Congrats guys! We did it!

We took a project that someone made for free, shared it to the internet for others to enjoy, worked on in his spare time, and killed it because of his choice in tools. Sure he was probably overwhelmed with issues counting up and demands from his users on his project that he made for free, but he should have developed his application in the way we demanded. It’s truly for the greater good that we have one less free open source project out there, and one less developer working on his passion project.

Seriously. I loathe AI’s encroachment into everything. Copilot and OpenAI are being absolute assholes. However, the people who scream against it on message boards and and tell fellow engineers that they’re evil for using it are honestly approaching about the same level of annoyance to me. Should AI be everywhere? Absolutely not. Does it have actual uses? Absolutely it does. Is AI killing software engineering? Debatable. What isn’t debatable is that us, people, killed this project. We can debate about the ethics of AI for ages. That’s not the point of this comment though.

Right now, an open source project has closed, and some guy who made this for free and shared it with us will probably never develop in the open source community again, AI or not. Open source should mean that anyone can write anything for fun or seriously, and we all have the choice to use it or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s silly or useful or nonsense or horrible, open source means open. Instead we shut down/closed out someone who was contributing. How they were contributing is irrelevant, what is relevant is that they probably never will again. Open means open, open to anyone and everyone. We should all feel ashamed that an open source project was shuttered because of how our community acted.

I share some of your same views. It would be good if devs using AI would state that on their github or codeberg, etc. However, the immediate, kneejerk, backlash probably snuffs that disclosure. Just look ar the reactions to AI here at Lemmy Selfhosted. AI is a tool. As much as I chafe against regulation, it’s a tool that needs some heavy governmental regulation imho, but a tool nonetheless. It’s not going away. I’d say there will come a day when we use AI without even knowing it. It will be seamless.

Unfortunately, right now we are stuck in the novelty phase of AI rice cookers and pretty pictures. I think with some regulation, and more fine tuning, it could become a great dev assistant, and has some very real world use cases. I can understand why people don’t want a 100% AI coded piece of software where the dev really has no idea what they are doing as far as security. I don’t either. That’s an obvious. You’ve got to understand and be able to interpret and understand the results of an AI query. However, if the dev is competent and uses AI as an assistant, I don’t see the conundrum.

I also think there are young devs who are excited about contributing to opensource and the selfhosting community. They have the fire, just not the experience. Experience is something you don’t have until after you need it.

I agree with your take, and I think it’s why there can’t be a rational discussion about AI on the internet, because AI is a very nuanced topic and the internet does not comprehend the concept of nuance.

Like all hype technology, both polar opposite sides will probably be wrong. The best and worst case outcomes are only 2 of an infinite number of outcomes in between. We will probably end up with some form of AI that sits comfortably in the middle.

Thinking that way, for engineers, I think refusing to use it will only limit you. It’s akin to refusing to use an IDE, or css. It may not feel like that, but to companies you might as well say you only code on punchcards. I can personally attest that searching for senior engineering roles last yeardid not ask if I used AI. they asked how much AI I used, and I was required to use it during the interviews. This is not one company. Every company interviewed with. It’s here to stay. Refusing to use it comes off as stubbornness to hiring managers, not some grand fight.

You’re exactly right.

I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.

AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.

I dunno, if we were pushed off machine code onto non-deterministic compilers that ran on a machine thousands of miles away with no way to know when it was changed i think we’d have balked at that too, even if compilers themselves are entirely positive.