Vim's lead maintainer has fully lost his goddamn mind

This is in a PR where Shougo, another long-time contributor, communicates entirely in walls of unparseable AI slop text: https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/19413

What a pathetic state after decades of active, thoughtful work. "I asked the chatbot how to write this code", "Well, I asked my chatbot, and "he" doesn't like it". What a fucking embarrassment.

Add setrepeat() and getrepeat() functions for dot command control by Shougo · Pull Request #19413 · vim/vim

Summary Add setrepeat() and getrepeat() functions to allow scripts to programmatically control the dot (.) repeat command. This enables plugins to: Save and restore the repeat command Make custom ...

GitHub

> Thank you for the detailed feedback! I've addressed all the issues:
> Thank you for the feedback! I agree that following the Vim 8+ naming convention makes sense.
> Thank you for the feedback on naming!
> Thanks for the suggestion! After thinking about this more, I believe repeat_set() / repeat_get() is the right choice:
> Thank you for the feedback. A brief clarification.

This isn't even rewriting his own thoughts in whatever bland style the chatbot can muster, it's just dumping people's comments into the bot and copy-pasting whatever it shits out.

This is The Future that boosters want: An endless bikeshedding session where agreeable chatbots trade excessively polite thank-yous and screenfuls of bullet-pointed lists. A bunch of children, getting paid to play around with tamagotchis.

What a bleak fucking future to dream of.

@AndrewRadev wow this PR is truly painful to read. it feels like these social networks made for AIs to talk to each other. I don’t mind AI writing code for you, but you gotta take ownership over the ideas, you can’t just point a finger and say it this or that, you gotta understand it and own it. You posted it online, under your name, not the AI’s.

@eljojo @AndrewRadev "I don’t mind AI writing code for you"

you really should

@eljojo @dirtside We could give you a bullet pointed list of all the ways generative AI is harmful- but frankly there’s plenty available on the subject and if you’re so ethically bankrupt you’ve ignored it so far, your opinion is not going to change in this thread

@penny @dirtside maybe we can go straight to basics: I'll start by saying I don't believe in copyright. I know it's necessary in today's world, but I'm personally opposed to it. I think it's a true reflection of capitalism and this world is much more worse off because of it than without.

Regarding AI, I believe there's a distinction between the theoretical technology and the current companies that deploy popular models. As well as downstream effects caused by them.

@penny @dirtside to add: I personally try to fight AI slop myself https://github.com/eljojo/no-autopilot
GitHub - eljojo/no-autopilot: You can use AI all you want — just don't submit on autopilot. Gentle PR guardrails that encourage human ownership.

You can use AI all you want — just don't submit on autopilot. Gentle PR guardrails that encourage human ownership. - eljojo/no-autopilot

GitHub
@eljojo @penny @dirtside > Please don’t make AI slop, just make AI gruel, that’s better

@amymagdalena are you open to having an actual conversation about this? or you just want to vent?

as a long time programmer, I legitimately don't understand why out of the sudden everyone started caring about which tools you used to write code

@eljojo All of a sudden? It’s been 3 years of slopfest now after a few years of shitty copilot autocomplete prior. And no, this is not similar to old instances of code automation cause they didn’t do all the logic for you, at most they gave you a bunch of boilerplate to fill in. So why did no one care, cause the tool was a keyboard and a brain and some generator scripts made by people with keyboards and brains, not a suped up Markov chain made without care.

And the reason people aren’t open minded with this with you, because you’re a long term programmer talking about something that has been clearly shitty for years, you should simply know better.

@amymagdalena regardless of "when it began", the bigger point is: why care about the tools I use to write code? shouldn't the code itself be what matters?

saying that people aren't open-minded because I simply should know better is also a bit silly, everyone has a different starting point for everything in life, you can't blame me for not knowing what you do.

I clearly am trying to fight AI slop myself, I published code about it on github, it's not like i've been living under a rock.

@eljojo Why do you claim to write the code when the tool specifically exists to save you the oh so difficult effort of writing it. And yes people do have different starts in life, you already stated your position in life “long term programmer”.
And you didn’t publish code, you published a config file to make the spam bot require a human to approve the spam.

@amymagdalena I claim to write the code because I publish it under my name. I made the git commit. I take responsibility over it. If I hadn't logged into my computer, the code wouldn't exist. What else is necessary for me to claim ownership over it?

I'm a long term programmer, but that doesn't mean I'm supposed to know or experienced with equal degree everything you know. It's not fair to be shitty just because you don't agree with my current opinion.

There's literal javascript in the repo.

@eljojo @amymagdalena But you *didn’t fucking write it*! If my employer hadn’t paid me to write some code it also wouldn’t exist—but that doesn’t mean they wrote it! I wrote it!

Do you also claim to have written y.tab.c when you generate a parser with yacc or bison? I hope not, because *you didn’t write it*, even if you wrote the .y file from which it was generated.

Hope this clears things up.

@eschaton if you have an idea an pay a company to build an app for you, did you build an app? -- if you instead, hire those people, and lead them, did you build the app? -- where do you draw the line?
@eljojo @eschaton i feel like it's a pretty clear "no" in both of those cases 

@felipe @eschaton at what point do you consider the app to be built by you? what % of its lines do you need to write yourself to consider yourself a builder of it? what if you wrote the entire spec on how it needs to work, with very precise detail, but didn't actually write the code for it?

do you think product managers are not builders of apps?

@eljojo @felipe Product managers are not builders of apps, no. The people who actually write the code and maintain the build system and the tests are the ones who built the app.

Why does this seem so hard to understand? If you didn’t build it, you didn’t build it.

@eschaton @felipe also, please tell me you’ve never worked with a product manager without telling me

@eljojo @felipe That’s funny, I could’ve sworn I spent 20 years working with a very large team on a large and highly successful product with millions of users, and also contributed to system frameworks that are used on billions of systems as part of that work.

None of the PMs I’ve worked with would ever say they “wrote” the product or frameworks, they’d say they were “PMs on” it. Same with managers, testers, etc. Doing otherwise would be “stolen valor,” look it up.

@eschaton @felipe I said built, not write. I'm confident your colleagues would take offence in you claiming they weren't an integral part of the building of the resulting product, after all, they managed its creation and directed where it should go, it literally wouldn't exist without them.

The word I used is build https://ruby.social/@eljojo/116299190493291626

For my personal case, I claim to write the code because it leaves my computer under my name and I take full responsibility over it. What else is necessary?

José Albornoz (@[email protected])

@[email protected] if you have an idea an pay a company to build an app for you, did you build an app? -- if you instead, hire those people, and lead them, did you build the app? -- where do you draw the line?

Ruby.social
@eljojo @felipe What’s necessary is to not claim you wrote the code.

@eschaton @felipe again, so, i show up to my computer and the code literally wouldn’t exist without me. its current shape it’s defined by me. it represents my intentions, its committed using my CLI, under my name. I am responsible for it.

why does it bother you so much that I claim authorship over it?

all I hear is someone saying that if you don’t punch the card, you’re not a true programmer because the compiler writes the assembly for you.

José Albornoz (@[email protected])

i spent my whole life learning how to punch cards, it’s what we’ve always done and what works. i’m not gonna just let a so called “compiler” write half assed assembly for me while wasting thousands of cpu cycles! the code is not even good!! don’t talk to me if you use compilers! #slopcode #instablock

Ruby.social

@eljojo @felipe When you lie about doing the work, it devalues the work that other people don’t actually lie about.

Just because “the code wouldn’t exist without you” doesn’t mean you wrote the code any more than Tim Cook or Steve Jobs did for iOS.

@eljojo @felipe Sorry that you don’t get to get away with lying about doing things to make yourself look better.

@eschaton @felipe please keep fooling yourself into thinking that:

1. you understand the code that runs in your computer
2. you wrote the instructions that runs in your CPU

you don't. no one does. it's beyond human.

@eschaton @felipe oh so you're the kind of people that think Woz would have made Apple all by himself? do you legitimately think that Steve Jobs took no part in shaping iOS? like, you think it would still exist if Steve Jobs hadn't worked on it? that it would be the same?

The only one who's making themselves feel better here is you, by thinking that physically writing lines of code is all it takes to make something.

@eschaton @felipe surprise news my friend: no one cares about the writing of the code, it's been the thing that we keep automating over and over, for decades now.

you literally don't write the instructions that run on the computer, the computer figures them out based on your intent that you communicate with it.

every decade, humans are further away from the actual moving of bits and bites, and the world keeps turning!