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0 pointsbuu7003mo ago0 comments

Agentic coding detractors: "If AI is so great, where all the thriving new open source projects to prove it?"

Also agentic coding detractors: "How dare you use AI to help build a new open source project."

I'm joking and haven't read the comments you're referring to, but whether or not AI was involved is irrelevant per se. If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an intern" or "a guy from Fiverr". Either way, the buck stops with whomever is taking ownership of the project.

If the code/architecture is buggy or unsafe, call that out. If there's a specific reason to believe no one with sufficient expertise reviewed and signed off on the implementation, call that out. Otherwise, why complain that someone donated their time and expertise to give you something useful for free?

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halfcat3mo ago

> If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an intern" or "a guy from Fiverr"

It’s not the guy from Fiverr anyone is annoyed with. It’s the tech CEOs who beat everyone over the head with:

- ”the future will be a-guy-from-Fiverr-native”

- ”we are mandating that 80% of our employees incorporate a-guy-from-Fiverr into their daily workflow by year end”

And everyone pretends this is serious.

Then there are people who are pulling off cool demo stunts that amount to duct taping fireworks to a lawn mower but they post about it on X doing their best Steve Jobs thought leader impersonation.

And again everyone pretends like this is serious.

The annoyance is like that friend you tell about this great new song, and they’re excited, but only because it’s something they can to tell other people and look cool. Not because they’re into music.

buu700OP3mo ago

I mean, if the end result is that I get a bunch of guys from Fiverr constantly at my beck and call for pennies on the dollar, I'm not sure why I should care what some CEO thinks they have to say to make money.

(Regarding mandates, of course they're a hamfisted solution, but it's not totally unreasonable that management would attempt to establish an incentive for its workforce to learn and put into practice a valuable new skill.)

Either way, that doesn't address the response to this project. Johan isn't Sam Altman. All Johan is guilty of here is building something useful and giving it to the rest of us for free.

bicx3mo ago

For real. For someone to even understand why this tool is useful and functions as intended, they need to have some deeper understanding of software development. Who cares if the implementation was done with AI. With Claude Code, I rarely write code by hand these days, yet my brain hurts more than ever from all the actual problem solving I’m able to drill into with all the programming cruft out of the way. I did it by hand for 15 years, and I don’t feel bad at all for handing that part over.

QuercusMax3mo ago

A decade ago, a senior staff engineer at Google told me that he doesn't mind delegating the data-entry parts of his job to junior SWEs, so he can focus on higher-level problem solving.

This is how I've been treating AI, except instead of assuming your junior SWE is generally sane and has some understand of what you're doing, you have to make sure you double check everything.

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