A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn’t have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn’t AI that laid off thousands of employees, it’s deluded executives who don’t understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this “issue” might come up so I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
Moral of the story is don’t let Claude do commits. It insists on crediting itself
Also stop harassing openspurce developers
Also be transparent when you have vibecoded commits. There’s no reason to hide it. Just say that parts of your condensed is vibecoded or coded with ai assist and those who don’t like it can fork it or use something else.
I really hate this new trend of FOSS developers being attacked and harassed for using AI. You might not like if they are using AI. Or you might not like AI at all, but there’s no reason to harass people who are providing you free software. Let them develop it like they want. If you don’t like that they used AI, use another software. Or fork the software before they started using AI. But attacking people like that is not okay on so many levels. It’s not okay to attack people for the software they are using. It’s not okay to attack developers providing a free service and it’s not okay to attack people at all.
There hasn’t been anything I haven’t been able to run between Heroic and Steam. I didn’t like using lutris anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AI is actively destroying the environment and harming people. Data centers have been caught using methane burner generators (which are banned for use by the EPA) which significantly increase health risk to residents that live nearby (cancer and asthma rates already significantly increased). Then you have the ridiculous effects it is having on computer hardware markets, energy and water infrastructure and prices.
Then after all of that, the AI themselves are hallucinating somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% of the time, and multiple studies have found that people that use them regularly are losing their own skills.
I can’t figure out why people would choose to use them. I can’t figure out why programming is the one place where people that might have otherwise been considered experts in the field are excited to use them. Writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, basically every other professional field that AI companies have suggested these would be good for, they get trashed by experts in the fields for making garbage. I have a hard time believing the only thing AI can do well is write code when it sucks so badly at everything else it does. Does development suck this much? Do developers have so little idea what they are doing that this seems like a good idea?
From his perspective, he’s investing his free time and likely money into a project for people that are 99% of the time just leechers, as in they never contribute back and only complain.
Now he has a tool that he feels helps him deal with all that FREE labor is doing for everyone, and the very same people now want to tell him how to do his FREE labor he does for them.
I completely understand being pissed off by that.
I work for a major software company. They are bragging about how much is AI code now. It’s not just things like lutris.
Honestly, unfortunately, I agree. It IS unfortunately helpful, and if you’re a competent developer using AI tooling, you can make sure it doesn’t generate slop. You are responsible for your code, at the end of the day.
AI does generate societal damage, but that’s mostly because of how companies abuse it and less because of the technology itself.
Open source stuff is awesome and I really like people improving Linux in their spare time
But, to do it this way is basically saying “fuck you” to the community which is fucked up.
Could have talked about how AI helps him or how he uses it for templates or whatever and damn even if I didn’t agree with those points either that’s a lot better than being like “alright good luck finding it now then bitch”
I wouldn’t mess with anything this guy does anymore after this.
I understand the hatred towards AI, but people gotta understand that there’s a difference between coding with AI and Vibecoding. They are DIFFERENT THINGS! AI is userful, what is not are both vibecoding and shaming a developer with 30 years of real world experience with no AI support for using it for once. Using AI is ok if you do that critically and with common sense
If it’s making commits for you you’re vibe coding.
I use it at work, I use it for troubleshooting and if I get it to generate anything for me, I stage them and review them before committing myself
No, vibe coding explicitly requires NEVER looking at the actual code. I can give claude a ticket, it creates a plan. I review that plan, maybe change some things. Then claude does the thing. I review the code, then tell claude to fix X. Then I test, then I tell claude to create a commit.
There we have claude creating a commit without any of it being vibe coded
Jokes on you, I’ve used it to untangle messy git problems (with a backup of course).
You can do that with 99.9% less damage to the environment and the working class with
git -f rebase, or even the old tried and true method ofrm -rf && git pull ....
You are correct but people in general are pretty bad at subtly and grey area. Just look at the current state of political discourse in the US. Probably half the people that support the likes of Trump do so because they like black/white binary choice and can’t handle shades of grey in their life emotionally.
Are you asking people to be rational? What kind of monster are you
I totally agree. I’m not an AI hype man. I want to scream whenever I see a PR littered with emojis, bullet lists, and way too much text for a simple change. I hate the discussions about the transformative power of AI, the 10x production gains, all the million tools, agents, skills, plugins, methods I should be using but I am already behind and old and probably unemployed next week, right? Still, AI use is not inherently bad. It gets me unstuck. It finds subtle errors I wasn’t noticing, it writes documentation faster and better than I can. I hate the companies who are pushing it, the methods of it’s training, but the tool itself is just a tool and sometimes a very useful one. IMHO we shouldn’t shame every open source developer just for using it. As long as they are responsible with it, I’m fine with some AI code in my software.
Pass
Please, go ahead and remove everything “AI” in your life. No social media. No GPS. No assist when driving or being driven. No streaming of any kind. No meteo apps. Ask your boss to remove everything related to prevision in his company. Ask your doctor to not use any tool to help his diagnosis if you have a scanner for cancer.
Let’s see how many of those you can “pass”. Or let’s see if it helps you develop a critical mind about to use which tool for which job and how to use it.
I’m already full Linux at work. Location on my mobile is always OFF unless I need it on rare occasions. I don’t stream. I self host.
Say your last sentence into a mirror today.
Bro, you are on fucking Lemmy. We are all like you. You are not special. You never ever use GPS to locate yourself, right? You never go from a to b. You never go in a shop to buy food. You never go to the doctor. You never buy anything online. You never watch YouTube. Sure.
Who hurt you
Ho, so that’s your argument? What a fucking kid. It’s easy to have an opinion. It’s harder to know why and not being a fucking parrot because you’re so edgy.
I for news for you its the same thing. There is no difference besides maybe the prompt same AI is writing the code. And I do bit believe a coder is going over every single line of code.
To be honest I don’t give a shit if a dev uses AI or not. As long as the code does what it is suppost to. In my personal experience AI, while still not anywhere near to capabilitys of a decent dev, can sometimes find and fix errors that I would have missed.
Hiding it won’t make the code any better genius.
Oops. Guess I’m uninstalling Lutris.
Personally, I have blocked Claude on GitHub, which helpfully puts a huge banner on any project it has infected.
Then unless I have absolutely no choice but using it, I get rid of it.
the temptation of using claude code is probably higher than it looks like for a single dev, I think. Hey, in the end one can just have this in their IDE and essentially have your own unpaid intern. It’s a fairly new situation.
you can criticise them but ultimately they are a unpaid developer making their work freely available to the benefit of us all. at least don’t harass the developer.
I agree with you with the current state of things in the world is hard to keep up and easy to complain. I’d say instead of asking the guy to not use AI ask him what he needs for help. He’s clearly stating that he’s in burnout.
I don’t have the time or skills to help so I wouldn’t go complaining.You make a fair point, but I feel like the trolling reaction they gave was asking for more backlash. Not responding was probably the best move.
It’s typical of dev burnout, though. Communication starts becoming more impulsive and less constructive, especially in the face of conflicts of opinions.
I’ve seen it play a few times already. A toxic community will take a dev who’s already struggling, troll them, screenshot their problematic responses, and use that in a campaign across relevant places such as github, reddit, lemmy… Maybe add a little light harassment on the side, as a treat. It’s a fun activity ! The dev spirals, posts increasingly unhinged responses and often quits as a result.
The fact that the thread is titled “is lutris slop now” is a clear indication that the intention of the poster wasn’t to contribute anything constructive but to attack the dev and put them on their back foot.
The fact that the thread is titled “is lutris slop now” is a clear indication that the intention of the poster wasn’t to contribute anything constructive but to attack the dev and put them on their back foot.
No, it was literally an important question to have answered. And booooy did the dev answer.
Is it appropriate to ask a stranger a question by first calling their work “slop” ? Is that how you communicate with people ? How is that working out irl ?
Y’all are so immersed in bully culture that this seems normal to you smh
… You’re right. I definitely wouldn’t be above such a response.
The problem is, a lot of people here - myself included - were/are also being impulsive about their responses to this issue, at least partially due to all the shitty stuff caused by GenAI.
There might be some toxic people too, I wouldn’t be surprised - but this can happen without them, too.
The thing is, toxic people thrive in mob situations and are often found leading or even manufacturing them. I tend to be wary around this kind of setups as they are easy to get caught up in and hard to get out of.
I see your point. I might also have responded poorly to that, on some level at least.
Yeah same. I’d like to think i’d answer “I’ll use AI, if you don’t like it you can fork the project and i wish you good luck. Go share your opinion on AI in an appropriate place.”. But realistically there’s a high chance it catches me on a bad day and i get stupid.
Trolling? They gave a pretty good answer explaining their reasoning.
I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not.
Seems pretty obvious to me that they knew this wouldn’t go over well. It was inflammatory by design.
Yeah ok. True. I think the rest of the post has much more weight, though. But yeah, he should have swallowed that last sentence.
They were at least. Now they’re making Claude’s code freely available.
They are on liberapay if you want to support the project btw. Combined with Patreon, they sit at less than 700$ a week. That’s like half a dev before tax
?
Yes, that’s Liberapay. You may have noticed that I mentioned Patreon.
You might as well donate to Anthropic.
They want to put clanker code that they freely admit they don’t validate into a product that goes on the computers of people who’s experience with Linux is “I heard it’s faster for games”
It’s irresponsible to hide it from review. It doesn’t matter if AI tools got better, AI tools still aren’t perfect and so you still have to do the legwork. Or at least let your community.
Also, you should let your community make ethics decisions about whether to support you.
Overall it was a rash reaction to being pressured rudely in a GitHub thread; but you know AI is a contentious topic and you went in anyway. It’s weak AF to then have a tantrum and spit in the community’s face about it.
Nothing is being hidden from review. The code is open source. They removed the specific attribution that indicates which parts of the code were created using Claude. That changes absolutely nothing about the ability to review the code, because a code review should not distinguish between human written code and machine written code; all of it should be checked thoroughly. In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
Oh, it’s more than subconscious, as you can see in this thread.
Lutris developer makes a perfectly sane and nuianced response to a reactionary “is lutris slop now” comment, and gets shit on for it, because everybody has to fight in black and white terms. There are no grey opinions, only battle lines to be drawn to these people.
What? Are you all going to shit on your lord and savior Linus himself for also saying he uses LLMs? Oh, what, you didn’t know?!?
The response is only nuanced until the “good luck” sentence. If he swallowed that it would be an almost perfect response. But that sentence is a quite big “fuck you”.
It’s not as much of a “fuck you” as much as “I’m tired of this same fucking response, when all I’m trying to do is get some work done, which I do for fucking free, by the way”.
A little personal flourish doesn’t invalidate the rest IMO. Humans get aggravated and humans are aggravating.
Yes, and I didn’t say that. I even argued in favor of his response thoughout this whole post (getting a shit ton of downvotes all along). But I think that doesn’t invalidate my point either: without this one sentence, his whole chain of arguments would have been pretty good and reasonable. It was just unnecessary to then add this snarky remark. It’s understandable if he’s pissed, but just because you are pissed when you say something doesn’t make what you said a clever move.
I get it. You can’t get by “Ai iS slOp” at top level comments anymore. I get that kind of ending because I would add it… but then I also don’t mind collecting downvotes so ymmv I guess.
If he’d just forgone that last paragraph…
