asieMar 7
vim, harfbuzz, who's next? people ask in shock, but...

i think, fundamentally, the reason Claude and Codex are becoming part of crucial FOSS projects is the same reason xz almost became the entry point for mass-scale server hacking a few years ago. we've decided to make billion dollar industries rely on burned out, lonely individual developers who never found a way to get paid for their labor. we never managed to solve that problem.

these burned out, lonely devs see a tool that spits out the boring part of their work in a more or less functional manner if you squint, and it "only" (*) costs "$200" (**) a month. i can imagine why most people take it. heck, i won't deny that i am tempted myself, but my convictions remain too strong.

i've also seen some say that these people should step down and make way for new developers. who, exactly? i know how many months it took me to find a maintainer for one of the more popular Minecraft mods, and that's a position with both far more takers and far less responsibility on either side.

i think that a lot of what's going to happen to software in the next few years is the consequence of long term systemic issues. the introduction of LLM tools to the equation is merely an illuminant and accelerant
Show threadAmikke
@asie I think, fundamentally, that a tool mimicking a cheap, very fast and very enthusiastic intern is a no-brainer, and the only considerations are the cost and any moral issues. Cost isn't high and moral issues are mostly made up by people mad that their jobs are being automated, so increasing adoption is only the matter of time and people realising they're fighting windmills.
Mar 7 at 1:58pmWeb
Show threadTed MielczarekMar 7
@Amikke @asie "no-brainer" certainly applies here, but not in the way you're using it.
Show threadasieMar 7
@Amikke In the late 1980s, Sun Microsystems tried to unbundle the C compiler from SunOS, leading to a bunch of sysadmins picking up a niche, academic project called the GNU C Compiler.

Over time, this led to a golden age where anyone could have access to industry-leading tools, pretty much everything required to effectively create code, for free - anything from compilers through IDEs to version control. Of course, cloud solutions existed for various things, but they were never really compulsory. Likewise, while faster machines certainly helped, an used $100~$150 laptop let you accomplish most things at an acceptable rate for a decade+ now.

The infeasibility of self-hosting "frontier" large language models without thick pockets is, in my opinion, the undoing of this golden age and a threat to a kind of "digital sovereignty" afforded to the field of programming. Likewise, the rate of expansion of the LLM hosting industry is threatening the accessible pricing of computer hardware.

This sets aside other issues, which I do indeed share. I have privately been a long-running skeptic of piracy's impact on at least some aspects of culture even before LLM training came to rely on it. As a project maintainer, I need to be responsible and consider that European law does not necessarily have to evolve in its favor. I'm also still not exactly satisfied with the output of these tools; but maybe my comparatively lower wages as a Pole affect the perception of "cheapness" of the LLM solution somewhat.

This doesn't exhaust my feelings on the matter, but I hope I have made it clear that my position does not stem from "made up moral issues"; of course, you are free to disagree with me.
Show threadAmikkeMar 7

@asie outside-hosting "frontier" LLMs is also infeasible for many cases. The market will settle on a decent proportion of price to performance, including the price of hardware, once the bubble pops.

Open source has always survived or thrived despite lower manpower due to good co-operation practices and passion. Increasing effective productivity on both sides of the equation does little to mitigate that.

The tools exist, and they are useful. Boycotting them is infeasible, it's like being mad at Photoshop in 2005 for being too efficient yet expensive and continuing to edit photos in Paint. Pushing open source projects to reject them only harms them by tipping the productivity scale even more not in their favour. And as for piracy and EU's law, EU has tried to tighten down copyright laws so much that just learning on many examples would give their authors partial copyright over your work before. It was not a good idea and was rightfully killed, with Poles leading the opposition, at that.

Show threadDźwiedziuMar 8

@Amikke
> moral issues are mostly made up by people mad that their jobs are being automated

Please tell me which of the following issues are made up or aren't to be viewed on the basis of morality:
- outsourcing amotional labour and worker abuse to the Global South,
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-content-moderators-unionized-africa
- “AI” abusing resources being a basic human right, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/americas-ai-boom-is-running-into-an-unplanned-water-problem/,
- the Nazi Bar turned a paid CSAM generator, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-for-grok-generated-csam-no-fixes-announced/

(Not a complete list.)

@asie

OpenAI’s Content Moderators Just Unionized in Africa

Over 150 African content moderators — whose work has helped to power AI systems at Facebook, TikTok, and OpenAI — have unionized.

Futurism