RE: https://hachyderm.io/@phillmv/116374969941559197

@phillmv Quoting you. What is there to talk about after we take all of that into consideration?

PS: I think it is hard to talk about because there's nothing to talk about besides special pleading.

@yoasif the past three-ish years it was extremely impressive but also kind of useless.

the harms obviously outweighed the benefit.

now however it caught up to (some) of the hype: i’m feeling excited about the kinds of projects i’ll be able to deliver with good quality.

@yoasif i’m happy to engage on the harms.

broadly speaking i think harms currently outweighs benefits; as of today if i could wish the technology away i think i would. as it is we need to regulate it more.

that said, does how other people use the tool impact the morality of how i use it? i don’t know. i’m not sending people spam.

i don’t really believe in intellectual property so we can skip “theft”.

this mostly leaves us with environmental concerns and social upheaval.

as a programmer it feels hypocritical to wax and wane about automation being inherently bad; automating tasks has been my whole career.

environment is kind of the strongest angle, but that’s downstream of not having clean energy. if you could built it all on wind and solar power then it’d be OK

RE: https://mastodon.social/@yoasif/116301328058936154

@phillmv I think that if you don't believe in IP, it's hard to get to a place where you are going to convince people that AI is good, unless you can somehow convince people that IP shouldn't exist.

I can't get there personally, since I know that much of the code powering these models were taken from people who were contributing with the knowledge that their contributions would be free forever (copyleft), and I fear that that goes away.

How does copyleft exist in a world without copyright?

@yoasif copyleft is a hack that uses copyright as a way of enforcing contributions back to the commons. i generally license my code (A,L)GPL and i think ppl who complain about the GPL are fools

but! the important part is the existence of a commons, not the exact enforcement mechanism - i use a lot of MIT and Apache licensed code too. i prefer it when ppl are forced to share but sharing still happens without it

i wont go into too much detail cos im still working on a demo but my early vibe is the commons might stand to benefit; i think we’ll be able to use LLMs to clone proprietary software and place it in the commons

@phillmv I disagree and I just wrote about it: https://www.quippd.com/writing/2026/04/08/ai-code-is-hollowing-out-open-source-and-maintainers-are-looking-the-other-way.html

The idea that people will be able to clone proprietary software and place it into the commons is an interesting idea - except for the fact that the models are very much copying machines - if the proprietary software is built on innovation not already copied by the commons (and models), that clone isn't coming out the other end. That means using your brain.

Besides which, the LLMs aren't going to be cheap forever.

@yoasif LLMs are actually quite good at disassembling existing software and translating it into new languages.

as of today this still requires a lot of human effort but i feel confident that before LLM innovation peters out we’ll be able to clone most things that expose an API

@phillmv But not really: https://blog.katanaquant.com/p/your-llm-doesnt-write-correct-code

The LLM reproduces code it has copied into its corpus, it is not producing new works based on language semantics.

Monkey see, monkey do.

@yoasif this article is complaining about a vibe-coded rust port; i don’t think you can vibe code a port of a project as complex as sqlite just yet.

my claim is more like that porting sqlite to rust has gone from a 2 year project to a 3-month project.