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.
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?
If you’re honestly asking, LLMs are much better at coding than any other skill right now. On one hand there’s a ton of high quality open source training data that appropriated, on the other code is structured language so is very well suited for what models “are”. Plus, code is mechanically verifiable. If you have a bunch of tests, or have the model write tests, it can check its work as it goes.
Practically, the new high end models, GPT 5.4 or Claude Opus 4.6, can write better code faster than most people can type. It’s not like 2 years ago when the code mostly wouldn’t build, rather they can write hundreds or thousands of lines of code that works first try. I’m no blind supporter of AI, and it’s very emotionally complicated watching it after years honing the craft, but for most tasks it’s simple reality that you can do more with AI than without it. Whether it’s higher quality, higher volume, or integrating knowledge you don’t have.
Professionally I don’t feel like I have a choice, if I want to stay employed in the field at least.
Professionally I don’t feel like I have a choice, if I want to stay employed in the field at least.
On the contrary!
I’ve seen quite a number of “AI cleanup specialist” job offerings so far, and even a few consulting positions on training juniors away from using AI in development.
(No, I have not seen any position open on training management away from using AI…)
Aaaaand just uninstalled lutris. There are many other ways to install windows games and applications that aren’t ensloppified.
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 mean, a reasonable person would choose to stop rather than becoming an unethical egotistical fuckwit…
I mean, I get if you wanna use AI for that, it’s your project, it’s free, you’re a volunteer, etc. I’m just not sure I like the idea that they’re obscuring what AI was involved with. I imagine it was done to reduce constant arguments about it, but I’d still prefer transparency.
I tried fitting AI into my workloads just as an experiment and failed. It’ll frequently reference APIs that don’t even exist or over engineer the shit out of something could be written in just a few lines of code. Often it would be a combo of the two.
Yeah I mean. It’s not like AI can think. It’s just a glorified text predictor, the same you have on your phone keyboard
It’s like having an idiot employee that works for free. Depending on how you manage them, that employee can either do work to benefit you or just get in your way.
Only it’s not free. If you run it in the cloud, it’s heavily subsidized and proactively destroying the planet, and if you run it at home, you’re still using a lot of increasingly unaffordable power, and if you want something smarter than the average American politician, the upfront investment is still very significant.
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 codebase is vibecoded or coded with ai assist and those who don’t like it can fork it or use something else.
Also be transparent when you have vibecoded commits. There’s no reason to hide it.
I find it rather ironic that one thing they are transparent about is the covering up the evidence that proves it was vibecoded. Apparently, they never heard of the Strainsand Effect.
Tbh I agree, if the code is appropriate why care if it’s generated by an LLM
It’s still made by the slop machine, the same one that could only be created by stealing every human made artwork that’s ever been published. (And this is not “just one company”, every LLM has this issue.)
Not only that, the companies building massive datacenters are taking valuable resources from people just trying to live.
If the developer isn’t able to keep up, they should look for (co-)maintainers. Not turn to the greedy megacorps.
A few years ago we were all arguing about how copyright is unfair to society and should be abolished.
Sure, but these same companies will drag you to court and rake you over the coals if you infringe on their copyrights.
The AI hate crowd on Lemmy is pretty insufferable. Same folks would be complaining about Cloud tech back in the day.
Know the limits of AI and use it appropriately. Completely shunning AI is just silly.
Weak moral compass
The maintainer openly admitted to suspecting this would be become an issue and hid the co-authorship, promptly telling the “haters” to wish them luck finding the AI generated code. Who are the insufferable ones here again?
I don’t care how many years of coding you have if your using AI to clear your backlog you are not going to review everything. And I’m sick of people saying I’m different I am using AI responsible. We all know eventually there well be a bug out in by AI.
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.
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.
