Maybe I’m seeing shadows in the clouds, but it seems like AI means a lot more people have been building open source tools.
I’m an AI skeptic, but I’m wondering if this can help undermine some of the shit software industry. Most AI tools sold by companies have an open source alternative.
I’m thinking that maybe AI will accidentally allow the private person to build free tools and reduce the market value of sold tools.
Have you not also noticed a dramatic increase in instability of platforms like Windows, AWS and Cloudflare?
I already left !programming@programming.dev because I was sick of seeing AI related posts. I would appreciate it if this didn’t also become a place where people talk about AI constantly, whether it’s related to FOSS or not. My ask is: Move the AI related posts to an AI-adjacent community or create one. Perhaps I’m not the only one who shares this wish.
While I am not the biggest fan of Ai (but also not the biggest hater as well, at least for local models), I think banning a topic because you don’t like it is not fair for everyone else. It is already used and part in many sections in our life, so discussing it (either if its good or bad or its pitfalls or recommendations) should be allowed. Especially in a generalized topic such as Open Source or Programming. I mean would you rather like it being silently used and lied about or make it official, and at least then you can filter out and ignore stuff about that topic?
I mean you don’t have to participate in the Ai discussions, but you can allow others to discuss. I don’t understand why you want to ban it for everyone.
I think banning a topic because you don’t like it is not fair for everyone else
It’s not just them. A lot of us don’t like it. The rules don’t exist to appease everyone but to make a “good” community, whatever that means in the eyes of the moderators. So it’s a valid suggestion.
It is already used and part in many sections in our life
No it’s absolutely not.
I mean would you rather like it being silently used
They can use it and talk about it somewhere else.
I don’t understand why you want to ban it for everyone.
Because it’s fucking everywhere and it’s fucking infuriating and it’s fucking dogshit. Corporations are stealing from creators and publishers, driving up costs of electricity, water, and electronic hardware across the board, unleashing DDoS attacks on the entire internet, creating an economic bubble the size of which the world has never seen, and inevitably going to lead to the destruction of the global economy, all in the pursuit of what? Spreading disinformation and sexual abuse? The damage AI is unleashing on the world cannot be overstated…
The absolute least we can do is stop perpetuating it on our little space on the internet.
I tried use AI to help me with self host. It gave me incorrect information and I wasted hours trying to read the docs and the AI slop to make sense of everything.
In the end, reading the docs was all that I needed.
I googled for the default port of dynmap, AI gave me the minecraft default port. I knew it was wrong, but that would have been annoying if I didn’t know that.
Seems it has been fixed now, but definitely kills the trust.
a lot more people have been building open source tools.
These tools would be a lot more useful if the people building them also released the prompts/instructions they used for the AI to build them under an open license as well.
The prompt is more important than the output, since it is human made and the limiting factor.
This is such a broad topic, that we need some qualifiers to focus. Ai tools in servers from big companies is an absolute no. I am experimenting for fun with local tools on my hardware only. Then there is a huge difference in generative Ai tools that generate code, assist tools to in example translate human languages, or if you use it to ask questions in example. So there is a huge difference in how, for what, and what you actually use Ai.
Ai tools can be useful, under the right circumstances and conditions. But it comes with the problem that they mostly have scraped data without consent and ignoring the licenses. And for server based Ai you also give up your privacy and you need internet connection at all times; loosing control. Then there is this generating code thing. If you don’t program yourself and don’t understand and generate lots of code, then it will be spaghetti code, with hallucinations and you don’t understand every detail to check it.
You can AI as hard as you like, you’ll probably not manage to replace the really complex tools.
I have just started writing a laser cutter tool, and I tried some suggestions from AI for doing basic matrix transform calculations, and it was completely wrong. So I wouldn’t trust it for anything moderately complex. That said, it was fantastic for the UI.
Many people have “itches to scratch” and some interest in development but little time to learn, so AI coding tools will allow them to scratch many of those itches without paying $ to others or investing that time (for better or for worse). Even as an experienced (but no longer full time) coder, I use it to scratch itches when I don’t have the time/lust.
Often enough, you’ll find some customizable app that does 90% of what you want, with a bunch of features you don’t care about. Writing personalized apps is a cool new thing, giving you exactly the functionality that you want. Many times these will be based on OSS or open libraries, which the AI just glues together.
Will this personalized development result in new quality OSS apps, though? I doubt it. We also don’t really need more sloppy code on github.
There are a lot of personal apps that just happen to have an OSS license… and then there are OSS projects, built and maintained as OSS community projects. It takes dedication to run a real OSS project, build a community, handle issues, websites, etc.
Will AI coding tools assist developers of real OSS projects? Sure… many are already using it to varying degrees. We’ll increasingly see it being used to find and fix bugs and security issues ahead of time - security researchers & blackhats are already having a field day.
One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.
Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.
I’m conflicted because more people joining the open source community and contributing is great. That said, open source is an ecosystem that covers everything from the application, to the build system and the code editor used to write the code. A lot of the people contributing to FOSS care a lot about the quality of their code, and being part of it means respecting the community.
But most of the AI models being used to write vibe coded or ai assisted code is not at all sustainable, it’s a huge part of the toolset that is locked behind corporate infrastructure. A lot of code spit out by LLMs is rarely workable or designed to be extended or transformed, and very few are critical of the quality of the code. I know even at work I’ve been frustrated at having to fix, work with or re factor code that has been written with the help of ai.
Personally, I have stopped contributing to open source as much because I know that any code I write will be stolen by scrapers to be fed to LLMs without regard to licensing.
Hm, not sure. Big Corp can generate their own datasets now, and all have ‘free’ versions and paying coding users to milk (I suspect them of training on everything), so maybe you mostly block smaller open source/open data models from training material ?
It seems to me that openness makes the masses moves faster than closed Corps.
I don’t know - just thinking out loud…
Things are moving so fast that anything that doesn’t work today, will work tomorrow, or ‘next week’. Take all the failed attempts from others, as possibilities of what you will be able to do in a week, and catalog what you think could be beneficial for you later. They are all on the plate.
AI is a technically a cognitive extension much like pen/paper - we are offloading cognition externally. So everything you spend mental energy on now, can and will be lessened when AI takes some of your cognitive load off.
Ignore their current baby-step errors. Think about where you spend your thoughts - your cognitive energy, and think of a way an AI could assist you with that. Worry too much ? Need a push/nudge with social connections ? Tired of seeking bargains at shops that cheat you ? Have something you find difficult ?
Then imagine what you can do with like-minded people from all over the world.
