against you, I’m simply expressing my frustration on this subject with arguments and examples I hope should make people realize things x)
I’m anti-WhateverTheBillonairesArePushing. And by golly are they pushing AI.
You shouldn’t let billionaires control your life. They may not have your best interests at heart.
I think that’s his point
Yea, but by refusing to use anything pushed by billionaires you technically give them control. They can just start pushing anything and you would stop using it
Using tech that billionaires push makes them richer and gives them control.
Tell me how does not using their crap give them control, exactly?
GrapheneOS is using AI models to find vulnerabilities before others do. The Bitcoin Red Team did the same and found an absolute ton.
I hate the AI bubble, but they’re forced to use AI to defend against AI.
And by-golly are they pushing AI.
What, you mean this fantastic enthusiasm isn’t entirely organic?
Mastodon users, yuck
The thing about tools is they do what you expect. A fork picks up food. A hammer’s head doesn’t suddenly change shape or fly off. I don’t have to worry about my shoes suddenly falling apart.
AI cannot do these things, but encourages you to use them in such a way that you don’t have to oversee the output.
It is so much more work to rewrite something that has already been written poorly. It takes more time and effort than to just rewrite it from scratch. It’s not a tool as it cannot do its job. On top of that it’s just a glorified collage machine pulling code or whatever it wants from its database and smashing it together. The code is not novel or genuine.
All of that rework and it still destroys the environment and communities wherever their data centers are housed. Loud noise and now Americans don’t have the right to clean water. They’re pissing in your yard and telling you to drink it up.
Please have a spine. Or just some pride.
I don’t like GOS devs, they are not focused on usablity, but on security (which is completely valid, but it’s a shame that GOS is the most usable mobile OS), but holy based.
If you are disputing AI utility in coding: Recent Linux kernel versions fixed up to 3 times more CVEs in comparision to releases before AI. Also, much less of those CVEs are found in the newer versions, which means new kernel releases contain better code.
People are insane. Open source people are insane in public.
LLMs are an amazing tool, the best advancement we have gotten since compilers. Only complete fucking morons would dismiss them.
God. Motherfucking. Damnit. All. To. Hell.
I’m with Linus Torvalds and GrapheneOS on this. AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.
I am sure I will be down voted on Lemmy for this but using AI for development by a team who is already experienced in development of the product they are working on is not a moral failing.
My personal experience but the people who blindly bitch about AI are, quite frankly, idiots.
I use AI daily for work it’s an extremely helpful tool as you stated. I still have concerns with it.
The difference is I understand human nature and the genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We need governance and standards and it needs to be a utility just like hydro, water and The Internet. There also needs to be a global UBI yesterday.
What people are bitching about with AI amount to the lack of control we the people have over it.
I’m surprised you haven’t been downvoted but I bet I will for calling a spade a spade in these people so rigidly opposed.
i trust no business to use ai coding properly, they cut so many corners in crunch already that pure unfiltered slop will for sure end up committed
we already see this with microslop windows 11 updates
it is even worse that many coders think it makes them better at their jobs because given how many issues pop up with factual ai use elsewhere i am sure no one rational expects coding to be exempt from this problem, so the least knowledgeable will be the most impacted with false assurance or worse we have other agents validating agent generated code that never has human eyeballs on it
slop-centipede of shit code
the biggest coding bugs either fail silently or succeed incorrectly and ai usage makes both of these worse
Again based on real world experience I disagree. The problem is the people doing the AI coding and how they were before?
I have a strong coding background. I know what AI is coding for me. I give it strong guardrails. It does for me in minutes something that would take me hours. I will still review and QA what it does.
The problem is people who use it to built a monolith of code and I’ve seen my fair share of that AND documentation driven by AI. It’s unneedingly obtuse and verbose and reeks of people who do not know what they’re doing.
There is a huge difference in telling AI to “build me a website in Django” vs. “build me a function to do xyz when the parameters are abc and the return value needs to be lmn”
my real world experience is both Microsoft win 10 and win 11 having massive impacting bugs since January
in the case of win 11, multiple times
even if you personally use it right that says nothing about these massive corporations
also im not anti ai as a concept but anti ai because tech bros are the fucking anti christ
i know for a fact in the coding sphere i operate in there are people coding via agent -> agent in multi chains
that shit is terrifying given the field i work in
I don’t think anyone is “blindly bitching”. I think people have understandable concerns regarding its development, use, and proliferation.
The other idea that it needs to be a utility is straight from the wet dreams of every AI company. Realistically, the average person has little use for AI and it’s much more likely to be a detriment to them than otherwise. I know someone who is an exec in a big company and they get AI through their work. They use it for inane things mostly, but recently they used it to generate a list of reasons that their kids *dont need to go to school. This is an educated person with a good job who can’t figure out that AI has no idea what their kids need.
I don’t think AI needs to be used by nearly the number of people currently using it, but my bigger concern is letting anyone, be it a private company or a government, have access to something people treat like a magic answer anything machine.
There are absolutely rabid anti-AI people on Lemmy even who think it’s just autocorrect.
I disagree in part. Many people have replaced searching with AI.
Take a pic of something in chatGPT. “What is this?”
It’s highly useful in everyday life.
The problem is that people my age were skilled before AI so it is literally just making things easier for us which is the point.
Kids on the other hand, it is taking away their opportunity to learn as my generation did and that’s a huge problem.
Then we get back to the underlying problem. Governance and standards.
Should AI be allowed in school? Should companies be forced to continue entry level jobs that could be phased out by AI?
You could ask a million questions.
The problem with human nature is we are great at figuring out if we can do things we don’t stop to think of we should do things.
If you think taking a picture of something and having AI identify it for you is something that 1) people should do on a daily basis and 2) the government should support AI as a utility for, then we have such different concepts of the world we want to live in that I don’t think we’ll come to an agreement here. I cannot imagine how that would be “highly useful in everyday life” for the average person.
The whole “You could ask a million questions” while supporting the idea it should be a utility is so weird to me. Like, yes, we could ask a million questions, and I think we should before suggesting it is a service that every citizen should be somewhat entitled to access from the government in some way (with all the caveats that come with a utility etc etc). It seems like you have fallen into the trap you suggest is inherent to human nature and you haven’t bothered to ask if we should do that.
The problem with your argument is it runs counter to the facts.
AI adoption is here. You can bury your head in the sand and pretend that’s not so, or you can acknowledge it and know there is work still to do.
https://www.theglobalstatistics.com/artificial-intelligence-ai-usage-statistics/
https://hbr.org/2026/06/how-people-are-really-using-ai-in-2026
Luckily, the “negative externalities” are mostly made-up bullshit.
Layoffs are made-up?
reduction in labour requirements are good.
The ecological damage is not made up.
It’s pretty insignificant compared to the rest of the economy. Focusing on AI to the exclusion of bigger issues is actively harmful.
It also didn’t exist at all 5 years ago. Why are we as a society allowing new ecological damage? When will we stop? The billionaires want it to be never as long as it gives them money and power.
Renewable energy makes good progress, but as you can see here, many people have other priorities.
It’s pretty insignificant
Citation needed. You’re just straight-up lying or clueless as to what’s actually going on.
The water usage “issue” has been blown out of proportion when compared to something as unnecessary as the ethanol that gets put in gasoline
AI is a useful tool, for all its flaws and negative externalities.
“If you ignore the negatives for everyone else and just focus on the positives for me, it’s pretty great”
Mhmm. Right, ok.
Go live under a rock then because that applies to almost anything in life. Selective morality is fine but when it is to be a science denier you are just a fuckwit.
you know what also was a useful tool? chlorofluorocarbon
I’m with Linus Torvalds
you mean the guy who started losing his marbles like 5 years ago?
I was ready to roll my eyes at the title and move on, but i’m glad I spent the time to read this.
TLDR; i very much disagree with the premise, but the author brings up an interesting bit of philosophy that is helpful to the conversation.
When people say “it’s just a tool”, it is not to assert that the tool is neutral, only that the thing being referenced should be thought of and discussed in a similar fashion as we do when discussing other items in the same category. This is in opposition to the tendency to ascribe moral features or aesthetic to things that aren’t inherent to their ‘essence’, but rather features external to the thing being discussed or features that are commonly shared by items in the set but not exclusive to it.
What comes to mind (possibly because of the great effort it took to read and understand it) is Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the ‘assemblage’. Here’s an excerpt from "A Thousand Plateaus (that happens to contain my favorite passage in possibly all of philosophy) that I think adds a contrast:
spoiler
[…] These affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a horse “can do.” They indeed have an optimal limit at the summit of horse-power, but also a pessimal threshold: a horse falls down in the street! It can’t get back on its feet with that heavy load on its back, and the excessive whipping; a horse is going to die!—this was an ordinary sight in those days (Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Nijinsky lamented it). So just what is the becoming-horse of Little Hans? Hans is also taken up in an assemblage: his mother’s bed, the paternal element, the house, the cafe across the street, the nearby warehouse, the street, the right to go out onto the street, the winning of this right, the pride of winning it, but also the dangers of winning it, the fall, shame … . These are not phantasies or subjective reveries: it is not a question of imitating a horse, “playing” horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects, that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. Is there an as yet unknown assemblage that would be neither Hans’s nor the horse’s, but that of the becoming-horse of Hans? An assemblage, for example, in which the horse would bare its teeth and Hans might show something else, his feet, his legs, his peepee-maker, whatever? And in what way would that ameliorate Hans’s problem, to what extent would it open a way out that had been previously blocked?
The author here is correct to point out that tools are not neutral - and the connection to Heidegger’s conception of the Gestell is very well received. I just wish they hadn’t stopped at their conclusion and actually kept the analysis going. Taking their example of SUV’s engendering ‘asshole driving behavior’ - it isn’t just that the existence of SUV’s bears a causal relationship to asshole drivers because of what that gestell produces, but that the existence of SUV’s reshapes the relations of all the other assemblages in close proximity to it regardless of how it’s used and by who. They even kind of preview this more balanced conclusion in their comparison of javascript and vue, stating that it’s not a matter of one being better than the other, but simply that they have different purposes and enable different types of collaboration.
I think the entirety of the problem of this argument could be captured just in this part of the blog,
After all, all kinds of fascinating weapons systems are being used in defence of freedom and democracy in Ukraine, and this is both good and necessary, but none of this makes the effects on leaders of having access to bombs and artillery, or on individual people of having access to firearms, not ceteris paribus deletrious.
All other things couldn’t possibly remain ‘equal’. The addition of those tools fundamentally changes the relations and constituent parts of all the assemblages around it, including concepts like “freedom” and “democracy”. To take it one step further - if the signs and symbols that refer to those assemblages and relations - that have now necessarily changed by the new addition - do not also change with them, then they simply stop being practically useful to describe them.
Any tool is going to have a non-neutral affect on those who use them - that’s mostly the point of the assertion.
Don’t forget the negative internalities (it makes it’s users dumber and the codebase less maintainable).
But yes it is useful, and the knee jerk hate comes mostly as a reaction to the marketing lies told by the companies selling it.
Experienced developers benefit from it, my guess is because they’ve already formed their knowledge, habits, opinions, etc.
I don’t think any company has shown productivity gains amongst experienced developers due to AI
Devs are lazy. Any productivity gains are negated by them simply choosing to work less and have more free time. Which is not a bad thing.
Reading the comments, wow AI is polarizing. Neither side will budge.
I guess only time will tell, to see if all the AI code will actually come crashing down.
Non AI code has been crashing down for decades, controlled chaos, continuous improvement. We have lots of tools to put metrics on that, and AI assisted code is fairly well crushing those metrics. It’s not 100% self sufficient code creation Nirvana, but it might be fairly compared to the Cotton Gin in terms of making the field workers more productive in the delivery of market ready code/cotton.
Non AI code has been crashing down for decades,
i.e. the code that made literally everything until a few years ago? That was crashing?
A bit unrelated, but I wonder if I’m the only one left that is:
- Using small, open-weight models
- Asking it to only write small snippets that I can easily go through, check and understand.
- Copying pasting from good old web frontends instead of integrating it into my editor or whatever else people do with agents nowadays.
I feel like when we’re talking about AI this sort of usage gets lumped into the same pile as agentic vibe coding and it’s not helpful for discussion. Surely most people wouldn’t find this problematic?
I have occasionally used anonymous browser sessions in the way you describe, and I still feel dirty for it and think it’s problematic. It did not affect the quality of my code because I never did the 2nd bullet, I never asked for drop-in code or used any, but the ethical implications suck donkeyballs so I hate that I do this occasionally - I blame really bad documentation of some build environments.
No, there are plenty on the left doing exactly that. Plenty don’t mention it because there’s been so much AI pushback they don’t want to be written off, others don’t mention it because they know it doesn’t really contribute to the conversation most times. It’s unlikely that your use is reflective of most AI use in these large projects.
Realistically, even your use doesn’t address some people’s issues. People dislike that the training data was used without consent, that’s not really addressed by open weight models. You checking and understanding the output is great, but a lot of people take issue with having offloaded that to the AI in the first place. Maybe your use doesn’t have the same negative environmental impact as some of the other models, but I’m not sure it really matters. If we’re using AI then inevitably some outputs will have larger environmental impact than others.
I am not saying your AI use is the problem with humanity or anything, but no, you’re not alone. Most people just aren’t talking about people like you and your specific situation doesn’t actually fully address people’s issues with AI regardless.
Probably.
My company is currently pushing “loop engineering” on us… They are in love with Claude and keeps referring to it as “him”. Very proudly announce that “I set ut a loop, and he closed 40 PRs while I slept!” (without review, of course). Based on vibe written tickets as well, which contains many hallucinations.
The poor QA department (2 people) is now trying to figure out how to test all the slop.
Things like this radicalize people against all AI.
I haven’t dug into the code, but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating. There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.
I understand this but, you have to consider the ecological impact of it, the thousands or more people whose work was stealed to train AI, the constant shoving of AI into everything and the problems that have arise from it, the campain AI companies did and do telling people they are going to lose their jobs and constant fearmongering, the constant blatantly lying of “AGI achieved”, the layoffs by senile CEOs, the debt that is causing because stupid people in power gonna be stupid, etc. There are plenty of reasons to hate AI and what it is doing to our world and people lives in general. Sure there are positives but the negatives clearly outweighs the positives.
On top of that, regardless of however you feel about AI, there are so many questions about copyright and ownership here, that as-of-yet remain untried and unanswered by the courts, that it’s essentially impossible to know what the legal ramifications will turn out to be, when accepting “AI code” in your project. I definitely fear that it could turn out to be a sort of trojan horse against especially the GPL, and other copyleft licenses. I conaider it to be risky to use AI code, on that basis alone.
True, but how will you prove that code was written by AI and not yourself? Any people can generate code, modify some variables to incorporate in their code, and it won’t be any different than copying it from stackoverflow. Unless the code is written in a “very specific AI way” it won’t be possible to distinguish.
Noooo All AI is Baaad!!1!
/s
It’s tiresome.
It’s funny because anyone seeing this as black and white clearly hasn’t ever opened an IDE.
Ssshh…Most of those having a knee-jerk “AI BAD! YOU BAD!” reaction don’t have any clue WTF an IDE is, how code completion works, nor the fact that by most metrics 95%+ of code now has “AI” in the chain…and has had that for YEARS.
https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
OMGWTFBBQ!
Here’s a crazy idea…how about instead of “AI BAD! ME HATE AI” how about some nuance? Assume ALL software in 2026 has had AI assistance, and review it on its merits.
As for the devs at GrapheneOS directly…why were you (the general you) trusting them before? Humans can be plenty dicey in ways that affect code all on their own.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/13s7mv3/why_i_deleted_grapheneos_louis_rossmann/
https://factually.co/fact-checks/technology/louis-grossman-grapheneos-drama-c1f2ae
Supposedly wonderful “human artisanal code” has plenty of fuckery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
https://thehackernews.com/2024/03/urgent-secret-backdoor-found-in-xz.html
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/31/supply-chain-attack-on-axios/
https://www.hivepro.com/threat-advisory/axios-npm-supply-chain-attack-what-you-need-to-know/
Supposedly wonderful “human artisanal code” has plenty of fuckery.
These are supply chain attacks and in the case of xz utils, the attacker had gone to extreme lenghts to hide the attack from a well-meaning, good-hearthed but overworked and burnt out solo maintainer.
To compare this to bugs that people unwittingly introduce in normal human-written code is not sincere.
Very well. Here -
https://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
https://www.finnie.org/2024/05/13/i-discovered-the-debian-openssl-bug/
That’s the thing about “pure human slop”: it doesn’t need to be malicious to be catastrophic.
The second link is particularly salient - kills the “supply chain attacks are special” argument because it is precisely about “unwitting bugs in normal human-written code just happen”
Okay, but they still happen with orders of magnitude less frequency than bugs in AI code. Consider that the time between when rsync first adopted LLM-generated code and users en masse reporting rsync internal protocol errors during a backup was on the order of months.
I don’t recall that one…but in fairness…AI generates a metric shit ton more code than humans. We’d have to normalize the results. Interestingly, looking it up now, someone DID normalize for that very case. Bug rate per commit for the AI-assisted versions landed within normal historical range. A pre-AI release had more regressions. The 3.4.3 regressions were primarily from the CVE security patches, not the AI work. Zero CVEs from the Claude-assisted commits.
EDIT: Correct URL https://alexispurslane.github.io/rsync-analysis/
The author of that article admits that the sample size is not large enough to draw meaningful conclusions.
But besides that, I believe LLM code generators can be a useful tool, provided you are willing to go over their output with a fine-tooth comb and assume it is broken until you have proven otherwise, because the hallucination problem is inherent to the technology and they’re never going to completely solve it, and are willing to overlook the myriad ethical issues with all major LLMs in existence today.
I’ve been a programmer for two thirds of my life up to this point. I don’t see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the “hallucination” issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.
If you’re using AI for code generation, I hope you like reading code.
If you’re using AI to learn your way around an existing codebase, I hope you’re prepared to fact check everything it tells you.
If you’re using AI for code review before merging a PR, fucking yikes. What made you think the sycophant machine that once told users a soggy cereal bar was a great business opportunity and cannot even transcribe McDonald’s orders correctly was suitable for that purpose?
If you’re telling yourself it’s okay because there’s a human in the loop, please read some studies about decision fatigue and consider that increasing the number of critical decisions a person must make per day, while giving them a suggested answer that’s right 90% of the time and catastrophically wrong the remaining 10%, and the only way to tell the difference is to read in depth, might not have the desired effect. Especially if the human in question is then put under time pressure.
And all that is before I go on a five paragraph rant about the ethical transgressions of every major AI company.
It’s pretty black and white for me.
I don’t see how the machine that generates code that must be assumed to be broken, and statements about said code that must be assumed to be wrong, until both have been manually verified, because the “hallucination” issue is inherent to the design of LLMs and cannot be solved, is supposed to make my life easier. Especially since a well known problem in computer science is that writing code is more fun than reading it.
quoted for emphasis. you have more patience than I do in telling sycophants why their take is idiotic.
This in spades.
To add; now there’s an issue in the generated code that’s been pushed. What to do? Read the code? Have new code generated? Abandon the project?
The fact that it isn’t perfect is the grey. And sure, it has a lot of problems but not only is it still useful anyways, but those problems are being ironed out. They probably won’t disappear completely but the tech is already miles further than what we had 2 years ago.
To make you understand what I mean by black and white, you have a user that put “AI is evil” in big bold letters in the comments. The hate is almost cult like for part of the population, and imo, it’s mostly because the media tells them to be mad.
Most of it depends on the task in any case. I don’t work with massive code bases and it doesn’t take long reading through a few scripts, running it and checking the output. The people I know that do work with huge code bases are using it as well, but I can’t really talk for them either. They don’t hate it tho.
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Sorry, I don’t bootlick the copyright machine. Anyone with half a brain can see it’s transformative. I don’t get why collage is fine but AI isn’t, it’s just copyright mega corps and data brokers that smell blood in the water. All the data isn’t even owned by the artist, you are fighting for universal records, not your local guitarist.
For the climate aspect, it’s mostly grid issues and corruption. It’s laughable to blame AI when we have president pedo prostrating himself in front of oil companies and destroying renewable projects. We need regulations and all that on where they can be placed and how they get powered, but in the end, it’s just software. I could use AI 8 hours a day for my whole life and I still wouldn’t be close to the damage one ticket to Europe does. It’s a scape goat being served by a corrupt pro oil lobby.
Don’t get me wrong, I know what datacenters entail with the amount of people they serve, but if you look at it at an individual level, it’s a drop in the bucket, or it would be if they weren’t using plane turbines. We need regulations to curb the stupidity, but it’s doesn’t make it all inherently bad.
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I don’t think the copyright thing is an issue.
Climate wise, it’s only an issue because of a corrupt administration, it’s not a death blow to it. It’s at the heart of it overblown by a reasonable measure imo.
The person who put “AI is evil” in big block letters is objectively correct. See homes getting claimed under eminent domain to build power lines for datacenters, electricity prices for consumers rising as service quality gets worse, and water usage to the tune of millions of gallons per datacenter per day. See companies buying rare books in bulk, cutting them apart so they can be scanned faster, and not publishing the scans, literally destroying culture so they can have one more scrap of training data guaranteed to be free of slop that their competitors don’t have. See companies operating web scrapers that deliberately evade every block that website owners try to use to stop them from reading their sites, and then scraping so many different pages so frequently that it’s indistinguishable from a DDoS attack, hosting bills skyrocket, servers crash, indie webmasters pay the price for corporate greed. See xAI operating natural gas turbines on the property of their datacenter for extra electricity in flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act, spewing toxic smoke into the air and generating powerful, inaudible infrasound vibrations that have been linked to everything from nausea to irritability to hearing loss to seizures. See Anthropic treating Minority Report as an instruction manual. See how ChatGPT use affects test scores. See AI psychosis. See chatbot-induced suicides. See deskilling. See how little AI companies care.
but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating
you misspelled “extremely deserved”
I’d argue that this news is over-blown. The project has more than a solid and honorable track record with insanely talented engineers behind it. AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere. I would put my faith into their decisions to improve this project by whatever means they think are best.
The truth is most commenters are not technically skilled to evaluate or critique their decisions. If GOS team, who again would be at the top % in the field, feel that this can elevate the project, should we not give them the benefit of the doubt?
My thought it was over blown until I saw them claiming that anyone on Mastodon is “not a user” and them saying that any real users are on their Discord and not complaining.
Uh, OK - Discord was semi-excusable up until 2025, but at this point anyone using it to communicate with their users is certainly not considering how bad that channel is for user privacy. Im a Graphene User, I will not use Discord, and I am not going to continue to use an OS thats supporting the rapid expansion of datacenters through the use of AI.
I did not see those comments, if that’s true, it’s definitely strange.
I don’t use Discord myself, but I think their decision to use Discord is defensible even if I find it distasteful. Their support chat isn’t meant to be a private space. (People discussing crimes and whatnot on Discord are using poor judgement.)
I think what they are trying to say there is that there is a lot of negative commentary on the Fediverse coming from people who are not users, and that they are not really beholden to those commentators. And that’s true. They don’t really have a history of smooth PR as far as I can remember.
I also think whether their acceptance AI usage is an overblown issue or not is completely unrelated to that comment, so I’m not sure why it would change your opinion of it.
Exactly this. As much as I hate the current AI scenario across the board, the GOS team has shown, time and again, that they are stellar developers and coders, that they genuinely care about security, and that they are the best at countering anti-privacy on the technology front.
If any team can use AI responsibly to improve all this, it’s the GOS team. And if it ends up failing on it’s face, I expect them to move away from it if things go south. Now, if they don’t because of ‘AI addiction’, then I will be looking at what my alternative options are. Until them, I’m 100% with them, as they have not given me any reason yet to doubt their judgement.
AI is a new technology that is not going anywhere.
I always wonder where this sentiment comes from. Whether or not AI is going anywhere is still very much up in the air
It’s not going anywhere because it’s already been here for a very long time, you just didn’t know about it
What people call “AI” is just Machine Learning.
Chatbots, OCR, Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, Computer Vision, Web Search, Spam filtering or Fraud detection, Personalized ADs, even your phone’s camera processing algorithm.
It’s all Machine Learning, but now under new and fancy “AI” name. And it’s been here for decades.
The reason it blew up this much only now is because people realized that the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes. And so they started exploring it more, to the extent of causing valid ethical concerns.
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere. But it’s clear from the context here what we’re referring to when we say AI in this conversation.
Apparently, not to me. Explain.
Edit: Downvoting a person for asking clarification? Shame on you lot.
Here’s a starting-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_language_model
Pointing to a wiki page instead of actually explaining stuff isn’t going to change my mind.
Now, if you’re talking specifically about LLMs, however (which you could’ve just said so, ffs). I think their scope of application and resources wasted on them will be significantly reduced. Look at what happened to blockchains and NFT. Basically, I expect the same to happen here.
Nobody is trying to change your mind. You’re just immune to context clues lol
Machine learning isn’t going anywhere.
As someone who despises the current slop hype with a passion, you’re correct on this. But only when you exclude LLMs. Because they are garbage with a net negative for mankind. Machine learning as a field however has very useful applications. Typically such that complement human assessment of data, e.g. re-viewing radiology images to flag potentially anomalous images for a second doctor to look at - not in place of the first doctor.
Finally, someone gets it!
Instead of going away, the AI will transform. It’s sort of in a bubble state rn. Once it pops, the fields where it’s useful will keep on using it, whilst those applications that have no real grounds for existing will either have their plugs pulled or resources cut.
the more data you feed into it, the better the output becomes.
And that’s bullshit. The slop machines have already peaked. More input will not improve the results.
Not compared to models from 00s or 10s…
What’s with the reading comprehension, people? I was talking about pre-AI boom vs. now, not now vs. 1-2 years ago, c’mon.
LLMs use a new way of data processing (focused on language rules) which is what brought the boost. Not more training data. More training data is needed for an LLM to reach “maturity” but it also increases cost due to resource usage. And current LLMs have already absorbed basically all of the internet and most books, and since the internet is now full of slop, more unpoisoned training data does not exist. That’s why more does not help anymore.
Touché
Yeah, lots of new tech that vanished because it sucked, wasn’t profitable, destroyed the environment, etc.
You cannot put the evils back into Pandora’s Box when it was already open.
Even if these companies sink, individuals can still use their own hardware for AI. Ai is here to stay whether we like it or not.
So where are all the 3D TVs? Where’s the Nintendo Virtual Boy? Betamax? Google Wave? Google+? NFTs?
Oh not transformational enough?
Ok then how long did it take electric vehicles to come back after The fossil fuel industry killed them in like 1920?
Oh here’s a good one: thalidomide. That one went away for good.
How about the hole in the ozone layer?
Sorry, AI is only a foregone conclusion because apparently everyone’s had their consent beautifully manufactured to an extreme degree.
Oof. Options for good software grows smaller and smaller each day.
hey feel free to fork it, call it amish os!
