r/linux • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 4d ago
Development Flathub just reversed its AI-generated content ban, but developers still need to say they used it
https://www.xda-developers.com/flathub-just-reversed-its-ai-generated-content-ban-but-developers-still-need-to-say-they-used-it/157
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u/Dakota_Sneppy 3d ago
Oh great, the sloppening.
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u/Adept_Percentage6893 3d ago
Banning AI written code is basically unenforceable unless the person is just being absolutely obvious about using AI.
Saying you've banned AI code gives people the false sense that the code they rely on isn't AI generated.
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u/OsseusOccult 3d ago
Flair checks out in the best way possible. I'm glad we all can look forward to Slophub.
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u/ChickenWingBaron 4d ago
Any platform banning AI-assisted code is basically shooting themselves in the foot. The tech is extremely useful and undoubtedly here to stay. What we need is not a ban on this technology but a better way to determine if a project was made by an actual developer using AI as an assistant, or someone with no programming knowledge just vibe coding slop.
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u/Nalivai 4d ago
The tech is extremely useful and undoubtedly here to stay.
This is not as unquestionable position as you think. There is significant number of research that shows that relying on LLM feels like you're saving time, even when you actually take longer to do the same task. And that's with subsidized costs. There is a world when the bubble pops before we collectively lose our minds, and this overreliance on LLM will go away.
There is, unfortunately, also a world where we're all in hell of our own making.141
u/PoL0 3d ago
and there's also a more concerning one: cognitive surrender.
personally don't like the people behind it and the intellectual theft it's based on.
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u/Waryle 3d ago
personally don't like the people behind it
Let's be honest: it's not just assholes, it's people whose endgame is replacing all workforce with AI and machines, to not rely on people their have to trust and pay, to funnel all money and power their way, and automate “law and order” (= the use of brutality) to repress all dissent and social movements that might impair their plans
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u/tmahmood 3d ago
Yeah. The people behind them has questionable ethical standard, and policies. To me it feels like there's something dark and twisted behind all of their goody good, polished front, and we are just being pulled under to something deep, by this lovecraftian creature. And over and over, everything they do, just strengthens the feeling, not relieve.
It worse than dotcom boom. I am not comfortable with where we are heading.
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u/FyreWulff 2d ago
It's pretty basic to me and it feels like everyone should be seeing them holding the string connected to the stick holding up the trap like in a cartoon.
They want people and companies to become dependent on AI generation so that they can get them trapped in paying loads of money to keep using it.
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u/AffectionatePlastic0 3d ago
Ford also had very, very questionable ethical standards. But this is not a reason to don't use cars.
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u/WorkingMansGarbage 3d ago
- Modern cars as a whole do not depend on Ford components to operate like how all language models in use today use stolen pre-training data or how most chatbots just directly call ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini APIs
- Yes it is and there's also about a billion reasons why you shouldn't use cars
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u/Willing_Ebb7894 3d ago
There's definitely reasons to not use cars, but the way urban planning is basically everywhere outside of europe makes owning and using a car a requirement for most working people. Outside of employers demanding it, there's nothing forcing people to become dependant on ai.
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u/tmahmood 3d ago
Not the same situation.
Ford, is a business entity, not trying to hide that, and we know they are doing bad things. Obviously when they started they did those drama already. But their power was limited.
Not this AI companies.
These AI companies are built on our information, gathered by manipulation, data brokers, then locking us out of computing, so that we can't do it ourselves anymore. And acting like a human kinds savior. Acting like highly ethical organization, whereas they are built on deception.
These guys are creepy. And they have more power over us, globally.
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u/Willing_Ebb7894 3d ago
This is more or less the same point I was trying to make. These 2 things are just not comprable imo. But the comment I was replying to was trying to insinuate that people are hypocritical for refusing to use AI while using a car makes them complicit in the dubious ethics of whatever manufacturer made their car. This is a bullshit comparison as modern infrastructure/city planning disadvantages people who dont own a car unless you're lucky enough to live somewhere that actually has good public transit.
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u/alchemi80 3d ago
How does AI lock us out of computing so that we can't do it ourselves anymore? Is this just because you think everyone will forget how to code?
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u/tmahmood 3d ago
Look at the price of RAM, SSD, GPU, and these prices are growing. Open ai started this by booking up all fabs for next few years. Buying a decent spec for compute going to cost as much as a car.
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u/alchemi80 3d ago
I see, this is from an economic/PC hardware availability perspective. Thanks, friend.
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u/Willing_Ebb7894 3d ago
Ah yes, not using cars in our society that all but requires a mode of transport is definitely comprable to not giving money to the water guzzling copyright infringement machine. This is some "you complain about society and yet you live within one" ass reasoning.
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u/OsseusOccult 3d ago edited 3d ago
There was a study a year ago on some open source circles that I saw (I wish I could find it) that showed it dropped overall productivity about 27% because efficiencies gained were made up for by the actual review process being more difficult. I'll do some digging later for it.
I also love that a lot of the arguments for AI amount to "but what if you're an asshole and don't care about theft/weakening FOSS licenses or the environmental and psychological devastation?"
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u/ShuppaGail 3d ago
Yeah, with the speed AI is moving at, a study published a year ago (meaning it probably has data from like a year and a half ago) might as well have been published 15 years ago in almost any other domain.
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u/lemontoga 3d ago
Luckily Harvard published an updated study 2 months ago so we don't have to rely on such outdated data.
Spoiler alert: they found the exact same thing is still true. All the benefits you gain from having a machine vomit out slop code are lost in the increased burden of reviewing that code.
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u/Redholl 1d ago
This paper has not been confirmed as published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, nor has it undergone any verified independent peer review.
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u/whinis 3d ago
The problem is this same argument is repeated every 6 months whenever a new paper is published "oh ya that model was trash." So either its always been trashed or these studies are showing a common trend.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 3d ago
Subjectively, there was a clear line around 6 months ago where models switched from not worth it to worth it, at least in terms of time spent.
So, yes, all the worst people will make the same exhausting, thoughtless arguments: "It's only gonna get better," "It's inevitable," or even more infuriating, "You just have to prompt better" or "That study you quoted that took a month to do is invalid, because it ran on a month-old model"... and they've been saying the same thing since these things could barely write something that compiled at all. I hate that they've been right, because they could not possibly have known. They were applying this kind of logic the whole time.
But the models are indeed getting better.
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u/whinis 3d ago
Models have constantly been getting better but even current studies, such as harvard have shown that even in coding the overall productivity increase is effectively zero. It might make coding faster but that code is harder to review or modify.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 2d ago
I hate to say it, but: I did just say "there was a clear line around 6 months ago", which would've been the most recent update to that paper. If they come back in 6 months and show the models I use weren't helping, fair enough.
The other complaint is of course about methodology: Measuring productivity through Jira issues closed is better than lines of code, but not by much. A reviewer with a chatbot just found a massive bug in something we built. I know what you're thinking, but it's a massive design bug in a dependency that we adopted two years ago, before we were even allowed to use Copilot. So the bots didn't cause the bug, but they did identify it, and it's too severe to ignore. As a result, those Jira tasks are gonna take a hell of a lot longer to close.
That seems obviously beneficial to me, but the study would measure it as a net decrease in productivity. I closed negative Jiras this week.
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u/whinis 2d ago
You are the first I have talked to, atleast online, willing to check back later rather than just repeat the same "that was old" line. As far are Jira/LOC/ some other measure, this is the problem in all software engineering. Productivity is not super obvious at an individual level or organization level, best you can get in a study is atleast measuring everyone the same way.
In my organization clearing Jira tickets is the main measure but I got reprimanded my first couple of quarters here because I followed the policies exactly of 1 ticket per feature instead of what was actually happening of most engineers making a ticket for about 3-4 hours of work. Principle engineers are expected to clear 100-150 tickets per week with each lower level expecting 33% less than the last. Meanwhile literally nothing gets done because thats the metric and not anything functional. AI didn't change number of tickets cleared here nor did it increase features shipped or really anything, the problems are not at the code level.
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u/Defiant-Plantain1873 3d ago
Yep. Compare a model from 6 months ago to the current frontier and claim that there is no way AI makes programming quicker
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u/G-Litch 3d ago
Delivering bugs ✨faster✨
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u/Defiant-Plantain1873 3d ago
Linux kernel uses ai written code.
Clearly its not bad and serves a purpose, just because you want to try and protect your job or hobby that does not at all make these tools ineffective in the slightest
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u/lemontoga 3d ago
How about a study from 2 months ago?
I've been hearing this dumb "You can't use that study because it's X months / years out of date. The models used to suck, but now they're so good. Literally everything's changed in the last 6 months!" repeated over and over again every few months for like 2 years now.
Also the models from 6 months ago aren't even really better by Anthropic's own admissions.
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u/FyreWulff 2d ago
It's because it's just stitching together code it stole from somewhere else so you're just inheriting everyone's technical debt instantly
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u/Indolent_Bard 3d ago
And yet if you're not using AI to find bugs, bad actors are, you have no choice but to use AI.
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
Except we have actual projects being made (like AnyPS5) that wouldn't be possible otherwise in such a short amount of time.
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u/Honey_Catfish950 3d ago
That project is only a couple of months old and already has over 3000 commits in its git history. I remain skeptical of any AI coded project until they've been successfully maintained for at least a couple years to demonstrate the author has the ability to keep the architecture from exploding and manages to avoid the vibe coder's trap of becoming the "new guy on my own project."
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
Agreed, that's my stance as well. AI based projects are good but only if the author is able to maintain it for atleast a year. That's why I'll revisit it in late 2027 to see if it is still alive.
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 3d ago
"oh you're mad that the economy and job market will crash, that we're destroying the planet, and that we're stealing human-made content to generate brainrot? seems like you forgot that we can now play some PS5 games on PC"
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
"noooo people can't use AI because I don't like it, my opinion matters the most; let me just ban AI in my project that no one cares about surely that'd undo AI and openai/anthropic will magically cease to exist"
Istg idealistic morons are the reason why linux community is insufferable.
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u/Hegemonikon138 3d ago
It's incredibly cringe. Like an annoying whine that keeps going. I've unsubbed this place is like preschool
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u/FanClubof5 3d ago
I was able to reverse engineer an old smart clock I had that still worked but the manufacturer went out of business ~2 years ago. I can now add in new functionality and support for features that were either possible in the hardware but never fully implemented as well as supporting new things like replacing Alexa with local assistant.
I would never have had the time or skills to do most of that work and it's such a niche product it's unlikely anyone else would have either.
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
Exactly. I'm also working on things that I otherwise would never even dare to try.
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
I reverse engineered an old bluetooth kettle once about a decade ago. It took me embarrassingly long time, because I had to learn a lot of new things back then. I know much more things now, and I did a similar job recently in a fraction of the time.
You asked a chatbot to generate you something, and it did. You didn't learn nearly as much, and you would take the same time next time, because you didn't do it now.
You outsourced the only thing that makes you a human to a text predictor, and you did the same that people were able to do since forever, but instead of benefiting yourself, you hurt yourself, and probably had to pay for it.7
u/flecom 3d ago
you hurt yourself, and probably had to pay for it.
a little melodramatic don't you think?
they wanted their clock to work, now it works
just because you had to go through pain doesn't mean everyone else wants to...
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u/gladtobeblazed 3d ago
So the next time you break a bone or cut yourself you are going to spend the time to learn how to set it or stitch yourself up instead of going to a doctor? Why would you deny yourself the joy of learning? Are you stupid?
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u/Kevin_Kofler 3d ago
Oh, back when vibe coding was not a thing yet, we have seen incredible code drops done by one person in a 24-hour overnighter.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 3d ago
Not on the level of "reverse and reimplement 80%+ of the PS5 standard libraries in two months" we haven't.
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
Which is very unhealthy and people have lives outside of programming.
I'm not denying that there are outstanding coding beast out there (vaxry, maintainer of Hyprland is one such insane people). My point is that even then the difference is night and day.
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u/Vaxerski Hyprland Dev 8h ago
true there were times back in the day where I'd no-life some specific work on hyprland and can confirm it was very unhealthy
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u/noobjaish 7h ago
Damn, I hope you stay healthy man. Reserve time for yourself, commits can wait :)
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u/Vaxerski Hyprland Dev 7h ago
thanks and no worries I've been developing much more healthily since, and that was like back 2 years ago with the ridding of wlroots saga
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u/noobjaish 7h ago
wlroots saga was one hell of a fever dream (instigated by a bunch of manchildren)
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u/Vaxerski Hyprland Dev 7h ago
maybe, but in the end it was a great move. Independence let us adapt faster and better with stuff like HDR for example.
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
that wouldn't be possible otherwise
This is, once again, isn't as unquestionable position as you think. It's not the first emulator people made. Humanity was doing impressive shit before, and unless we actually fry our brains with this shit, will be able to do impressive shit in the future.
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u/noobjaish 3d ago edited 3d ago
AnyPS5 is a few months old and is already at 80%+ (you can test quite a few games already on it).
It took Wine, Waydroid and all the amazing console emulators DECADES and an insane amount of effort to reach usable states.
Someone recreated the entire Adobe suite in a few months (and surprisingly it's very usable) meanwhile Gimp is still dogshit even after decades of work.
People have lives outside of sitting infront of their computers in their basements.
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u/AliceCode 3d ago
PS5 runs on x86_64, previous consoles did not. That's a large part of the reason it's so much easier.
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u/starm4nn 3d ago
The original Xbox was using regular 'ol x86, and it's only been in the last decade or so that emulation was in a good state.
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u/AliceCode 3d ago
And emulators for the original Xbox were made, so what's your point?
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u/starm4nn 13h ago
The emulator wasn't made during the lifespan of the console like we're seeing here.
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u/FyreWulff 2d ago
that's because 95% of the games peopled care about on it also had PC versions. It doesn't even have an exclusive Halo game, both Halo 1 and 2 had PC versions.
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u/Lawnmover_Man 3d ago
It took Wine, Waydroid and all the amazing console emulators DECADES and an insane amount of effort to reach usable states.
..........what? Decades for usable state?
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u/Brillegeit 3d ago
I assume "running games using DirectX12" is the goalpost for "usable" here. Wine was usable in the late '90s, and Codeweavers sold licenses to it in 2002.
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
Wine is so much not the same thing as anyPS5, it's not even funny. Waydroid initial commit is 5 years old.
They are also pieces of software built at least partially to be supported in the future, and so far all the big slopped projects are the opposite of those, and you can go far and wide if you don't care about the future.6
u/noobjaish 3d ago
Wine is so much not the same thing as anyPS5, it's not even funny.
I never claimed that it was? I was listing
Waydroid initial commit is 5 years old.
It takes a lot of stuff from other projects that existed before it (Anbox, Halium etc) + AOSP is open-source while PlaystationOS isn't
They are also pieces of software built at least partially to be supported in the future, and so far all the big slopped projects are the opposite of those, and you can go far and wide if you don't care about the future.
That's just your assumption because the ability to make this stuff at scale with AI is barely a year old. These projects use spec-driven development to contain the chaos and essentially work feature by feature (that is clearly them being serious about maintaining this stuff in the future).
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u/Nalivai 3d ago edited 3d ago
I never claimed that it was? I was listing
Than why did you mentioned it. Significantly more complicated, completely different project took longer to make, what's the news? Linux took decades to build, therefore it's impossible for humans to make anything quickly, right?
It takes a lot of stuff from other projects that existed before it
I would like you to remember that you're defending an LLM. This is like it's whole thing.
hese projects use spec-driven development to contain the chaos and essentially work feature by feature
This doesn't change anything. All development is spec-driven development, the difference is scope. But if your realization of a feature is write-only, your complete product will be write-only, no matter how detailed your interface descriptions are. We just went through all that with microservice infrastructure, it didn't automagically solve all the problems. Neither did TDD. Neither will this "what if nobody knows what in this blackbox, this way nobody can tell if it's shit" approach.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 3d ago
He mentioned it because WINE and AnyPS5 are both taking the translate syscalls and run code natively approach and they're both doing it at a system-wide scope.
WINE is more complex, sure, but it's not as far off as you seem to be pretending.
He's also explaining how to use an AI effectively to you because you clearly don't know, you arguing such pointless semantics about it is just sad.
You're a fool if you think the speed that AnyPS5 was developed at would have been possible by one person before AI.
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u/BoomGoomba 3d ago
You're forgetting that it is trained on this decade of code
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
And?
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u/BoomGoomba 3d ago
If I copy-paste an entire code base, are you also gonna claim I did a decade worth of work in a single day?
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
LLMs don't copy paste... If you call that copy pasting then looking for solutions on Stackoverflow and Reddit is also copy pasting and is the exact same thing that basically every dev does.
Are you being obtuse on purpose?
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u/BoomGoomba 3d ago
I did not claim LLMs copy-paste. They however have been proven to remember and restitute entire parts of their training data.
What I am claiming is that building something after it has already been built is not as huge as you want it to be. No one would claim a developer did a decade amount of work for that. Let alone a LLM that can digest and repurpose way more existing code. So it's even less of an achievement for a LLM.
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u/shalodey 3d ago
For the record, AnyPS5 is not an emulator but a full decompilation of the PS5 which allows for most games to be recompiled to run natively on other systems. I am generally vehemently against LLM programming, but to me there is no doubt that LLMs are simply magnitudes better at reverse engineering complex systems than humans ever could be. Still skeptical of its use in other programming areas, but 85% of the system libraries and 100% of the GPU shaders being reverse engineered on a modern system over the span of a couple months is decompilation at a rate we have never seen before.
Of course, this sets a horrible precedent for cybersecurity. LLMs produce insecure code, and are simultaneously really good at reverse engineering and spotting vulnerabilities in systems
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u/GammaGames 3d ago
How much did it cost to have a bot make all that?
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
IDK ask the project maintainers
I use an opencode go sub (costs 10$) which gives you 60$ worth of Deepseek V4.1 Flash usage which is basically infinite for my usecases and has a geniune impact on my dev speed (been working on a project and in a single week I was able to do as much work as I did in the past 6 months.
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u/mikat7 3d ago
How can $10 give you $60 worth of something? Isn't that the subsidy mentioned a few replies above?
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u/-Sa-Kage- 3d ago
None of the LLMs is anywhere near being profitable. If they'd charge their users the real costs, people would very quickly move away from AI
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u/dontquestionmyaction 3d ago
The API pricing isn't how much inference actually costs. That's with a fat profit margin already built in.
Subscriptions are better for predictable cash flow, so you get more for less. This is really pretty basic.
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u/lemontoga 3d ago
To be clear that "fat profit margin" is after you subtract basically every single cost that it takes to make any of this possible. If you get rid of all those annoying expensive things then, yes, there's very fat profit margins.
Kinda like how my lemonade stand has really great profit margins because my Mom buys all the supplies for me.
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u/noobjaish 3d ago
Idk but somehow using deepseek v4.1 flash via their API is more expensive than through the Opencode go sub
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u/daniel-sousa-me 3d ago
You're stuck in time. I'm doing weeks worth of work in a day
The claim that LLMs were subsidised was always questionable, but now it's just laughable. Anthropic has had two consecutive quarters with profits. Currently the margins are estimated at around 80%
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
Well, if you believe Antropic profitability, I have a subprime morgage bond to sell you real quick. Huge margins, very green.
In order to show you the line going up they did more financial shenanigans than should be legal, including something that almost certainly is. Which doesn't even matter, you're still paying fraction of the price they want you to pay, and they will adjust it the second your brain stops working on it's own, if they not collapse when the bubble pops (although we're in a darkest timeline so of course they wouldn't).I'm doing weeks worth of work in a day
Every single time we measured it scientifically, we have found that people unbelievably overestimate how helpful llm is in both time and quality. But sure, you're the only one who is immune both to propaganda and to cognitive bias. You need to be studied.
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u/Meeesh- 3d ago
Using LLMs absolutely save time. That research is likely old. At this point in time I’m legitimately working on 2 teams at the same time at work. I spend 4-6 hours a day on my real team but I spend 2-4 hours a day working on another team with heavy AI workflows.
I’m delivering faster on my main team than I ever have before with less time and I have the capacity to spend time on this other team to learn. I was very skeptical of AI before and cited the same research, but at this point we are completing end-to-end delivery from product idea to implementation to QA customer in less time, not just task.
The cost is a lot and I’m using over $10k a month in tokens, but my employer is encouraging it so I’m taking advantage while I can so that I can keep up.
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u/BourbonXenon 3d ago
That's $120k/y that eliminated a QA tester, junior dev, etc. That's multiple roles no longer needed for your work, so the LLM tokens are likely saving the company money while also increasing development velocity.
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u/untrained9823 3d ago
Not to mention the phenomenon of model collapse. The internet is full of slop now so there's no clean data to train the new models with anymore and training them with AI-generated content leads to garbage models.
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u/inoffensiveLlama 3d ago
I saw this as well. I am very curious if this has changed since the last time I looked at it.
I do think there is nothing wrong with using it though. But just as the original comment said, in my opinion it really needs to be enforced, that people say if they used AI and how much it was used.→ More replies (7)16
u/Nalivai 3d ago
I do think there is nothing wrong with using it though.
I do. Cognitive decline, if nothing else.
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u/AliceCode 3d ago
Copyright violation, cognitive decline, environmental harm, propaganda, surveillance, lack of accountability, loss of the arts, watering down of software engineering principles, making programming pay-to-win, overreliance on a third-party, and the list goes on.
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u/MorallyDeplorable 3d ago
Copyright violation
Already settled and it's not
cognitive decline
Baseless fear
environmental harm
Basically a non-factor and is being laughably over-exaggerated
propaganda
Like everything you've listed?
surveillance
Already possible and being done, more datacenters won't really move the needle here
lack of accountability
You're still responsible for stuff you put out
loss of the arts
expansion of the arts by democratizing the ability to create
watering down of software engineering principles
learn how to set up project guidelines? this is definitely the most overblown fear
making programming pay-to-win
already was at any sort of scale. If anything it's cheaper now because you can hire fewer people to get the same job done.
overreliance on a third-party
everything in computers is built on the shoulders of giants who came first
and the list goes on.
keep going, this is funny
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 3d ago
You're right, though my take is that copyright is a mistake that only empowers the rich while fooling the rest of us into thinking it's a good system and everyone would be better off without "intellectual property" as a concept.
Cognitive decline isn't baseless, but it's also not new. Anyone who worked in the trenches and then went into management has experienced loss of skills. That's how our brains work and we just need to be concious of it.
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u/haywire 3d ago
That study was many model versions ago and absolutely doesn’t track.
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
I am arguing on that for years already, and the song is always this. I point out that the results are shit, and the answer is always "no they're not, they're amazing, you're shit, and all the stuff you don't like is from previous models, that were obviously bad, new models are good though", and it happens every new cycle.
The people from those studies (there was more that one) were as sure that their shit is the shit as you are right now. The only difference is, year after year people's brains get worse because of their overreliance on llm chatbot, and someone who was capable of doing tasks before can't do them anymore. But that's my assumption, on that I don't have any research info.1
u/lemontoga 3d ago
Here's a more recent study Harvard put out that came to the exact same conclusion.
How long are you guys gonna cope about this?
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u/haywire 1d ago
Skill issue tbh.
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u/lemontoga 1d ago
All those dumbass companies just can't figure it out! But also, AI is so damn smart it's so capable and it can make you incredibly productive. But, it's really dumb so you have to know the exact right way to use it or it's a skill issue. But it's so smart! But you better know exactly how to use it or you'll just waste money and experience literally no upside.
See how you guys live in both worlds at the same time?
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u/Adept_Percentage6893 3d ago
bold of you to assume that workers are still needed when we get to that point. I kind of envision a world where [we all stop receiving pay checks the same way Milton did when they "fix the glitch" of needing to pay other humans to do economically viable work.
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u/coljackson42069 2d ago
Meme response. The METER study you’re referring to’s own authors now treat the finding as dated, and they could not repeat it because professionals refused to give the tool up. A fad does not behave this way.
If people misjudge their own speed, the answer is to stop relying on self-report. It is not to abandon the tool. The studies that measure output directly find PLENTY of gains.
And even if every subsidy vanished tomorrow, today's capabilities would keep getting cheaper.
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u/ldn-ldn 3d ago
None of that research focuses on the actual development process and its positive impact on software developers. Let me explain with my personal experience.
I really wanted to make my own self-hosted recipe management system as I cook a lot. The reason for that is that existing solutions don't have a good UX/UI and are a PITA to use while in the middle of cooking. So my main focus is on user experience, not features.
The problem? Nice UX prototype doesn't do shit, so I still have to write a lot of code I don't want to: authorisation, backend with DB, etc. I have over two decades of professional software development experience and I really don't want to write this shit again, set up all configs, dependencies, etc. I've come to hate all this copy/paste nonsense over the years. And starting a new pet project was always a huge chore, so a few years ago I just stopped.
And that's where AI changed everything for me - I don't have to waste my time and my mental capacity on chores anymore. I can focus on what I want to do and leave all other stupid nonsense to AI. Instead of spending months on writing CRUD code, and making login pages with OIDC support, I can spend months on UX, test it with my wife and family. The project takes even more time now to develop, but I'm not mentally exhausted by all the stupid shit I hate to write. Instead, I'm having fun and when I'm done I will have a product I really really like.
One of my colleagues says that writing code is now cheap and fast. That's true. But I like to add that while writing code is now cheap and fast, delivering high quality projects is now more expensive and take more time than ever. Because now, after decades of crunch, copy/pasting, and struggling, we, the developers, can finally do what WE want to do, the way WE want to do.
Not using AI all day every day means only one thing - you have zero creativity and you hate yourself.
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u/RealLiraShit 3d ago
I'm not an AI proponent, but y'all really have to look deeper; this is like pointing at hordes of people using a tool poorly and then broadly stating it slows everyone down, assuming no one is using it well, and that no one should try to use it well.
No matter what tool it is, observing how the masses use it is not an indicator of its actual utility or potential. The pitfalls masses fall into are not always worth bringing up when discussing what potential or current utility a tool has in the hands of someone paying attention to their relationship to the tool.
This statement has always felt like this to me: "There's plenty of research showing that people using a wrench to drive in nails are slower, but they're actually taking more time, you should stop using wrenches."
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
I wonder what stage of grief that is.
At first, it's the best thing ever and can do anything.
Then it's the best thing ever and can do anything but you need to use the latest and the most expensive version.
Then it's still the best thing ever, but apparently if the results are shit you're just doing it wrong, and you need to be an elite whatever for it to bring you any benefits.
That's kind of the point of research, you know. To find a representative group. If nobody you can see uses the tool correctly, and those who do are never observed and researched, and you can't talk to them they're in another town right now very busy, maybe, just maybe, the tool is just shit, it's all scam and ruse and there is a guy behind the curtain stealing your money while you in awe with chatbot?1
u/RealLiraShit 3d ago
You're attaching a lot of baggage to me that I never advocated for. You don't get to tie me down to the statements and arguments other people made.
I'm aware that the current shitlord techbros who own all this aren't trying to make a better world, or even a good tool; they're trying to exploit and make money.
That doesn't mean the broad strokes you're painting the situation/tools with is appropriate. That doesn't mean local models aren't useful, that doesn't mean every model in the hands of every user slows the user down while making them think they're more efficient.
The amount of assumptions you're making here is telling btw.
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u/TsunderRae 3d ago
This is something I figured out quick. I do not have formal programming training and limited experience, and tried to use chatgpt 3.0 years ago to assist in modifying a javascript program. It was so frustrating, and kept breaking so many things over and over, that I ended up just learning how to do it myself. Never used LLM's to assist in programming again, and I'm better off for it.
Yes, I know the tech has gotten better since then. Yes, I know the LLM I used was not fine tuned for programming. I don't care. The lesson I got from that was doing it myself was much more gratifying than handing it over to a machine anyway.
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u/svprdga 3d ago
I understand that you’re not a programmer. Those of us who do this professionally know that AI is here to stay. It’s simply too powerful and useful a tool not to use. That means good programmers will create better software. Note that I’m not saying they’ll necessarily work faster, but the software will definitely be higher quality.
I’m leaving vibe coders out of the equation, of course. I’m talking about professional programmers.
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u/Nalivai 3d ago
I have 20 years of professional programming experience, and I work in an environment where software quality is important. From what I see around me, and from what I experience myself, none of that is actually true. LLM doesn't on average make it faster, unless all that you do is write-only quick proof of concept prototypes. LLM doesn't make the code better. LLM doesn't make the product better. You end up taking more energy and time to actually make it good, than if you did it yourself, and this defies the whole purpose.
What it undeniably does, is it makes it easier on the brain. And since people are hardwired to conserve brain energy, they are holding to this like crazy, and are willing to lie to themselves about the quality and speed, just so they can conserve some energy on actual thinking. It demonstrably makes professional programmers less professional. It makes the process of learning new things harder, it makes problem solving skills worse.
And that's not even talking about the fact that you actually need professionals to do even that, and those aren't immortal, and since LLM actually prevents learning, we will start to run out of those at some point, if LLM is here to stay. And we will end up praying to the gods of the machine in hopes it will bring us something that nobody can understand.0
u/svprdga 3d ago
I disagree with your opinion, at least based on what I see in my day to day work and in the experience of some close colleagues.
In my case, I use LLMs mostly for simple tasks, reviews, and routine tasks where the probability of failure is low. What I’ve observed in my business isn’t that I work faster, but that the final quality is better, especially because LLMs can point out edge cases and potential bugs before they make it into production.
On the other hand, I have a close colleague who works at an international payments company. There, reliability and security are extremely important, and operations need to be done properly. They’ve implemented AI effectively, and they’re now much more productive, they ship things faster and with higher quality.
Of course, there are also cases like the ones you mention, but as time goes on, those who don’t know how to take advantage of AI will disappear, while those who do will be the ones leading the way.
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u/Ursa_Solaris 3d ago
but the software will definitely be higher quality.
When? Because that absolutely has not happened yet.
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u/svprdga 3d ago
Now. That’s the case with the software I distribute. AI doesn’t make me work faster, but it has undoubtedly improved the quality of my output.
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u/Ursa_Solaris 3d ago
Every developer I've asked this question has said it makes them more effective, every single one, and yet nobody can explain why collectively nothing has gotten any better. Don't you find that strange? Everyone is better but nothing is.
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u/svprdga 3d ago
Your objection is reasonable, but no, I don’t find it strange. The reason is the following:
- AI is a fairly new tool. Like any tool, it has a learning curve; it may seem like it’s simply a matter of “throwing prompts at it” and that’s it, but there’s more to it than that.
- There’s the overly seductive idea that with a single prompt, it can do the work for you with almost no effort on your part. I don’t think that’s the case; it simply allows you to reorganize your workflow.
Many programmers may fall into the trap of trusting it too much. As I said, it’s a seductive idea.
In my case, there isn’t a single character produced by AI that I haven’t carefully reviewed.
We’re still in the early stages of AI adoption. Professionals need training and need to learn how to use it properly. Companies need to learn to use it for what it is: a tool that requires dedication and effort, not a silver bullet that will boost their profits with almost no work.
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u/Ursa_Solaris 3d ago
In my case, there isn’t a single character produced by AI that I haven’t carefully reviewed.
And every developer I've talked to said that too. They all insist they're the ones using it correctly in a sea of slop, that everyone else is using it wrong but not them. Do you understand why, as a sysadmin who has to deploy dozens to hundreds of software packages for my users and systems, and has not seen any notable difference in the last two years, this starts looking like a collective psychosis to me?
We have trillions of dollars invested in it, the internet has been flooded with bots and generated media, we can barely afford to deploy new computers because of supply crunches if we can even find stock, and literally nobody can tell me what we're supposed to be actually getting for all this. Developers just insist it's good and when I ask to prove it they tell me they personally feel great. Or, occasionally, they just snarl at me and call me a Luddite and member of the "permanent underclass".
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u/MorallyDeplorable 3d ago
This is not as unquestionable position as you think.
It really is
There is significant number of research that shows that relying on LLM feels like you're saving time, even when you actually take longer to do the same task.
Only if you don't know anything about what you're doing
And that's with subsidized costs. There is a world when the bubble pops before we collectively lose our minds, and this overreliance on LLM will go away.
Open-source models you can run at home are on the verge of being just as useful as the big ones and can already do many things
There is, unfortunately, also a world where we're all in hell of our own making.
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u/ExaHamza 4d ago
Many of the problems raised by those who wanted to ban AI are legitimate; I just think they tried to solve them from the wrong perspective. Licensing issues, code laundering, ethics... banning the use of AI doesn't solve any of that. On the contrary, it denies open-source projects the reuse of a tool often trained with data from the open-source itself, which is paradoxical.
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u/KnowZeroX 4d ago
I don't see any paradox, but there is the issue that if you published your closed source software in flathub with ai slop it would go through, but open source wouldn't because people could review the code and see the slop. That is a problem for sure.
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u/my_name_isnt_clever 3d ago
So don't use closed source software from Flathub? Closed source being harder to trust is not remotely new.
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u/Zomunieo 4d ago
I tried packaging an open source app in Flatpak and it was a really chore. If you do it all the time that’s one thing, but you’re learning and making mistakes as you go otherwise.
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u/James20k 3d ago
AI tools are built on theft. The latest estimate is that 20% of the training data is legally acquired
We would not condone plagiarised or stolen applications on flathub, why is this any different?
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u/AssistingJarl 3d ago edited 3d ago
it increases your productivity by factor 1000x
Man it sounds like you must really suck at writing code if something you'd do in 8 hours and 45 minutes of vibecoding would normally take you a whole year literally non-stop
Assuming that "writing code" is what you mean by "productivity", because if you actually meant "productivity" then I'm going to disbelieve your comment even harder.
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u/rebellioninmypants 3d ago
Here to stay for the wealthy, as it always happens. But sure, let's agree for the sake of agreement. What we need is not a better way to find the best way to determine that the project was made with AI. We need to not lose our critical thinking for when we get priced out/regulated out to hell and back out of this technology.
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u/Tellurio 4d ago
I was downvoted for predicting this in the past, now to see if other projects follow the same path.
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u/underdoeg 3d ago
I don't think the original ban was about AI but rather the resulting influx of potentially short lived projects and their lengthy review process.
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u/skoam 3d ago
You didn't get downvoted for predicting something, you got downvoted for suggesting it's the only reasonable outcome.
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u/smulfragPL 3d ago
and he was right, it was the only reasonable outcome which is why it occured. It's ridicolous to claim he wasn't downvoted because he made a pro ai prediction lol
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u/Tellurio 3d ago
In my opinion it is the only possible outcome in the long run. Guess we will wait and see.
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u/skoam 3d ago
I guess it's a likely outcome, so it's not absurd to suggest that. We'll still want to make choices about the software we use (or make) in the future and I think it's good to acknowledge that while it is popular, it's not completely inevitable. If Flathub decides this is the direction they want to go, it's still their decision. It doesn't mean other projects can't take a different stance, or that people won't fork projects to continue them without AI, or just keep using older versions forever. There is so much good software out there and iteration isn't the only path forward.
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u/smulfragPL 3d ago
what do you mean likely outcome, it happend man
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u/skoam 1d ago
"what they predicted is a likely outcome" be for real man, I wasn't talking about the future and you're misreading that on purpose
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u/smulfragPL 1d ago
I know what you meant, the framing is just wrong. The outcome wasnt likely it was certain and you have failed to reconcile your own failed perspective. This was incredibly obvious as i was certain this would occur too. If so many people thought it was obvious and it occured it wasnt likely it was just obvious
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u/skoam 1d ago
There is still an active choice being made, regardless of how obvious it seems to you. Being the most commercially viable, trend-chasing success story is not the goal of most FOSS projects and to me it sounds like you're applying business logic to something that doesn't follow those rules. These platforms do not need to be popular to keep existing because they're built on ideals and often non-profit in nature. If you really think that a 90% chance, a 99% chance and a 100% chance are the same things, you're just wrong. People are still conscious human beings that can make decisions you don't expect, for reasons you don't understand.
Like, you're really just insisting on making a technically incorrect statement here and it doesn't help.
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u/smulfragPL 20h ago
Ok but you still failed to self reflect and realise this one Simple thing. Ai is going to be The way to code for everyone, and it gets better at coding faster than any human. So none of these restrictions will ever be permament. That's the lesson you failed to learn
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u/howardhus 3d ago
"the past" being 2 months ago..
and i just downvoted you too for your butthurt comment at the bottom. you are a bad loser.
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u/Geminii27 3d ago
Why not keep the ban but offer a similar/identical service for AI content? People who want AI stuff can look there, or even specify searches across both services, while the original Flathub remains AI-free.
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u/InstanceTurbulent719 3d ago
because not even the linux kernel is AI-free. You'd have to ban all apps that are not exhaustively reviewed by the flathub maintainers and even then it'd be impossible for them to prove whether code is generated by AI or not
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u/elmagio 3d ago
The whole point of Flathub is to make it easy for both developers and users by having one platform for everything.
Also since AI content still has to be declared, two platforms would just be superfluous imo. Just add a feature to filter out AI stuff for those who want to do that, and you get some separation without maintaining two services.
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u/ward2k 3d ago
Because every product larger than a single dev team has ai generation. Using Ai to just generate some boilerplate counts as ai generation. Hell using copilot's auto complete counts too
There's a mountain of difference between something containing ai generated code, and being vibe coded too
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u/PerspectiveMain6454 3d ago
I agree, and we shouldn't focus on the declaration of AI but rather adherence to quality standards - which in itself filters out improper and negligent usage of AI tools, better known as 'AI slop,'.
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u/ward2k 3d ago
My rule of thumb is if you can tell something has been generated with Ai, then you need to disclose it
If the quality is high enough that it's obvious that it's indistinguishable from typical code that's all fine to me. It means someone has tweaked whatever the ai output was, or used it in a limited supportive capacity
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u/balder1993 3d ago
Actually this is the way most developers who care about use AI, from what I see. People “vibe coding” either don’t know what they’re doing from the start or just don’t care about the product at all. It’s the new “Chinese cheap hardware that breaks after a week” but for software.
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u/Geminii27 3d ago
And if it's enough to need to be tagged, it's enough to put it somewhere separate.
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u/Comfortable_Swim_380 3d ago
But i can think of like 10 freaking apps that used AI on there just off the top of my head. Literally AI app is the whole point of the app. 🥴
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u/Key_Sense9870 3d ago
I think it is the review process that is more important than devs using ai or not. As long as people spot the flaws or chinese data leakage packages between the lines, I am happy to use it.
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u/lupinthe1st 2d ago
Doesn't really matter, soon there won't be any need for repos like flathub anyway. People are creating their own apps with AI now.
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u/Knightoffreddit 1d ago
I’m more than happy to use AI code as long as it’s fast,secure and bugless. I don’t have a problem with who or what writes the code but rather the code itself . Ai,human or dog, I believe all code should be reviewed before release without exception.
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u/munsking 3d ago
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u/balder1993 3d ago
This link has some valid arguments, but others are very biased. Ex: this case mentioned: https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/tennessee-grandmother-ai-arrest-error-north-dakota-b2938261.html has nothing to do with LLMs, but an error with facial recognition software using machine learning.
Feels more like they gather anything bad that mentions AI and tried to compile it into a document.
Other open source orgs recognise that a tool can be misused or used in a good way, such as automating tedious and error-prone tasks and helping maintainers which already have few spare time. These can be accomplished even with small models that don’t consume too many resources but have becoming increasingly better.
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u/Ghost_x_Knight 3d ago
Putting aside the use of articles about 2024 era LLM, as if the technology and workflow is stagnant, I will respond to the first three reasons:
Legal Ramifications
Legal Cases And Law Problems
The legal cases section mentions a case that GitHub/Microsoft already won, and a bunch of platform child-protection liability and defamation lawsuits.
License Problems
The copy left license might have to evolve in the future due to legal developments, such as into a terms-of-use contract or a not-viewable-by-LLM license. This is a future hypothetical, and not a problem for pragmatists who would use AI assisted coding.
Stolen Training Data
It is established that Big Tech commits IP theft at scale, and doesn't care about copyright law except to weaponize it against smaller competition. So either Big Tech will be found liable, or courts will side with them with a favorable interpretation of copyright law.
By the way, the paid tier of frontier models often includes commitment from the AI companies to legal defense for litigations on normal use; this is precisely because they don't want to be found liable. Enterprise organizations, including Red Hat/IBM, have legal departments, and they have determined that the legal risk of LLM coding is acceptable.
Environmental Impact
The consumer level carbon footprint and environmental impact of using LLM is insignificant compared to consuming meat or having a gasoline-powered car drive a few kilometers. Fixing and preserving the environment is more than selectively zeroing-in on a carbon-intensive behavior you don't like.
As unfortunate as the local environmental impact of data centers is, their construction is not going to slow down unless the AI-arms race and geopolitical competition between the US and China is somehow resolved. We are dealing with micro-incentives that goes beyond enterprise profits, and no amount of preaching about personal environmental ethics is going to bring the political change advocated for. The technology is not going to disappear or uninvent itself; it is considered dual-use and critical for superpower hegemony and national security.
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u/Kevin_Kofler 3d ago
Too bad, another platform that has succumbed to the slop. One more reason to avoid Flathub (and Flatpak in general).
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u/rangelovd 3d ago
AI was always allowed‚ but only for proprietary apps. It was only prohibited for free software apps which was unjust. Furthermore‚ AI Disclousure rule means potentially one might be able to filter apps by AI-usage in it's development.
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u/Kevin_Kofler 3d ago
Proprietary apps being allowed to begin with is a major issue with Flathub.
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u/rangelovd 3d ago
Sure‚ installing proprietary apps with no sandbox is surely better. If people use proprietary apps there is a reason‚ then free software equialent doesn't suit their needs at this point in time.
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u/KyuyriiByakko 3d ago
The issue is that the requirements for packaging and publishing open-source software on Flathub do not apply to proprietary software.
The Flathub requirements would only make sense if they only allowed the publication of open-source software.
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u/GodGardner 3d ago
| installing proprietary apps with no sandbox is surely better
installing proprietary apps already allows any privacy and security violations
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u/bunkuswunkus1 3d ago
Not every app has an open source equivalent, and most users aren't willing to just not use their computer for what they need just because they would have to use a proprietary app to do it,.and that's ignoring the fact plenty just don't care that much, which is unfortunate but they have every right to not care if they don't want to.
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u/MelioraXI 3d ago
I was not very familiar with their ban before but this seems like a damn given, no? Just like we bitch on posters here who vibecoded and claim as their own I would imagine you want same standard to apply to a Flathub deployed application, aka transparency.