I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/i-am-not-a-reverse-centaur

by ibobev • 1 month ago

275 207 1 month ago

blog.miguelgrinberg.com

tehjoker2• 1 month ago

To respond to the ending of this piece, I think open source still matters because LLMs generate very specific code for a specific situation. Quality libraries mean solutions can be reliably shared between projects.

WorldMaker• 1 month ago

But how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones? How do you even discover up quality libraries if you are leaving so many code decisions to LLMs? Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code without your attribution and without directing people back to your library (and your very human interests in funding development on it or getting copyleft contributions back to it)?

I think there are so many hard questions right now for "Does open source even matter any more?" and many of those questions seem particularly demotivating to me right now, especially because we don't seem to be at risk of getting some, much less better, answers any time soon.

tehjoker2• 1 month ago

how do you tell quality libraries from LLM generated ones?

Reputation. LLM libraries can also be high quality in theory. It's the level of effort, duration of use, stability, and test coverage. People will need to resist using LLMs to make huge transformations of their libraries all the time to avoid erasing their reputations unless they have convincing safeguards like comprehensive tests or formal proofs that are not touched.

Once the LLMs train on your quality libraries how do you stop so many copies just getting pasted into people's code

Those copies are not reliable like a callsite. Maybe there is less advertising... but it is still better to use the library. I have to hope that at some point AI psychosis will end and engineering, which has not changed, will remain. You have to have reliable inputs to your processes. To do otherwise is insanity.

getting copyleft contributions back to it

This is a hard question. That said, for my own libraries, I get very few contributions but people use the libraries! The more "hardcore" the library is, the higher the ratio of users to contributors because they're just not expert enough to contribute meaningfully (until your stuff becomes so valuable companies sponsor teams of contributors as in Linux).

That said, my libraries seem to have made it into the weights, so when I talk to LLMs about my problem space they shockingly frequently recommend my own libraries to me (which is kind of ego stroking not gonna lie).

I think there's a lot of reasons to feel demotivated right now, but my perhaps privileged attitude (since I don't have bosses forcing me to use AI for everything) is to use AI where appropriate and apply engineering discipline and thinking in all cases. Retain your own human skills. If expertise really does become completely devalued, we're going to have bigger problems than you can solve on your own.

ctoth2• 1 month ago

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-demand app store where features / forks are shared/upvoted/evolved by the community where the maintainers don't have to get burnt out, and when it inevitably becomes a ball of mud oh well it does the job? I really don't know!

I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?

dude250711• 1 month ago

When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie.

awhitty2• 1 month ago

This analogy makes no sense to me and honestly skews pretty elitist in vibe. iPhone is regularly used in professional videography now. Like, 28 Years Later was shot on iPhone. Indie filmmakers have been using iPhone to break into the industry for years.

jrm43• 1 month ago

This is so good, I wonder if op did it on purpose.

Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras.

The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?

utopiah• 1 month ago

Art isn't craftsmanship.

You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you want to be more traditional, at least in 1917.

You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its tool.

You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa.

You can also be popular without any or both of these.

There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system but there goals might not be yours.

dgellow• 1 month ago

I think a better analogy would be commissioning an artist to create a painting. Yes you provided instructions and decided which style you preferred, and maybe pointed some corrections you wanted. And you can be proud of owning that specific, unique painting. No you didn't create anything.

marcosdumay• 1 month ago

We almost need like ... noncanonical software?

You mean some modern version of vb or php?

That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.

joseda-hg• 1 month ago

An ecosystem on shared formats can exist hapily

There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily

beering• 1 month ago

I agree. For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.

At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.

tomxor• 1 month ago

For many people, LLMs are the first time that computers do what they tell them to. Not what some big tech PM has decided is or isn’t possible.

The crux is here somewhere.

A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone.

Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes.

The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell.

As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.

janalsncm2• 1 month ago

What is the kind of person who would use such software? What you’re describing is the need for a two sided market where really only one side exists.

A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.

navane• 1 month ago

Sounds like the user could just ammend the software to his need with the LLM, but instead of sending that update to the maintainer with a pull request, just keep it to himself, to the users version.

rpdillon4• 1 month ago

You're assuming that everybody will be equally skilled in using an LLM to create software. I don't think anything in my experience indicates that this is true.

mostlysimilar7• 1 month ago

sense of pride and accomplishment

What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

Trasmatta2• 1 month ago

People are very proud of their prompts I guess

It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce

unacorner• 1 month ago

Maybe building something? It doesn't matter much that the programming language was English and built by an LLM and a harness. They created something they wanted that wasn't there before.

ben_w2• 1 month ago

What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

The sense of accomplishment does not necessarily require much accomplishment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

Trasmatta2• 1 month ago

The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.

jackp96• 1 month ago

I mean, I largely agree with the sentiment (friction is important for growth/happiness, after all). But even as a developer, I'm able to quickly whip up custom personal apps that I just wouldn't be able to justify the time for previously.

Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet.

We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.

fragmede• 1 month ago

Huh? The difficulty and the cost was stopping them before. It was really difficult, took a ton of time and money, and you had to deal with another person.

lwyrup• 1 month ago

So I am thinking this is like an army of plebs going to Home Depot, buying power tools, and building a house with no experience. Oh what fun—we can finally build a house the barrier has been broken.

I don’t want software written by plebs.

surgical_fire2• 1 month ago

I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?

I think no answers are needed.

If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing.

If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out.

There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.

skybrian2• 1 month ago

I think this makes sense for apps, but the apps will still need infrastructure and common protocols to interoperate. It still won’t make sense to implement your own cryptography.

oytis3• 1 month ago

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM? Do you get a sense of accomplishment when AI draws a picture or writes a poem for you? I guess there are some minds I'll never be able to comprehend

zephen• 1 month ago

After trying and failing multiple times to get any LLM to create exactly the picture that I was trying to make, I have to admit that, at one point, if one of them had succeeded, I would have felt a quantum of accomplishment.

But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever.

However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."

keiferski• 1 month ago

Don’t think of it as creating art, but as solving a frustrating computer problem. For people that aren’t technical, computers are often irritatingly obtuse and unclear if you’re trying to get something to work in a particular way.

seanlinehan2• 1 month ago

One can reason by analogy here.

In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers.

Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc.

When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling.

Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!

LatencyKills• 1 month ago

Who gets a sense of accoplishment from prompting an LLM?

I have a good friend who is a VP at a telecom company who has never written a line of code. He's been using Claude to create interactive web pages to help him understand parts of the company.

He was so excited when he got something to work he called me immediately.

I'm sure the code isn't what you or I would write, but it is good enough for my friend. That said, heaven help him if he loses access to Claude. ;-)

aidenn03• 1 month ago

1. There exists some X that you wish existed, but does not

2. The world has changed in such a way that X now exists

3. You took even a tiny action towards #2

Even if the main goal was #2, Is it really hard to see how there might not be some sense of accomplishment? Many investors take pride in the impact the companies they invested in have on the real world; this is the same thing in the small.

ai_critic• 1 month ago

Do you think your CEO has no sense of accomplishment when your team ships a product feature?

rpdillon4• 1 month ago

I think there's a spectrum between simply writing a prompt and generating slop and using AI in a loop over many hours/days/weeks to produce something that works the way you want it to. I get a great sense of accomplishment from doing the second, and I pretty much refuse to do the first, except only in the most ephemeral of cases.

collingreen• 1 month ago

I'm a professional software engineer and even I get excited about having an ai vibe out some throwaway software for me (two recent examples - a personal recipe site I never made time for and a video game skill tree build tool that isn't worth the time it would have taken to build).

As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream something up then have it exist. This is very cool!

That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community (architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.

paulddraper• 1 month ago

Amen.

I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get any sense of accomplishment from authoring software.

luma2• 1 month ago

What sense of pride an accomplishment do you get from using a library, or a high level language? You didn't write that code, you didn't hand translate into processor opcodes, etc. There are a million man hours of other people's work involved in making a simple python script run.

Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing... Why do you feel accomplishment?

Making things is fun, using tools to make things can continue to be fun. I have fun woodworking with hand tools and I also enjoy using my CNC where the job permits. Both bring joy.

kerblang• 1 month ago

It doesn't even matter and isn't worth arguing about what emotional state the submitter obtains. I don't care if they even achieve nirvana and ascend to permanent buddhahood.

What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.

Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.

danso• 1 month ago

Back when image-gen was made widely available (2023ish, feels like eons ago), there were people who took genuine satisfaction with their art prompting skills. It did come off as a bit cringe though: https://www.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/s/KxwhqJ5hrU

gavmor• 1 month ago

Who gets a sense of accomplishment from cheering for their home team?

AndrewKemendo• 1 month ago

You should see the non AI trash that people are proud of

Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value

perching_aix• 1 month ago

Do you think people in product design never feel a sense of accomplishment or something?

Or for another perspective, why do you think a "sense of accomplishment" is an essential, and dominantly important thing for everyone? Maybe they feel two hot shits about such a thing.

Especially when the "accomplishment" in the vast majority of cases is in the realm of "having had the patience to endure the humiliation ritual of figuring out the arbitrary abstractions some other dude came up with, and doing the plumbing to reconcile that with the requirements to the extents possible"?

It's like that Star Wars: Battlefront PR comment's idea of a "sense of accomplishment". Outright asinine and cynical. https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

When I make things, what I care about is exactly the function they provide. It's endlessly rewarding to make something useful. It's not some exercise in polishing my ego by proxy. I don't want people appreciating the things I make because they were hard to make. That's borderline condescending and pitiful.

But hey, maybe I'm mischaracterizing the way you meant "sense of accomplishment" myself. Maybe this is exactly what you meant too. But then how would people vibecoding be robbed of feeling this? Makes no sense.

agumonkey• 1 month ago

For people totally new, it can be partially understood, just as i was ecstatic having a tool create something on a computer for me in my early days.

For anybody else thought, I get that a LLM is a regression (npi) where you don't have to learn or understand anything .. therefore the personal growth value is moot (except the alleged sales if the person tries to use LLM to create a side business).

For actual devs it's disheartening and caused me real grief seeing how many of them were happy not thinking anymore.

saltcured• 1 month ago

I posit that there are people who get a sense of accomplishment from operating their laundry machine.

And people who get a sense of accomplishment from hitting the jackpot on a slot machine.

Operating an LLM is a strange combination of the two.

doctorpangloss• 1 month ago

it's called plugins, lots of end user facing OSS have vibrant plugin ecosystems.

maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!

jrm43• 1 month ago

I do a bit in my IT classes where I show a "spectrum" of computer activities, from "changing a screensaver" to "Assembly" and then challenge people to find the line where "using a computer" stops and "programming a computer" starts.

It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.

skydhash4• 1 month ago

As soon as you’re specifying instructions for the computer to do a task automatically, you’re programming it. It can be recording a macro, writing a script, describing it in something like Shortcuts,… The core thing is automation.

ramses0• 1 month ago

...maybe some sort of "Software Bazaar", where the users of the software can edit their own software and make local modifications that they need to it, probably with NO WARRANTY FOR THE PROGRAM, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License

It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...

...we can dream though, can't we?

nihakue• 1 month ago

https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ This has never been truer than right now. What we need isn't app store ecoystems but to eliminate the friction for distributing apps to your inner circle. We're entering the WhatsApp era of software, where everyone is going to be using a home cooked version of every piece of software that can conceivably exist on an island, and it's going to be a vibe coded mess, but it's going to be lovingly maintained by the people that use it every day. This is why I'm bullish on things like https://sprites.dev/ (not affiliated, just a customer). I have a little self replicating starter template that lets me quickly stand up new sprites with all my stuff logged in, ttyd + tmux so I can run claude code in the browser from my phone, and a caddy reverse proxy so I can also host a little starter app behind the fly io relay that sprites get out of the box so I don't have to do any extra work to have a publicly accessible https url I can send to people. Using this set up I've created dozens of little silly web applications for my family and friends, none of them were more complicated than little sketches but we've gotten some real pleasure out of them. There's still quite a bit of friction here though and I think if someone can really make this seamless for people they'll have something really special.

As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.

thisisit• 1 month ago

If you scroll through any personal finance forum every year someone will discover the forum and excitedly share their customised budget tracking sheet they built from scratch and it works exactly as they wanted to. How many do you think even get 1 upvote?

Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately.

The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.

LuckyAbe• 1 month ago

Very well framed.

xboxnolifes2• 1 month ago

A customized budget tracking sheet is the personal finance equivalent of a programmer showcasing their TODO webapp. Obviously it's going to be incredibly unpopular. Yet, there are popular tools people have shared in personal finance communities.

austin-cheney2• 1 month ago

The thing is I totally, 100% get this. The other thing I can't help but see though is how excited my non-programmer friends are to finally be able to make software. The sense of pride and accomplishment from non-coders who are finally able to make something work the way they wanted to.

You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.

Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.

kvark• 1 month ago

We had a process at one company where you had to create an issue before filing a PR. I found it most non-sensical and introducing friction for no good reason. Very surprised to see the author suggesting it in the article.

Review is indeed the main bottleneck now for open source, and we need to solve it. Introducing more friction is hardly helping.

katerberg• 1 month ago

I think the point that he is making is that the additional friction is a good thing and necessary in this case because it's an open source project. It's too easy to do drive-by PRs that don't actually provide value and just eat up review cycles. The issue requirement simply ensures that the requester actually is invested and cares enough about this to get approval before starting work on it.

I can see why that doesn't sound great particularly on a team where everyone knows each other and is working together but it totally makes sense for me if I were maintaining a project that was large enough to get a lot of low-effort PRs coming into it.

janalsncm2• 1 month ago

The author is describing a method for turning a low trust/no trust environment into a slightly higher trust environment.

A company is usually already a high-trust environment, where people use real names and have real reputations. So creating an issue cannot serve the purpose of increasing trust.

oytis3• 1 month ago

Are there other companies? Where you are submitting PRs that solve no known problem?

dreamcompiler• 1 month ago

We had that process too, and I insisted on it. Any PR not matched to one or more issues gets automatically rejected. The friction this injects ensures people are not wasting company resources bikeshedding.

I'm a world champion bikeshedder, and I both hated this policy and insisted we keep it.

aakresearch2• 1 month ago

In my opinion review will always be a bottleneck, in OS as well as in commercial development.

To my understanding Code Review is first and foremost a trust-building exercise, seeking to establish common understanding behind the piece of code which is to be delivered. That it also may lead to improvements or "catch some bugs" is a distant tertiary side-effect, not the primary goal. At least this is the vantage point I reviewed any code from in the last two decades, and found that team morale and overall quality of teamwork - and delivered software, and customer satisfaction, as a result - responds very well to such interpretation. Regardless of the side you are on and competency level of your vis-a-vis. I would put "elevating competency level of both partners" as a secondary goal of Code Review, and very closely connected to the primary.

With current crop of LLMs there simply nothing on their side to which words "trust" and "understanding" can be meaningfully applied. Hence the "review" takes drastically different shape and implies very different goals. As both the primary and secondary goals described above cannot apply too. The only remaining goal of "improving and bug-catching", in absence of trust, understanding and learning, now requires much more work, which is also much more exhausting.

aakresearch2• 1 month ago

And a follow-up to my comment above, as wanted to reply to "create an issue before filing a PR" remark too.

I find it actually extremely useful practice. We engineers tend to center our thoughts around "code" and with such code-centric mindset to accumulate knowledge as "code-adjacent" - in repo's commits, PRs, markdown files of all sorts. But in reality most if not all projects extends past the code, and it makes much more sense to have a "project-centered" mindset. As such, an external "issue" captures much more context and provides more useful insight about project impact than PR description alone. Love or hate JIRA, beyond microscopic solo-projects it makes full sense to use broader-scope external tools for project management.

As a nice cosmetic effect it also removes (some) bickering about whether to put "type" or "scope" first in the commit message :). Simply provide a reference to the ticket! (No, really, I hate JIRA, honestly!)

austin-cheney2• 1 month ago

What criteria are people using to discern if code contributions are from humans or LLM?

Are there concrete patterns that somebody could write a linter to auto evaluate for this?

stantaylor• 1 month ago

Even if this guy were not anti-AI, as the primary maintainer of OS projects, it sounds like he's dealing with a genuine problem.

My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure out in just a few seconds.

OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.

ZpJuUuNaQ5• 1 month ago

OK. How?

Have you never seen vibe-slopped PRs?

CagedCoder• 1 month ago

I feel like these 2 sentences answer what the author is looking for:

I do not want an LLM-generated novel with chapters, bullet points and emojis, just a simple description of the problem in your own voice.
If I don't see proof of human involvement, then I'm not interested

raincole2• 1 month ago

OK. How?

By vibe. That's what people who believe they can detect AI do.

bluefirebrand3• 1 month ago

Don't blame the people who dislike AI, blame the people producing AI and using it to produce mass amounts of trash. They're the ones poisoning the public well and making all of this distrust necessary

GrinningFool• 1 month ago

If someone goes out of their way to hide it, it probably can't be detected. But the default commit comment and PR writeup styles are pretty distinctive.

phyzome4• 1 month ago

You pretty quickly get a sense for it. But the author does also explicitly list a few indicators.

mystraline2• 1 month ago

As a systems engineer, ive been a reverse centaur more often than not.

I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the behest of the ticketing behemoth.

Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or system-breakage (which impacts lots of customers).

Im not sure what IT roles im capable of doing wouldnt have tickets. So, yeah. Reverse centaur.. But not an AI driven reverse centaur, yet.

bendmorris• 1 month ago

Reverse centaur means a machine is using you to get things done. Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other people. So not really the same thing at all.

mystraline2• 1 month ago

I look at at reverse centaurs as a spectrum of autonomy at work.

We can now observe a complete reverse centaur. But those of us who go ticket after ticket, metrics of tickets, response times, and all of those management metrics also go directly to reverse centaurs as well.

Now, its not Marshall Brain's "Story of Manna" level each listed action at a time... But it was definitely getting to that point.

Call centers were already absolutely at that point, with completely scripted communications, that that attendant could not deviate from or be fired.

Presumably at the other end of the ticketing system is other people.

Sometimes. As a systems engineer, tickets can also be generated by other systems as an "immune response" to detected but unfixable errors.

fantasizr3• 1 month ago

I - and many, many others - learned flask from his mega-guide that he obviously spent a lot of time working on.

I feel bad for people like him who get the brunt of dilettantes who can "code" polluting his time and focus. Reminds me of that mitch hedberg joke: "When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away." but for PRs

d1l• 1 month ago

The question that resonated with me was whether open source even matters anymore.

I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m curious about HNs thoughts.

My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using llms.)

So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects because they are perceived as safer bets.

bluefirebrand3• 1 month ago

I think we need to stop having open source as soon as possible to stop giving AI more material to train on.

Sucks, because open source was a really wonderful thing for many years but we should not continue to create fuel for the theft machines

weinzierl• 1 month ago

The article closes with the question: "Does open source matter anymore?"

I wouldn’t pretend to have an answer. of course. Opens Source means, always meant, different things to different people.

I know what always counted for me:

1. Copyleft License

2. No CLA or Copyright assignment

3. Diverse group of contributors

I sympathize with Miguels point but it bothers me it clashes with point 3 in my list. If you hand select your contributors[1] you will never reach the diversity necessary to effectively make relicensing impossible. Without that Open Source matters less to me.

[1] I admit that controlled set of known contributors has other advantages too.

yoyohello132• 1 month ago

He is 'hand selecting' for people that show respect for others. Still plenty of room for diversity within that framework.

phyzome4• 1 month ago

"Diversity" doesn't mean "zero thresholds for skill or respect".

hungryhobbit• 1 month ago

This blog post had serious "old man yells at cloud" vibes for me.

iainctduncan• 1 month ago

nope, it's an old man yelling get off my lawn. And as a fellow old person with an open source lawn, I 100% sympathize.

My lawn == I'm not wasting any of my dwindling old man time on bullshit people vomit out. You want to do that, you fork and leave me out.

kaffekaka• 1 month ago

The old man is absolutely pointing out a very real problem. It is too easy with LLMs to create crap PR:s.

I learned Flask from Grinberg, god bless the man.

layer8• 1 month ago

My perception is that there is less interest in open source, and in coding in general. The main reason I love coding is that it is a challenge, and I think this is actually the same reason why a lot of people prefer to give money to an AI lab and get a machine to spit out code for them, even with the risk of the code being subpar.

I maintain the hope that those technically minded who are really interested in coding and care about doing things properly using their own reasoning on all levels of detail will find each other and maybe become less diluted as a community by the coding-just-for-money crowd than in the past decade or two.

powera• 1 month ago

The priesthood doesn’t like that the peasants can read the Bible for themselves now.

bluefirebrand3• 1 month ago

No one was ever stopping anyone from learning to program in the past. Don't act like there was some massive gatekeeper you had to overcome to learn to code other than your own laziness

phyzome4• 1 month ago

There hasn't been a programming priesthood for decades, now.

aidenn03• 1 month ago

I first encountered the following concept in one of Oxide's publications; good chance it didn't originate there though:

There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited.

I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was usually obvious when a PR was either completely terrible or very half-baked, and the required effort to create even a shitty PR was usually more than that required to reject it.

AI makes it trivial to make a completely terrible PR, and much easier to make a not-immediately-obviously-bad PR.

toponijo2• 1 month ago

Given this, you can conclude that writers should be putting in at least at much effort as readers, whether or not they use an LLM. What really seems to be the problem is writers that don't at least check their own work, and pass that burden onto the readers. This is easier than ever with LLMs.

This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to where in corporate situations a reader can't say no to doing work for a selfish writer.

kentm3• 1 month ago

Its exactly this. I have had a few LLM coding sessions where I reviewed the resulting work and thought "I don't think my team can safely PR this." I then went back and broke it down into smaller PRs, still using LLMs but at a size that is easy to review. And I reviewed the output myself before I asked a reviewer to commit their time.

The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing everyone else down, so the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable. I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.

XorNot• 1 month ago

Isn't this just a continuation of the performance art of the modern corporate environment though? There's an entire industry producing pages of documents which aren't read, aren't responded to, but need to be at least X lines long for anyone to take them "seriously".

Then suddenly LLMs happened and it's like the mask is off: no one's reading them still, but also no one is writing them either.

Which is perhaps a drop in the ocean of the insanity which is "we need you to work on the Jira tasks" as basically a job title.

RealityVoid• 1 month ago

I've had a guy once reply in an email with a bug report generated by ChatGPT telling me that some piece of software I wrote wasn't working. He just plopped right there the discussion he had with the confirmation bias machine confirming 100% that what he had in front was sending spurious messages. With all the information in the world at its disposal, the LLM did not consider informing the reporter that maybe his code should flush the serial device pipe before starting his processing. I stopped short from facetiously replying to him that maybe he should use another model, since his seems to be broken.

cgio• 1 month ago

I think that this is the essence of the argument. I spent two weeks of long nights across a few different sessions with millions of tokens generated, to produce a 5 page proof. I think we have come to the age of the aesthetics of curation. At least I don’t feel like I broke this silent contract. The effort you put in driving the torrent of words before distilling it is a new art. First time I tried it and it felt more creative than slop. The judgement nevertheless lies on the eye of the beholder.

ErroneousBosh5• 1 month ago

Sure you get crackpots still,

They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths looks about right to me but I'm not a good enough mathematician to prove - were pretty damn odd, but his writing in 1989 on how it would be vital for an interconnected network of computers for information sharing to treat censorship as damage and route around it and some ideas for doing this was bang on the money (as we now see) and his writings on how American business management methods result in the worst possible outcome for everyone that's not already a billionaire have also proven oddly prophetic.

So maybe there's something in the crackpots after all.

aidenn03• 1 month ago

Maybe lots of (most?) people are crackpots about something, but they lack the time and/or resolve to do something about it.

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

if anyones got an active issues list, the maintainers should close all issues and open only ones they intend to fix. A bot should repeat this message to the issuer and point them to issues they're accepting.

So at a minimum, you could maybe fish some useful work out. PRs should be the same.

alexanderdmitri• 1 month ago

I think this is from Sartre's "Literature & Existentialism."

I'm not a big fan of his generally, but I highly recommend this book in particular. A lot of what he wrote there really resonated for me.

jdw64• 1 month ago

I think the answer to this question probably doesn't exist and opinions will remain divided. I can understand this person's feelings. But I 'won't be able to feel them' because I'm in a different position. The technology this person takes pride in is directly affected by AI.

On the other hand, there are also people who start coding with AI, and those people will love a large part of code that isn't pretty but works.

Some will say that messy code will ruin software in the long run, while others will think otherwise. This reminds me of Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. This means that for any type of thing, there are quality items and inferior ones, and quality items make up about 10%. The 10% of code created by AI will be valuable, and only 10% of human-written code was valuable. AI has just increased the amount of crap.

Whenever I think about these issues, I always think of Undertale. Undertale's code is overwhelmingly messy, yet it's a masterpiece often cited as one of the best games. I love it too. But Leaked Undertale code (its quality) is terribl

Ultimately, it seems that AI's usefulness and harmfulness are determined by the purpose for which it is used.

If someone enjoys code quality, long-term perspective, and intellectual exchange and interaction with people from these kinds of discussions, they will be hostile toward AI.

On the other hand, someone like me, who is in a community that has a hostile attitude toward on-time delivery for clients and learning (based on mockery and disregard), will be receptive to AI.

Honestly, I am a direct beneficiary of AI. I'm on the side of consuming the results managed by open-source maintainers, so I can't fully understand their position. I just think, 'That must be incredibly hard for them.'

In my case, AI writes English functions and documentation, and by using AI to refactor English function/variable names that were previously hard to use, I can now write code that's easier to read.

But since my role mainly involves assembling things using IoC on top of frameworks, I see more advantages. The downside is that my coding skill declines, I suppose. I'm a traveling contract programmer who often goes on-site to work with legacy codebases and add features to them.

Actually, my workflow hasn't changed much. It's just that the legacy codebase has become an AI-generated codebase. My workflow of debugging and tracing the flow there hasn't changed, so I'm probably in the beneficiary camp.

Conversely, people like the OP have seen a massive change in the number of PRs they need to handle, so it's understandable. The intellectual exchange with people they've always had, and the values that come from that, have been damaged.

This is a really difficult problem.

doginasuit• 1 month ago

It seems like there is a ready solution here, have an LLM review and filter pull requests from unknown sources before you read them. My understanding is there are semi-reliable ways to detect AI writing, maybe there is an analog for code. In any case, you can filter according to criteria you set. Analysis and bug-finding is where LLMs shine, much more than their ability to generate code.

I can understand wanting to minimize your interaction with LLMs, so this might not be an attractive solution. But it seems like a worthwhile feature to have on the platform level for people who would like to continue to accept pull requests without the frustration.

phyzome4• 1 month ago

"AI-detectors" are still probabilistic and none of them are exactly stellar. (No, even Pangram. It still screws up on the regular, very badly.) And some of that includes calling real people's writing "AI-generated", which isn't acceptable for this task.

ethagnawl• 1 month ago

Back in pre-LLM days, receiving an unexpected pull request (PR) from a fellow coder was a source of excitement and pride.

As a maintainer of a few FLOSS projects, this tracks.

The Pavlovian PR notification response has gone from, "Oh! What do we have here?" to "Groan. Do we have _anything_ here?"

I won't get specific but I just had to remove a contributor from a project after multiple submissions of either cutesy, fluffy bullshit (add ASCI animations!) or "rewrite entire project in other language". Not only did the PRs result in wasted time and energy but they also resulted in conversations about how to deal with this sort of spam. (Probably good to get out of the way and set policy but still...) So, this person probably spent fifteen minutes prompting together these stupid PRs and multiple maintainers had to spend hours agonizing over what to do about them.

anal_reactor• 1 month ago

TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort needed to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with the rest of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one small thing.

There's one project where I need to download a new version once in a while and I just rebase my changes.

yoyohello132• 1 month ago

I not trying to be mean about it, but... that's good. If your one small thing wasn't worth the effort for contribution then it probably doesn't need to be in upstream. Contrary to what many seem to believe, code existing is not inherently better than code not existing.

lelanthran2• 1 month ago

TBH I never contributed to Open Source because of the effort needed to bring my PR from "works on my machine" to "compliant with the rest of codebase". Especially that I only want to implement one small thing.

That's a good thing; OSS projects don't want drive-by contributors, they want a community. A small bit of friction is a good thing.

After all, we can see what happens with frictionless contributions.

stephenlf• 1 month ago

GitHub Issues before PRs is a great approach. The ghostty project takes that one step further: GH _discussions_ before GH issues. Only maintainers can make issues.

alex_young• 1 month ago

A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right? I don’t get the analogy. I understand he’s talking about getting pushed around by an LLM, but would a normal centaur push an LLM around? It doesn’t even have any hands right? Seems like a reverse centaur is more capable of typing.

probably_wrong• 1 month ago

A reverse centaur is just a person with a horse head right?

Well, no. A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs. That is, it's an augmented person who drives the powerful machinery underneath. Think of a person driving a car.

A reverse centaur is the opposite, namely, a machine making the choices and a frail human following them. In this context, a reverse centaur is an AI spitting thousands of LOC for a human to find the good ones.

toast0• 1 month ago

A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs.

Well also more numerous than human legs... And the whole two torsos thing

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Te...

thomasahle• 1 month ago

I recently built a very large test bench for System Verilog.

I ran a bunch of different compilers on it, including some open source ones.

Some of them failed some tests, and it was natural to have my LLM (Claude Fable 5) root-cause the issues, and to double-check my test bench wasn't to blame.

But now I stood with all these patches that I couldn't just throw at the upstream maintainers all at once. I ended up just filing a few issues and moved on to other things.

It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a lot of time root-causing and fixing the issues. But then, maybe they could just have their LLMs do the same.

Still not sure if it was the right call?

cushychicken• 1 month ago

This is a real problem.

I suspect that part of it is that people don’t have enough time to mentally incorporate the fix.

Is it weird to submit the MR later, after people have had a chance to digest the issues?

overfeed• 1 month ago

I ended up just filing a few issues and moved on to other things.

This is the most valuable contribution you had time for, hopefully with a minimum-viable bug reproduction.

Drive-by patches/PRs are usually a net-negative because the maintainer has to reverse-engineer the intent from GenAI code, and then make changes to have it fit in with the rest of project.

It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a lot of time root-causing and fixing the issues

There are countless ways to fix any issue, and only a few right ways (subjectively). The maintainers' role is to decide which ways are right for their project. You shouldn't worry too much about "wasting" code you already generated, GenAI made that step very cheap, but did little for taste and roadmapping.

lelanthran2• 1 month ago

Solution: write a markov generator (or use the cheapest AI possible) to generate plausible-looking rejections for PRs.

Let those agents bankrupt their owners in a loop of neverending improvements and changes.

DrewADesign2• 1 month ago

Those mad about auto-rejected drive-by PRs should go fork themselves

a copy of the repo.

dllu2• 1 month ago

I totally understand the point of view from maintainers. Review fatigue of low quality slop is a legitimate issue.

The worst ones are fully autonomous AI agents looking for open source projects and adding random pull requests.

But in some cases, I find a legit bug that needs fixing. For example, I want to get a particular program working in Wine/FEX on aarch64 [1], or I find a 12 second hang in Darktable [2]. The problem is that, as a software engineer working in a totally different discipline, I have no knowledge of the low level C code to fully understand what the problem even is, or how to fix it. All I want to do is to fix the issue and help other people avoid running into the same issue. Right now, on my machine, I maintain a set of custom patches to get everything working. But I am too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to create the fix by hand, so I can't submit a pull request (or when I do, I feel really bad about it. I honestly feel like a horrible person, e.g. when a project added a "No AI" policy soon after I submitted some AI-generated PRs [3]). Going forward, I feel like this sort of scenario is going to be way more common.

[1] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/issues/5512

[2] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/21069

[3] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/commit/8c85096f98084ca9438b16...

xboxnolifes2• 1 month ago

Then say all of that in the issue. Say you have a real problem. Say you tried using AI. Add the human element by communicating. I dont think there is a real problem there.

People just want to know you put in the effort, and that you didnt just prompt an AI and hand over completely unchecked slop.

dllu2• 1 month ago

Yes I wrote the issue by hand and try to communicate well.

emodendroket2• 1 month ago

Does open source matter anymore?

I mean, did it ever? It depends what you mean. Very few open source or free software projects are successful in any meaningful sense.

zeroonetwothree2• 1 month ago

I feel like projects can be successful without being popular.

emodendroket2• 1 month ago

To me the "open source" model implies something about community development and people sharing or otherwise using it. Otherwise what does it matter if it's open or closed source?

Thrymr• 1 month ago

Considering that the whole industry, including the big AI companies, is built on top of open source now, I would have to say it did matter. That doesn't mean every project mattered (in a larger sense), but certainly thousands of open source projects have value, and dozens have contributed enormous value. The fact that the value has been disconnected from the maintainers has been a problem for a long time, but it is getting worse, and this is one example of a maintainer near the breaking point.

zeroonetwothree2• 1 month ago

On the other hand, there’s nothing more frustrating when I submit a hand-written issue to an open source project, happy to implement it if they approve, and then their bot closes it with some AI slop comment that indicates it has no idea what I’m talking about.

On the plus side it’s easier than ever to patch or fork projects. So at least this toxic gatekeeping behavior matters less than it used to.

WhitneyLand2• 1 month ago

The PR quality problem is legit and needs a solution.

But saying his opinion hasn’t changed on this:

“the main and most important reason why GenAI tools do not work for me is that they do not make me any faster.”

It’s been a year and agents and models have improved dramatically.

I can see for some things it doesn’t make sense, but not using it at all because there’s nothing it can help with?

Devs who don’t use models at all are a dying breed and I think it won’t be long before he’ll be forced to concede the point.

mplewis• 1 month ago

Why is that any of your business?

bigstrat20034• 1 month ago

It’s been a year and agents and models have improved dramatically.

It's been years of AI advocates saying that. It has never yet been true, and it isn't true today either.

notpushkin• 1 month ago

It’s been a year and agents and models have improved dramatically.

Then why is the PR quality still a problem?

WhitneyLand2• 1 month ago

Because having more powerful tools is a different problem from using them well.

When GUI apps first made it easy for anyone to use 100 fonts and colors in a document, it did not make the quality of design go up. The tools became more powerful but the average quality of design went down because lots of people with less skill could suddenly participate.

Same issue here, two things are true at once. Models and agents are very powerful, and it makes it possible for less skilled or less conscientious developers to increase volume of low quality PRs.

This is what needs a solution with the PRs.

eranation• 1 month ago

Asking contributors to first make sure there is an approved requirement before creating a PR sounds like a great idea regardless of the use of LLM.

But another issue is - AI disclosure (agent, model etc). I'm sure others tried similar approaches, but in case this is not common knowledge - I tried to see what happens if you ask agents to disclose themselves in the PR description / comments in a rule file.

It seems to work pretty well as most AI "assisted" PRs will be opened by agents using the gh cli or MCP on behalf of the user. (Of course this can be bypassed, but for someone who doesn't mind disclosing or doesn't care, this is a good step forward)

Example: https://github.com/arnica/depsguard/blob/main/AGENTS.md#ai-d...

(so far worked on PRs from both Claude Code and Codex - both got a footer disclosure of the agent name and model)

devrundown• 1 month ago

Generative AI notice: I do not use LLMs, agents or any other generative AI tools for help with writing, coding, image creation or any other tasks related to this blog or my open source work.

This reminds me way back when you would see "Website written in Notepad" on websites.

JCattheATM• 1 month ago

It's just silliness. Judge the code on the merit of the code, not deciding to reject it if you learn it was constructed with the aid of AI.

gaigalas• 1 month ago

Does open source matter anymore?

Probably not, but maybe free software now matters more.

joshka• 1 month ago

I agree with the core maintainer complaint here: PR slop is bad, and maintainers should not be forced into reviewing code the submitter does not understand.

But I think the answer is not “don’t slop me, all you sloppers.” The better answer is closer to: “what problem were you trying to solve?”

There is no obligation to treat every PR as merge-ready code. A PR can also be a concrete issue report or a proof-of-concept for a bug. It can say: I found a problem, I investigated it, and code was the clearest way to show where I think the issue lives and how it might be addressed. Use or ignore the implementation as you like. Human-language descriptions are not always the best way to communicate something you've already traced through the codebase.

That can be a high-value contribution even if the code itself is not accepted. It moves the conversation from “I want X” to “here is where X touches the codebase, here is a failing case, here is a possible direction, here are the tradeoffs I noticed.”

The social contract should be that the contributor does not dump review debt on the maintainer. Mark it as a prototype. Explain the problem in your own words. Say what you tested. Say what you are unsure about. Be willing to revise or accept that the maintainer may throw the patch away.

But once framed that way, the relevant question is not whether AI was used. It is whether the PR reduces ambiguity or increases burden.

A sloppy PR that demands review is bad. A prototype PR that explains a real problem is often useful.

I Am Not a Reverse Centaur

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