GrapheneOS is currently defending its use of AI coding tools on Mastodon against complaints by various accounts claiming to be users.

We do not understand where you’re coming from or why you’re so incredibly angry with us. It’s not justified and does not make sense.

  • VykeTheGreat@anarchist.nexus
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    11 days ago

    I haven’t dug into the code, but blanket hate for AI in code is extremely frustrating. There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.

    • Grimy@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      It’s funny because anyone seeing this as black and white clearly hasn’t ever opened an IDE.

    • Bob@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      I understand this but, you have to consider the ecological impact of it, the thousands or more people whose work was stealed to train AI, the constant shoving of AI into everything and the problems that have arise from it, the campain AI companies did and do telling people they are going to lose their jobs and constant fearmongering, the constant blatantly lying of “AGI achieved”, the layoffs by senile CEOs, the debt that is causing because stupid people in power gonna be stupid, etc. There are plenty of reasons to hate AI and what it is doing to our world and people lives in general. Sure there are positives but the negatives clearly outweighs the positives.

      • skaffi@infosec.pub
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        10 days ago

        On top of that, regardless of however you feel about AI, there are so many questions about copyright and ownership here, that as-of-yet remain untried and unanswered by the courts, that it’s essentially impossible to know what the legal ramifications will turn out to be, when accepting “AI code” in your project. I definitely fear that it could turn out to be a sort of trojan horse against especially the GPL, and other copyleft licenses. I conaider it to be risky to use AI code, on that basis alone.

        • Bob@lemmy.world
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          9 days ago

          True, but how will you prove that code was written by AI and not yourself? Any people can generate code, modify some variables to incorporate in their code, and it won’t be any different than copying it from stackoverflow. Unless the code is written in a “very specific AI way” it won’t be possible to distinguish.

        • ricdeh@lemmy.world
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          10 days ago

          I’d hope that they will stick to non-retroactivity for new laws and rulings on AI, or else the world will have a giant mess on its hands. But I have the feeling that we’re moving towards an eventual, enduring weakening of copyright law, which is totally fine by me. Copyright has done more harm than good to the world (imo).

    • Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 days ago

      Usually, if it’s noticeable that AI was used on code, the code is flawed or, at least, has copyright concerns.

      • turmacar@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        Agreed.

        I strongly remember a CompSci professor ~2005 being disgusted with auto-generated Java GUI. And yes it was clunky and more memory intensive than it could have been, but also, I really don’t care about how GridView is defined most of the time.

        Bad code is bad code, touched by AI or not. For working code, a volunteer group spending resources to determine if it might have been touched by AI is at the very least an incredibly frustrating standard to try to meet. And very likely impossible to verify in any meaningful way.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
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      10 days ago

      There’s a difference between vibe coding and the hundred other ways to “use AI” on a project.

      I am not talking about the Linux kernel or the Rust project - they have stabdards way above average commercial projects - but generally “using ai” in practice means to use it for code generation. Then, programmers are expected to review the output but are not given extra time for it. This creates an extremely slippery slope leading to mostly unsupervised code creation. Also because reading and understanding buggy third party code means more effort than writing new code.

      Then there is the idea to get rid of the bugs by “debugging”, but debugging is frankly not a software engineering strategy, because you can always just recognize a fraction of the bugs that your process created in the first place. Debugging is also more expensive tha writing good code.

      Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.

      LLM code generation largely replaces clear specifications with plausible assumptions. That appears to make the process fast, but the result is often wrong. At times obviously wrong, and at times subtly and catastrophically wrong.

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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        10 days ago

        Then, what makes the process between product managers and software developers very often a bit friction-loaded is that good developers always want to have clear specifications what they are supposed to build.

        Excellent observation, which aligns with my observation that fans of “coding assistants” can’t wrap their head around algorithms, not to mention a sound software architecture.

        • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
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          9 days ago

          Eh, I now have witnessed two cases where I asked a software team lead of a project I was working for for a precise interface or API for a planned function and they looked at me as if I had talked about going on a giraffe ride with a bunch of alien Martian schoolkids.

          (And subsystem interfaces is really a subject I was taught in 10th grade by a math professor who himself had been a student of Niklaus Wirth. Maybe if you stand on the shoulders of giants, you should not be pissing on them…)

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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            9 days ago

            It was already difficult to find people who know how to phrase good requirements and / or design an architecture before the slop machines got introduced. It will be so much worse for the next couple of decades, with idiots bullshitting their way past HR into a position.

    • wedge@multiverse.soulism.net
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      11 days ago

      Shh, you’re using logic on social media.

      If the haters only realized that literally every software company has been using it since at least last fall, we’d have a helluva lot more Amish.