Aequitas

@Aequitas@mastodon.gamedev.place
81 Followers
140 Following
990 Posts
Senior Game Dev working at 24Bit Games. South African. Won an IGF award once \:D/
- Desktop Dungeons
- Volantia
- SoundSelf
he/him
(opinions are my own, obviously)
A very “surprising pattern” that people don’t want to use fucking shit that doesn’t fucking work and depends on stealing people’s work and fucking lighting the mother-fucking planet on fire while feeding their fucking money into the greedy throats of billionaires.

⚠️ If you see a post or DM saying "your account is currently suspended for verification purposes", do NOT click on the link. It is a scam.

Fediverse servers do not ask people to verify their identity. There is an optional self-verification system, but that's just for those who want to use it. No one is ever asked to do it.

If you are in ANY doubt about ANY official-looking message, contact your own server's admin directly using their public email address on your server's website's "About" page.

Back in the day, Twitter used to be really good if I set up a thread to connect freelancers with clients. Let's see if Mastodon can do it.

Clients: if you're looking for freelancers/contractors, get in the comments

Freelancers/contractors: get in the comments

Everyone else: boosts appreciated.

The market is *dead* for freelancers and a big part of that (in my opinion) is fragmentation. Let's get that network effect *back*.

#FediHire

This is important to sign and share. I archive Dutch language educational games (yeah very niche, that's why they require archiving) and I have to deal with lost media a lot. Don't let games disappear, please.

stopkillinggames.com

oh look, a new luxe dev log!

dev log #15 - try luxe now!

As we continue to wrap up our goals for a wider release we're happy to note that you can try luxe already!

Read all about it in dev log #15!

https://luxeengine.com/dev-log-15/

#gamedev #createwithluxe #luxeengine

It's Sunday.

Today let's remember that good people still exist. You're probably one of them.

Don't let your anger take your focus off of the people around you or the community that you belong to. Remember, no matter what anyone does, they can not change who you love and care for.

Practice kindness whenever possible.

Give to your community.

Lend assistance when needed.

Just because the world around you seems to be on fire, doesn't mean you can't be a little oasis of peace.

Also, I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but I'll say it again:

Part of your job as a senior is to tell your juniors about your fuckups. The embarrassing cringe reckless and lazy bullshit that you did when you were new, and the various times you brought down Prod. We ALL did it sometime. And then tell them: the moment you realized you fucked up, I know, the impulse is to try and cover it up, but don't do it. Come to the seniors you trust, and they'll help you unfuck it, and fight management tooth and claw like mamma and pappa bears to defend you from any shitheads in management. Because that's what our seniors did to us.

The naked kitties are helping!

I don't want to outsource my thinking to a machine.

I don't want "art" averaged from some aggregation of actual artists' work.

I can write my own fucking emails.

I can write my own fucking code and design my own fucking games.

And I want art that comes from the brains of human artists. Who feel and whose soul goes into their work.

All this stuff is clever and I am sure there are uses for it but the things that are actually valuable in life can't be reduced to a fucking prompt.

FFS. 🦬

Just discovered:

Teleios

Ancient Greek for "perfection"

A massive spherical bubble, 11, 46, or 157 light-years across (they aren't sure yet)

Could be from a white dwarf slurping up a companion star, exceeding a mass limit, and exploding

In our Milky Way, not an ORCS (Odd Radio Circles at intergalactic distances)

Discovered by Miroslav Filipović and team of Western Sydney University using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP)

https://www.sciencealert.com/mysteriously-perfect-sphere-spotted-in-space-by-astronomers

#Australia #Space

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AI is a horrible tool in software development.

A team leader explains the problems in this post on Reddit:

"AI Slop PR's are burning me and my team out hard"

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/s/MeNimUXpsy

@Lucomo
I personally haven't experienced this a lot but it sounds like something you just have to correct Junior devs not to do. And it will take time. Don't let a junior dev get away with pushing code they don't understand.

If senior devs did this, I'd be very irritated and I'd have a serious conversation with them about it.

@ryanjyoder @Lucomo this very much sounds like a "you're holding it wrong" argument.

The fact that these tools do allow junior devs to submit wild & ungrounded PRs is itself a major, major problem.

@jaredwhite @Lucomo
Maybe? But they already do that when they copy code from stack overflow without understanding it, which has to be corrected and they figure it out eventually.
@ryanjyoder @jaredwhite @Lucomo PRs copied from StackOverflow don't change 5k+ lines of code
@Ash_Crow @ryanjyoder @jaredwhite @Lucomo if a junior dev would do this, they would have a very serious talk. This is not just copying code you don’t understand, it’s deliberately wracking the system
@ryanjyoder
Cobbled together code from StackOverflow is relatively easy to recognize. AI slop is not (while being even easier to generate). LLMs are specifically trained to generate hard to recognize code (or text in general). This makes the "bullshit PRs problem" at least one order of magnitude worse.
@jaredwhite @Lucomo
@denki @jaredwhite @Lucomo
I may be coming at this from a different perspective. I'm not working with any engineers that are trying to bs me. So it seems easy enough to detect and correct this behavior. But if these PRs were being opened against an open source project by a new contributor, I can see how it'd be very hard to review.

@ryanjyoder
I am also not working with any engineers that try to bs me either. But we are not (yet) using LLMs for code generation in our team.

Judging from my LinkedIn feed, however, management may try to encourage the use of LLMs to "increase productivity". So the engineers might even be encouraged to submit bs.
@jaredwhite @Lucomo

@jaredwhite @ryanjyoder @Lucomo I don't think this is a junior dev using AI to generate PRs, I think this is one of the places where they've allowed the AI to submit bug reports and PRs directly.

@ryanjyoder @Lucomo Speaking aside a former junior dev, we won't create additional files that seem to serve no purpose, and create 5K line code changes.

They tend to be smaller, on account of being smaller features given to us to work on.

@ryanjyoder @Lucomo I have already seen this. It’s not always obvious to untangle since it can appear plausible - it can take more expertise and effort to debug than it would have to write up-front.

I predict a lot of software is going to become janky and unmaintainable as early adopters have false confidence.

@Lucomo Regardless of tools (IDEs, StackOverflow, coding tools), I think authors of PRs are responsible for PR contents. And the burden of proof that a change is safe and desirable is on the author, not the reviewer. That's my current opinion, anyways :)
@jawnsy @Lucomo The reviewer still has to expend effort to properly review the change regardless of how responsible the original developer is for code quality. It takes time to look at the 5k line PR to figure out that it could've and should've been a much simpler change.

@adamsnotes @Lucomo What I'm saying is that, if a reviewer is confronted with a 5k line change, they should feel empowered to reject it until the author can convince them that it's safe and that it's the minimal change necessary.

Big projects like Kubernetes do have big PRs sometimes, but I thinkthey are from people who have a reputation in the project and thus a high degree of trust. I imagine that a lot are simply rejected without much review if they come from new contributors

@jawnsy @Lucomo I suppose this plays out differently in Open Source vs the Corporate world.

OS can easily bounce a PR from a contributor of it's not up to snuff, but within a corporate environment the politics can be a bit more problematic, so you do need to justify your review.

@adamsnotes @Lucomo If your colleagues are sending you AI generated slop without reviewing it, that's an issue either of their performance, an issue of aligning expectations, or a cultural issue.

If you have people copying and pasting code from the Internet, then expecting reviewers to deal with it... That's also a problem

@jawnsy @Lucomo Yes, but unfortunately common - and, especially for technical teams in non-technical organisations it can be challenging to get leadership to seen it that way (even harder if, as in OPs cases, it's a different team entirely - whose leadership may well try to solve the issue politically rather than technically).
@adamsnotes @Lucomo Yeah. If you can't change your company, then you may need to change your company :)

@jawnsy @Lucomo 'this true. Probably also industry as well - since sometimes the cultural issues are larger than just an org.

In my experience, orgs whose core business depends more on some kind of engineering or technical excellence tend to be better in this regard (whether that's software engineering or real-world engineering)

Whereas completely non-tech industries (e.g. many finance orgs) are more challenging.

@jawnsy @Lucomo for sure. "I'm not reading 5k lines. Try again in smaller chunks," is a perfectly acceptable PR review comment.
@Lucomo the whole world sucks now. :(
@Lucomo "I used AI to do it" really needs to sound more like "I asked my younger cousin to do it"

@Lucomo

People in the comments suggesting, completely seriously, that the solution is to use an AI reviewer to review the PR before a human looks at it.

JFC.

@Lucomo lets be honest, if they can't be bothered to review the code before committing these same people would have been copy and pasting directly from stack overflow

Fire them all
@Lucomo I first read PR as Public Relations... Is it Product Review?
@temptoetiam @Lucomo Pull Request - without getting into the details of how Git works, it's when a contributor submits a proposed change in a software's code for the team maintaining it to look at.
@HauntedOwlbear @temptoetiam @Lucomo As I up, this is Git-specific terminology, so you might also just hear "Code review" instead, or alongside it. Same basic idea, some details are different.
@temptoetiam Pull request. That's GitHub lingo. GitLab, for instance, has merge requests.

@Lucomo It doesn't have to be this way.

Yes, use AI to help you solve issues in your code, but don't let it write missions critical stuff. I might get it to write unit tests or method comments, but I'm not going to let it to touch any key auth code, for example.

We use Claude / Cursor at work and we don't have these issue (we also don't have any junior devs either so we all know better than submitting a bunch of AI slop for review).

I'd reject these PRs outright (wouldn't even review them), then arrange talks with the developers producing them to educate them on the dangers of submitting AI generated crap.

You're a developer, you write the code and use AI as a tool like any other. It shouldn't be used to replace people, it's not good enough and can actually be dangerous (as noted).

I think most of the problem here is about educating properly. Also raise this with your manager (if they're any good / will do anything about it).

@Lucomo I encountered a website recently where a two factor authentication window was a popup, and I was able to continue by clicking on the page behind it without putting in a code. I can't prove it was an AI generated website, but all the signs were there. Not gonna name the site because it's a company whose actual product is not software, and I like what they actually make. I contacted their support to let them know because I don't want them to destroy themselves by vibe coding gaping holes into their security.
@Lucomo The thing that scares me most here isn't the people using LLMs to generate PRs. There's always going to be lazy, incompetent developers, especially when management encourages it in a misguided effort to cut costs.
The scary thing is the people defending using LLMs, in the very topic explaining how it doesn't work. Or the people who think that more LLM is the answer here, rather than a blanket policy of "No LLM generated code at all".

@Lucomo "endless redirection where multiple things don't actually do anything"

Let me guess ... a million to one on this was trained on EJB code.

@Lucomo @baldur The idea that _tests_ should be open for AI edits will be the downfall of the industry.

The whole „AI will replace developers” thing is a self fulfilling prophecy. Reduce engineering to bullshit code generation, and of course AI is better at it.

@Lucomo The more I read about AI slops the more I think of I, Robot the book (not the movie).
@Lucomo Of course the embedded ad says "Don't waste time fixing code security issues. Let our AI agents fix them for you"

@Lucomo the only valid solution I see is flatout #ban users for that shit citing it as #vandalism.

  • The University of Minnesota got yeeted from #Linux fir far less shite!
@Lucomo thanks for sharing this "[...] no one wants to talk about it." !!! we should only talk about this. This is the thing AI can't do and this is what hurts the industry most.
@Lucomo The problem already starts with "TL (dev/manager hybrid)", AI slop is only the icing on that effing cake.
Half of this is bad management though.
@Lucomo those Junk PRs are from their team and not from the AI. maybe he should manage their team.. or at least the team agrees on a mode of working.
@Lucomo gotta hit those 5k line PRs with one of these.
@Lucomo @ivan why, solution is obvious… have AI review those PRs…
@Lucomo ah yes, the Volkswagen approach to testing