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.
There’s a problem with that. The vast majority of Linux users are probably more tech savvy than average but I’d wager not all of them or even the vast majority have the skills to vet the code.
Lots of the people in the gaming space who are having Lutris suggested/recommended to them are not going in to check that code for problems. They install the flatpak on move on with their lives.
It appears (from what I’ve read which isn’t necessarily the end all be all) that the people taking exception to the use of AI to code Lutris are doing so because they do decompile and vet code.
My understanding is that it’s harder to get AI code in general because when it hallucinates it may do so in ways that appear correct on the surface, and or do so in ways that don’t even give a significant indication of what that code is attempting to do. This is the problem with vibe coding in general from my understanding and it becomes harder and harder even for senior code engineers to check the output because of the lack of a frame of reference.
You’re asking people who don’t have the skills to ignore people who do have the skills who are sounding the alarm.
I get that this person is a single person writing code and disseminating it for free. I get that we should be thankful for free and open software. I fully understand why this person might use AI to help with coding.
I understand that they are upset about the backlash. But that was a very much foreseeable consequence of the credits they gave the AI (a choice they made), and honestly the use of AI (which might have been called out later on if they hadn’t credited it).
They shot themselves in the foot with the part of their response that was flippant and a “fuck you” to anyone who might find the use of AI concerning.
There’s also the fact that AI is something that a lot of people in the Linux community at large seem to already be boycotting and boycotting derivatives of it make sense.
Just because you create something for free doesn’t mean people have to use it. Or that people aren’t free to boycott it.
Thanks for that long answer. I agree completely with the second half of it. I also agree with most of the first half of it, but I have to add a remark to it:
That is mostly true, but also depends on the usage. You don’t have to tell an agent to “develop feature X” and then go for a coffee. You can issue relatively narrow scoped prompts that yield small amounts of changes/code which are far easier to review. You can work that way in small iterations, making it completely possible to follow along and adjust small things instead of getting a big ball of mud to entangle.
And while it’s true that not everyone is able to vet code, that was also true before and without coding agents. Yet people run random curl-piped-to-bash commands they copy from some website because it says it will install whatever. They install something from flathub without looking at the source (not even talking about chain of trust for the publishing process here). There is so much bad code out there written by people who are not really good engineers but who are motivated enough to put stuff together. They also made and make ugly mistakes that are hard to spot and due to bad code quality hard to review.
The main risk of agents is, that they also increase the speed of these developers which means they pump out even more bad code. But the underlying issue existed before and agents don’t automatically mean something is bad. That would also be dangerous to believe that, because that might enforce even more the feeling of security when using a piece of code that was (likely) written without any AI influence. But that’s just not true; this code could be as harmful or even more harmful. You simply don’t know if you don’t review it. And as you said: most people don’t.