nikodindonI built a local AI movie recommender for Radarr using Ollama
Built with Claude by the looks of things. Not sure if Claude was used to generate the boilerplate and whether the dev reviewed it after or whether Claude did all of it, but definitely Claude was used for some of it. I recognise the coding style that Claude outputs and the bugs that it implements that will cause TypeErrors if not handled.
FWIW, I’m not against using AI as an assistant for coding (I do it too, using Claude and Vercel as assistants) just as long as the code is reviewed and understood in full by the dev before publishing.
irmadladFWIW, I’m not against using AI as an assistant for coding (I do it too, using Claude and Vercel as assistants) just as long as the code is reviewed and understood in full* by the dev before publishing. *my emphasis
A very sane take. I do wish devs would fully disclose this on their github or other. That way, if the project is seasoned, well starred, et al, and the dev used AI as an assistant, then the user gets to decide. Given all the criteria are met, I would deploy it.
I will say that I have observed what seems like a pretty decent up tick in selfhosted apps, and I would be willing to bet a goodly amount of them have at the very least, used AI in some capacity, if not most/all code. I don’t have any solid evidence to back that up but it just seems that way to me.
Honestly, any developer that isn’t using an LLM as an assistant these days is an idiot and should be fired/shunned as such; it’s got all the rational sense of “I refuse to use compilers and I hand-write my assembly code in vi.”
(And I speak as someone who has a .emacs file that’s older than most programmers alive today and finally admitted I should stop using csh as my default shell this year.)
Here’s the disclosure you need: all projects you see have involved AI somewhere, whether the developers like to admit it or not. End of. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. Railing against it really isn’t going to change anything.
Here’s the disclosure you need: all projects you see have involved AI somewhere, whether the developers like to admit it or not. End of. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. Railing against it really isn’t going to change anything.
I’ve said it before, AI is here to stay. It’s not a fad. Kind of like when the internet first started to become publicly available. Lots of people deemed it a fad. It’s now a global phenom and it is the basis by which we do business on the daily, minute by minute, globally. I do think that AI needs some heavy governmental regulation. It would be great if we could all play nicely together without involving the government(s). Alas, we don’t seem to be able to do that, and so, government(s) has to step in, unfortunately. The problem with that is, imho, surveillance capitalism has worked so well that governments also want to take a peek at that data too. I have nothing to back up that conspiracy theory, it’s just a feeling I get.
Haha. I think there’s often a rough idea on what kind of programmer people are, judging by their opinion on these AI tools.
Have you tried arguing with your AI assistant for 2.5h straight about memory allocation, and why it can’t just take some example code from some documentation? And it keeps doing memory allocation wrong? Scold it over and over again to use linear algebra instead of trigonometric functions which won’t cut it? Have you tried connecting Claude Code to your oscilloscope and soldering iron to see what kind of mess its code produces?
I’m fairly sure there are reasons to use AI in software development. And there are also good reasons to do without AI, just use your brain and be done with it in one or two hours instead of wasting half a workday arguing and then still ending up doing it yourself 😅
I mean, I haven’t argued with an AI for 2.5 hours straight, because I know how to use them. And I don’t expect them to think for me, because I know they’re not capable of it.
I was writing assembly language for embedded controllers where the memory is measured in bytes not megabytes, professionally, before half of you were born. I’ve developed preemptive multitasking OSes for 8 but microcontrollers, by hand, for money. These skills ceased to be particularly useful decades ago, but I didn’t sit down and sulk because optimising compilers and ludicrously cheap memory had ended my career, I moved with the times.
Practically everyone who calls themselves a “programmer” has never had the training wheels taken off since the invention of managed runtimes, you don’t now get to complain about what is or is not proper programming. The actual software engineers, who understood that the code was always just a side effect of their real job - understanding and solving problems - just have a new, and really cool, tool to learn how to use. The ones who aren’t up to it will spend 2.5hrs arguing with their AI, and then go back to coding for a hobby. And that’s fine - but if you refuse to learn AI as a tool, you no longer have a career in this industry. Any more than I would’ve if I had refused to accept that memory is basically free now and compilers can write assembly better than me.
I don’t have a definite answer to it. Could be the case I’m somehow intelligent enough to remember all the quirks of C and C++. Eat a book on my favorite microcontroller in 3 days and remember details about the peripherals and processor. But somehow I’m too stupid to figure out how AI works. I can’t rule it out. At least I’ve tried.
I still think microcontroller programming is way more fun than coding some big Node.JS application with a bazillion of dependencies.
And I sometimes wish people would write an instant messenger like we have 4MB of RAM available and not eat up 1GB with their Electron app, which then also gets flagged by the maintainers for using some components that have open vulnerabilities.
I mean I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to complain about it.
But yeah, software development is always changing. And sometimes I wonder if things are for the better or the worse.
I’ve had a lot of bad experience with embedded stuff and trying to let AI do it for me. I mostly ended up wasting a lot of time. I always thought it must be because these LLMs are mainly trained on regular computer code, without these constraints and that’s why they always smuggle in these silly mistakes. And while fixing one thing, they break a different thing. But could also be my stupidity. I’ve had a way better time letting it do webfrontends, CSS, JavaScript…
But I don’t think this specifically is one of the big issues with AI anyway. People are free to learn whatever they want. There’s a lot if niches in computer science. And diversity is a good thing.
Lol. For someone who says they expect other people to learn something, you’re a bit short in supply. I mean this would be an opportunity for someone (me) to lean something. But a down-vote won’t do it. And lessons on what not to do (discuss 2.5h, expect it to think) don’t lead anywhere either. I’d need to know what to do in my situation. Or where to find such information?!