I don’t usually share what I build. Most of it lives on Codeberg or Github as a glorified off-site backup. 3-2-1 and all that. If I nuke my drive, I can pull it back down. That’s the whole point for me.
A while back I mentioned Pimaps here, a few people asked to see it, so I posted it. Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted (documentation and review- flagged with AIP). Similar story with Cliparr. I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
What does the community actually expect from devs when sharing a project? I’m not assuming everyone here is a professional dev - though I’d guess the overlap is significant - so I’m wondering where the bar sits.
Polish? Full handwritten codebase? Something else?
How much of the sausage making do you actually want to see?
Having a discussion on this is perfectly fine, but I want to remind of two things.
- Rule 1: Be civil.
- Use the report button. Your comment is not a report. I do not get an alert about your comment unless its reported.
Lets keep it friendly and constructive.
The AI disclosure is important. Which one, where, how and why. Just to show an example why it’s important, it’s basically the same as this thing that is absolutely needed and normal in the food industry precisely because we allow people to do things the wrong way:
This food product is processed in the same tanks, conveyors belts and filters that also process Imperiling Allergen.
In this post and your linked post you come off as quite confrontational while exaggerating the dissent and underplaying the support. It’s a great way to get comments that strongly disagree with you. In all of that commotion, it sounds like you’ve missed the point: You’re regretting the AI disclosure, when really people were voicing their opinions in hopes that you’d regret/rethink the AI use.
Personally, I really like the AI disclosures. I like seeing how the sausage is made and what it’s made with. If the sausage is stuffed with hot dog “meat” I want to know. I’ll also avoid it like I avoid junk food, because that’s what it is. LLM-generated code is the junk food of programming. It’s a waste of resources, it’s bad for your (and everyone’s) health, and it can’t be trusted.
Some people really like junk food and hot dogs, and that’s fine. We just need to be clear that that’s not healthy and encourage healthier habits like eating fruits and vegetables (or at least real meat). People like ignoring the externalities of junk food and LLMs; both are responsible for a lot of pollution and societal harm (increased healthcare costs, dark patterns, misinformation, etc.). That’s enough reason for some people to completely remove them from their lives and be understandably vocal about how others should too.
The occasional sweet treat isn’t bad, but making sweet treats at home is always better. At home, I have more control over what ingredients I use and where I buy them from. Though I know I’ll never be able to use zero resources to make a good cinnamon roll, I can at least make the most optimal choices for myself. Ask yourself this: what value does text I generate provide? Could someone else, given the same information, generate the same text? Could someone else write functionality similar text without boiling the oceans and massive copyright infringement? I think any LLM-generated content that anyone could reasonably generate and use themselves is worthless and a net negative impact on the world. If it’s LLM-generated content that can’t be immediately/easily used, then you’re at least providing some real value by doing some work to make it usable.
AI disclosure doesn’t protect you against other people’s opinions. Some people will buy and consume the product, some people will try out the product and decide it’s not for them, some people will discover the product is made very unethically and decry it publicly in hopes that others won’t enable the ethical violations.
My intention isn’t to be confrontational, though I am genuinely perplexed, and that’s probably what you’re reading.
I don’t believe highlighting the AI tribalism is exaggerated. Technology is literally one of the top communities on Lemmy - one rarely (never?) sees positive comments about AI there. Hell, FuckAI is literally an top and active community here.
On regret: why should anyone “regret” using a tool? If we need to take moral consideration into tool use… well…should we regret using mobile phones? I would argue they are just as reprehensible.
If a dev used a local model to spelunk the codebase and write the documentation, would that sit better? Why? I’m not sure the line is where people think it is.
My intention isn’t to be confrontational, though I am genuinely perplexed, and that’s probably what you’re reading.
Meanwhile…
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
“Fork it, fix it or fuck it” - dealers choice :)
Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted
I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
Anyway:
On regret: why should anyone “regret” using a tool? If we need to take moral consideration into tool use… well…should we regret using mobile phones? I would argue they are just as reprehensible.
I think you’re finally getting to the realization: doing things without considering the moral or ethical implications is inherently, uhhh, immoral and unethical. Do you do more good than bad with your smartphone? Does it use thousands of watts (hours) every time you use it? Do you replace your phone every year with the new model, maximizing your environmental impact with the manufacturing? What do you think makes using a smartphone just as bad as using an LLM?
Look, I get it: considering all of the consequences of your actions all of the time is tiring. I don’t like doing it either. Clearly companies don’t do it at all (at least not for external consequences). Look where that has got us. Apathy is not an option.
If a dev used a local model to spelunk the codebase and write the documentation, would that sit better? Why? I’m not sure the line is where people think it is.
Local models are better in many ways, yes. The local user has control over how much power they use (for the query, not on training), other resource usage (water, electrical power sources), what model (and by extent the training data it uses), and exactly what documentation they get out (depending on the query/ies). The best option is still obviously to write the documentation yourself, as the subject-matter expert.
Meanwhile…
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
“Fork it, fix it or fuck it” - dealers choice :)
Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted
I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
Hang on though; you’re glossing over a lot of salient context.
See: https://aussie.zone/post/37281785/25338365
That’s neither here nor there. Let’s talk turkey.
I think you’re finally getting to the realization: doing things without considering the moral or ethical implications is inherently, uhhh, immoral and unethical. Do you do more good than bad with your smartphone? Does it use thousands of watts (hours) every time you use it? Do you replace your phone every year with the new model, maximizing your environmental impact with the manufacturing? What do you think makes using a smartphone just as bad as using an LLM?
On an individual level I actually think it’s worse. A lot worse.
Smartphone (Ericsson LCA): 57 kg CO₂e (Carbon Dioxide Equivalent) total over 3-year lifetime. Manufacturing dominates. https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/research-papers/life-cycle-assessment-of-a-smartphone
Smartphone (Carbon Trust): ~80% of footprint is production, embedded before you even turn it on. https://www.carbontrust.com/news-and-insights/insights/circular-economy-and-net-zero-how-can-carbon-footprinting-reinvent-the-mobile-phone-market/
Meanwhile - LLM inference: 0.3–0.4 Wh per query (short), up to ~17 Wh for long reasoning runs. https://arxiv.org/html/2505.09598v1
Even at 500 AI-assisted coding sessions (heavy runs at that), I’m looking at 3–4 kg CO₂e. That’s 4–6% of a single smartphone’s manufacturing emissions.
So no, they’re not “just as bad.” Individual smartphone ownership is orders of magnitude worse environmentally than individual, occasional LLM use for a hobby project. And people typically replace their mobile phones every 2-3 years . Which means every ~3 yrs your phone adds ~60 kg CO₂e.
A good primer on the topic: https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
You’ve ignored all of the other impacts of LLMs while comparing different lifecycles.
If you’re going to include the manufacturing of smartphones, you must also include the “manufacturing” of LLMs. That requires everything from the construction of datacentres and the manufacturing of computers which go into them to the less “real” copious scraping, training, and shutdown that is required.
Here’s some other numbers that I found for a mix of ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 (since the stats for newer models are hard to find):
- Around 10K GPUs were used to train the model
- Each GPU has a manufacturing carbon usage of around 164 kg CO2e (8 GPUs per server)
- GPU usage accounts for 85-95% of CO2e emissions (5-15% manufacturing and other impacts) for a 3 year usage lifespan
That puts the total per-card emissions around 3280 kg CO2e and the total usage around 32 800 tonnes CO2e just for one model. Per your smartphone metrics, that’s about equivalent to 560K people’s smartphone use. If you use a smartphone that is more carefully constructed, you can get that up to 1.13M. So for the same atmospheric pollution as 0.5-1 million people buying a phone, we made one model run for 3 years. Now consider there are multiple models and they usually get replaced more often than once every 3 years.
Most people rely on a smartphone these days, very few people need an LLM. Phones are significantly less polluting than an LLM datacentre so you’d be better off using your phone.
Now for other concerns, including the rest of the environmental devastation, which smartphones and most other products do not have. Most of these are still unknown or hard to quantify because the tech industry has long since abandoned open development of new products. I’m just going to list the problems because no one wants to read anymore paragraphs from me:
- Societal impacts
- Reduced barrier to misinformation
- Increased concentration of power (the political kind, not electricity)
- Reduced barrier to professional skills
- (this might seem like a good thing, but LLMs are not competent by themself, so)
- Increased danger in safety critical applications
- Increased ease of embedding malicious elements
- Reduced confidence in professionals
- AI psychosis
- Isolation
- Increased bot traffic
- Reduced access to infrastructure
- Reduced access to critical resources
- Other environment impacts
- Increased water usage
- Land destruction
- Noise pollution
- Water pollution
- Ground toxicity/pollution
- Increased raw material demands (feedback loop for the other env impacts)
The only real positive of the tech industry shenanigans is that prices have gone up, which is discouraging people from buying these significantly environmentally impactful products and instead extending the lifespan of existing hardware.
why are you comparing manufacturing to inference? compare it to training.
I am a lemmy user. Use as much as you want as long as you take full responsibility for it. I am open to ai. There is rubbish, but there’s also very good stuff.
I don’t have enough security knowledge, I can’t judge if a project is applying state of the art security practices. If a non experienced dev published a fully working app within a couple of days, one may rightfully question the quality of the project. You have to have experience in order to judge a llm output. The more people look at it, the better. I don’t judge you, I didn’t look into either project.
posted it. Got dunked on for AI slop
101 upvotes and 14 downvotes… dunked?
Anyway, I stopped reading and downvoted after the
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
typing the word “politely” or a smiley doesn’t make a very rude remark any less rude.
Moreover, splitting the community into a pro-AI faction and an anti-AI one isn’t healthy (for the community, whether it’s healthy for you is a can of worms that I don’t want to open right here and now) and ridiculing the other “faction” can only radicalize things and we already have more than enough of that, both in lemmy and, sadly, also IRL.
So, personally, I donwvoted your post, not your project.
There also only seems to be one comment chain mentioning the AI, which has been mod deleted. The test of the comments don’t mention AI or aren’t critical because of the AI.
You are of course free to downvote as you see fit - that’s what it’s there for. Likewise, I’m am free to write as I do / not sand down how I write for the sake of votes.
On the vote count: you may have missed the deleted posts here and elsewhere. The ratio wasn’t the issue.
On the rest - “whether it’s healthy for you”, “splitting the community”, “radicalize” - that’s a lot of weight to put on someone asking a straightforward question about community norms. You’ve framed a genuine query as a faction rally, and slipped in a dig about my wellbeing while doing it. That’s the part I’d call unfair, and I think you know it.
Sir… You came to us for these comments this time. Are you just here for a fight? It’s not clear what you want from us.
I don’t find your project interesting enough for me, but I was happy you did it. I prefer to keep my infrastructure at home in a controlled environment and take my maps out with me, but I don’t use navigation, I just record GPS tracks.
Now with this post, I’m starting to wonder what your motivations are altogether, particularly considering your responses here.
Huh? I’m not here for a fight. I posted a genuine question about community expectations around AI disclosure. What I didn’t anticipate was needing to defend my character and sequencing of events across a dozen comments in order to get there.
The “motivation” is pretty simple: we should discuss what the bar actually is, because every time people try to meet it, the bar moves. That’s the thread. Nothing more sinister than that. See https://aussie.zone/post/37216287
Glad you’re recording tracks either way, sounds like the right tool for your use case.
I just looked back over your post and your answers there and in here. With respect, your writing style sounds combative. I would never ask you to change it for anyone, but you should understand how it comes across.
Regarding the AI disclosure stuff, you aren’t the first burgeoning dev posting to Lemmy to go through this exact gauntlet of “AI slop” accusations. You are on a platform used by a fairly specific group of people who were pissed off enough to leave reddit, so not the usual general “tech enthusiast” crowd, and a fairly militant bunch.
The way I see it, AI is 1) already here and 2) just a tool. It’s being used in the background of a LOT of projects and there is by now simply no way to cover our ears and pretend it doesn’t exist. For better or worse, it’s also changing the pace of development, check out how fast PS5 emulation is happening because of AI tooling.
That said, developer practices that took us 40 years to make standard are still valuable, so folks have legitimate reason to call out your commit and documentation practices. If there is anything I objected to in your project, it might be that.
Ultimately, a created work starts to live a different life once it is public. You started without sharing it, shared the source, and now you have to make a decision: continue sharing and accept that not everyone will like it, or stop sharing. It’s really that simple.
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I don’t see how you were “dunked on”. There was one (1) person who went farther than voicing legitimate concerns… and then you were a twat and a half about it in the edited post. “Politely go fuck yourself” with a smile is worth a downvote.
Developers have been getting criticism for using particular tools for decades. For using Electron, for using systemd, for developing in Rust, for not developing in Rust, for using GTK or Qt… but when LLMs get involved, it’s suddenly verboten and you get to take some reductive moral high ground because “it’s just a tool”?
(edit) Just to answer the actual question:
- If you don’t need to use AI, don’t. Messy, undocumented, human-authored code deserves more respect than clean code with dubious authorship.
- Show how the sausage is made. Don’t just push your project as a single squashed commit; it makes you look like you have something to hide. (edit 2) If a commit contains AI-generated anything, mark it as such.
- Again, don’t be a twat when you inevitably get pushback. As a developer
of supposedly 25 years, you should be familiar with thatof no particular renown, you should learn how to handle it gracefully before a reputation develops around you.
Ok, fair enough about “dunked on”. The exact nuance of Americanisms occasionally escapes me, in the same way “rooting for the home team” means something very different once you cross the equator. I’ll concede that, and stop trying to translate into lingo that isn’t mine.
On sequencing of events: I posted about my project as a genuine “hey, look at this cool thing I did”, with no intention to share the codebase until others asked for it. Literally no intention, grabbing for likes or stars on Github.
Someone responded by calling me “fluent in slop” - directed at a person who is, for what it’s worth, autistic. I wrote the original post and then rewrote the AI disclosure with some cheek baked back in. So, the twattery had a catalyst.
Which, I’ll note, is a word you’ve used twice in one comment while advising me not to be one :)
Finally: you’re conflating me with the author of Cliparr. I’ve never claimed 25 years of development (and if anything, I prefer not to talk about professional roles on social media). He’s the gent being called a slop merchant preemptively in the other thread, who inspired this one.
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you’re conflating me with the author of Cliparr
My mistake, I’ve edited the comment to reflect this. Although I don’t understand, then, why you even brought Cliparr up. You’re not involved, and only taking offence on someone else’s behalf.
That also means that the lovely message of “Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)” was precipitated by a single negative interaction and a handful of downvotes. Regardless of linguistic and cultural differences, that’s just being a dick, and it should be pointed out. Perhaps you should reexamine how you handle criticism.
I brought up Cliparr because someone was being pre-emptively called a slop merchant before anyone had looked at their code. You don’t have to be personally involved to think that’s worth pushing back on.
On the catalyst: you’ve characterised it as “a single negative interaction and a handful of downvotes.” You’ve also already acknowledged you missed the deleted posts. Those two things are doing quite a bit of work together. The comment that preceded the edit wasn’t a downvote - it was being told I was “fluent in slop”, and that my app might kill someone, directed at someone who is autistic. That’s the interaction we’re talking about.
I’ll take the broader point that the phrasing was undiplomatic. But “perhaps you should reexamine how you handle criticism” is a bit rich from someone who’s called me a twat twice and is now on their third comment about it.
Show us how the
carrotsausage is made. Not all lemmy hates AI. I used it myself on a project I could otherwise not have made in my limited free-time. Just be honest about it, as you have so far, and people will tolerate.yeah I have problems with ai but not against it per se. I have a feeling people like that are not as vocal.
I found your Pimaps to be fabulous.
Haters gonna hate, there’s no help for it.
AI is a tool. Slop happens, but it doesn’t necessarily need to happen. I imagine there were many misguided, unnecessary, and just plain wrong trenches dug just after invention of the backhoe.
Go on and do even greater stuff.
As far as I remember we had a hunch you weren’t completely honest with us because some of the code and design smells of AI as well. The rest is just crazy, like the spacebar and enter key on your keyboard are jammed.
And not sure if disclosing it in some reply is all that great. IMO there should be a “co-authored by …-AI” in the commits. And transparency in the Readme, where people actively look for that kind of information. You didn’t do that.
Disclosure is for the post, not comments.
If you see it in comments but not in a post, report it. Not comments, but reporting, otherwise its just more cleanup later.
Yes. OP is fine as per the community rules. I was going for how there isn’t disclosure on the project page. It’s just in a post which is a reply to another post. So only Lemmy users will know. But maybe that’s alright.
Thats about all that we can control on this side, though. It would be great if more people made use of https://ai-declaration.md/, its what the rules here are (mostly) based on for disclosure, but half the time even a proper readme is more than what a repo will contain.
At least as a post here we can address appropriately.
Thanks! I didn’t know this existed. It’d solve a lot of my grief with AI coding if we just added transparency like this.
Your recollection is either misremembered or conflated with something else.
Irrespective, a hunch and a smell aren’t evidence. If you spotted something specific in the codebase, I’m genuinely open to hearing it - “it feels like AI” is doing a lot of j’accuse there.
As for the spacebar and enter comment - I’m not sure if that’s a formatting critique or something else entirely.
In any case, none of this is on topic here, with the topic being: what exactly is the expectation? As I said on the Cliparr thread -
- Don’t disclose - slop
- Disclose with AIP - not specific enough, still assume slop
- Disclose more specifically - “slop”
I’m genuinely trying to get a read of the room. Because when I explicitly described how the sausage was stuffed, I got harassed and called a clanker. I’ve seen that happening on other threads also…to the point at which I question the utility of tagging posts.
Don’t disclose - slop
“Don’t disclose” means report, not commenting.
Disclose with AIP - not specific enough, still assume slop
Not specific enough because it requires a disclosure, any comments of “slop” should be reported not interacted with.
Disclose more specifically - “slop”
“Slop” with an appropriate disclosure is a rule 1 violation. Report.
Yeah, I think the room is divided. You got a lot of upvotes. In fact I think you mainly got upvoted?!? Seems those people think you did alright. Some people also disliked something about it.
Sometimes you can’t make them all happy. I’d say be as transparent as possible. Just be honest. It doesn’t really matter whether random internet people think you are. What matters is what you are. And you’re the one person who knows the facts. Just be genuine and upfront. Set your assistant to reveal itself in the commits. Add information in the Readme about what’s AI and what’s human. Add a paragraph on if you’re planning to maintain the project (you did that). That way everyone knows what to expect. And then have fun coding stuff. Stay positive. If a handful of people tell you they’re using your stuff and they’re glad it exists, you probably contributed something to the world.
Edit: Similarly, if someone like me decides to question your coding style, you’re free to have a conversation about it. Or decide not to discuss it. That’s up to you. I just opened a conversation. And by your usage of words like “fuck” and “shit” I figured you’d be open to a more direct conversation style, so I just skipped polishing my sentences and just straight up said what’s on my mind.
It’s all good. I’m more than happy to talk shop…but I genuinely don’t know if that appreciated or wanted here. I think I’m just overall a little fuzzy as to what the heck is ok and isn’t ok in this space. I have trouble parsing Lemmy sometimes.
I think NGram has a good point. Your conversation style is a contributing factor. You’ll engage in all kinds of arguments about details. Sometimes the dialogue drifts to a personal level… And that just ends you up at opposing sides with other people. And tricky discussions about disagreements.
We can have a bit of control here. Usually good advise is to focus on positivity. Talk more to people when you think it’ll lead to something constructive. Cut conversations short if you think they don’t go anywhere… At least that’s how I do it. Not all the time. I also love picking fights (sometimes). But it is a bit tricky to judge what’s a reflection to own conversation style, what’s legitimate opinion and what’s just wrong facts. If we even know the real deal.
And then AI is a polarizing topic. People have strong opinions towards it, for good reasons. And we’ll read about all of them on most online discussion places.
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Maybe the people asking for your projects and the ones slamming them for you using AI in any capacity are different people.
I for one think AI is a tool and if you’re competent or it’s for one-off tasks, you can use it. It’s the agentic vibecoding by complete non-IT people (or techbros, or absolute beginners) that grinds my gears.
Clasic goomba funnel fallacy
Yes, we want to know how the sausage is made, just like with all FOSS.
what does the community actually expect from devs
Don’t flood the zone.
It really isn’t so long ago when making an app required various stages of completion and testing, usually including other people. I expect from devs that they follow that well-established road and stop with the silly “who has the time” argument I’m hearing so often lately. Sorry, you didn’t actually say that.
Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?
Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?
Yes, actually :) (or near by, at least).
I demand that you code in assembly. Javascript is too high-level. Natural language is too high-level.
Assembly?
I’ll toggle transistors with a paper clip, thankyouverymuch.
Let me know when you get to handwaving.
for me the issue isn’t so much the AI usage, but rather the intent behind the project. The reason I stopped browsing /r/selfhosted (and most of reddit) was the huge volume of people announcing their latest github star farming project, usually something that already exists or otherwise re-invents the wheel. The worst ones were the soulseek clones that caused massive disruptions because of their poor implementation of the protocol.
If a project is well written (and maintained) AI assisted coding, then that’s fine. But the problem is that the deluge of pure slop has made separating the two much harder, and thus I tend to assume anything that looks AI assisted is a waste of time.
I don’t understand this behaviour. They’re little stars on a website.
Stars.
I mean…why not go for unicorns or rainbows or something?
Are you 6? Or what?
Anyway, I agree with you. That is probably the main reason for not interacting on Reddit for me too (the LLM fora are even worse with it). The only thing I can surmise is that GitHub stars somehow equal social validation equals…I don’t get what.
Once again, little fake shiny yellow stars.
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
Clearly years of caffeine have burnt out my dopaminergic receptors.
As a dev i dont care for ai, but i will only hate/judge/completly ignore programms/tools/documentation thats clearly vibecoded slop.
Meaning if you let ai fix your Gramnar/Sentece structure okay, i dont care its probably better. But if you let ai write your documentation and i find most of the information wrong, broken or halucinated its a no go.
Same with your code if its full of sloppy hacky bullshit, repeats and useless libs, i will assume you vibecoded it without nowing anything
Edit: Also remember there will always a loud group of haters. There a probably many like me that saw ypur posts and just didnt care/react at all.
You will need to choose if you want hate from all ai is bad people when disclaiming it or if you want to add the other peoples hate when it inadvertently is found out that you used ai.
but i will only hate/judge/completly ignore programms/tools/documentation thats clearly vibecoded slop.
If its disclosed and tagged, then keep that thought to yourself - its now OT (rule 3) or potentially a rule 1 violating comment depending on how its phrased. In either case, its not appropriate for the post.
If its not disclosed and/or tagged, report it.
“If it gets out what gets into the sausage we make, we’ll get into a place we won’t get out anymore.”
