A user asked on the official Lutris GitHub two weeks ago “is lutris slop now” and noted an increasing amount of “LLM generated commits”. To which the Lutris creator replied:
It’s only slop if you don’t know what you’re doing and/or are using low quality tools. But I have over 30 years of programming experience and use the best tool currently available. It was tremendously helpful in helping me catch up with everything I wasn’t able to do last year because of health issues / depression.
There are massive issues with AI tech, but those are caused by our current capitalist culture, not the tools themselves. In many ways, it couldn’t have been implemented in a worse way but it was AI that bought all the RAM, it was OpenAI. It was not AI that stole copyrighted content, it was Facebook. It wasn’t AI that laid off thousands of employees, it’s deluded executives who don’t understand that this tool is an augmentation, not a replacement for humans.
I’m not a big fan of having to pay a monthly sub to Anthropic, I don’t like depending on cloud services. But a few months ago (and I was pretty much at my lowest back then, barely able to do anything), I realized that this stuff was starting to do a competent job and was very valuable. And at least I’m not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.
Anyway, I was suspecting that this “issue” might come up so I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not. Whether or not I use Claude is not going to change society, this requires changes at a deeper level, and we all know that nothing is going to improve with the current US administration.
Aaaaand just uninstalled lutris. There are many other ways to install windows games and applications that aren’t ensloppified.
Moral of the story is don’t let Claude do commits. It insists on crediting itself
Also stop harassing openspurce developers
Also be transparent when you have vibecoded commits. There’s no reason to hide it. Just say that parts of your codebase is vibecoded or coded with ai assist and those who don’t like it can fork it or use something else.
I really hate this new trend of FOSS developers being attacked and harassed for using AI. You might not like if they are using AI. Or you might not like AI at all, but there’s no reason to harass people who are providing you free software. Let them develop it like they want. If you don’t like that they used AI, use another software. Or fork the software before they started using AI. But attacking people like that is not okay on so many levels. It’s not okay to attack people for the software they are using. It’s not okay to attack developers providing a free service and it’s not okay to attack people at all.
From his perspective, he’s investing his free time and likely money into a project for people that are 99% of the time just leechers, as in they never contribute back and only complain.
Now he has a tool that he feels helps him deal with all that FREE labor is doing for everyone, and the very same people now want to tell him how to do his FREE labor he does for them.
I completely understand being pissed off by that.
AI is actively destroying the environment and harming people. Data centers have been caught using methane burner generators (which are banned for use by the EPA) which significantly increase health risk to residents that live nearby (cancer and asthma rates already significantly increased). Then you have the ridiculous effects it is having on computer hardware markets, energy and water infrastructure and prices.
Then after all of that, the AI themselves are hallucinating somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% of the time, and multiple studies have found that people that use them regularly are losing their own skills.
I can’t figure out why people would choose to use them. I can’t figure out why programming is the one place where people that might have otherwise been considered experts in the field are excited to use them. Writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, basically every other professional field that AI companies have suggested these would be good for, they get trashed by experts in the fields for making garbage. I have a hard time believing the only thing AI can do well is write code when it sucks so badly at everything else it does. Does development suck this much? Do developers have so little idea what they are doing that this seems like a good idea?
There hasn’t been anything I haven’t been able to run between Heroic and Steam. I didn’t like using lutris anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Honestly, unfortunately, I agree. It IS unfortunately helpful, and if you’re a competent developer using AI tooling, you can make sure it doesn’t generate slop. You are responsible for your code, at the end of the day.
AI does generate societal damage, but that’s mostly because of how companies abuse it and less because of the technology itself.
I understand the hatred towards AI, but people gotta understand that there’s a difference between coding with AI and Vibecoding. They are DIFFERENT THINGS! AI is userful, what is not are both vibecoding and shaming a developer with 30 years of real world experience with no AI support for using it for once. Using AI is ok if you do that critically and with common sense
If it’s making commits for you you’re vibe coding.
I use it at work, I use it for troubleshooting and if I get it to generate anything for me, I stage them and review them before committing myself
You are correct but people in general are pretty bad at subtly and grey area. Just look at the current state of political discourse in the US. Probably half the people that support the likes of Trump do so because they like black/white binary choice and can’t handle shades of grey in their life emotionally.
Are you asking people to be rational? What kind of monster are you
I totally agree. I’m not an AI hype man. I want to scream whenever I see a PR littered with emojis, bullet lists, and way too much text for a simple change. I hate the discussions about the transformative power of AI, the 10x production gains, all the million tools, agents, skills, plugins, methods I should be using but I am already behind and old and probably unemployed next week, right? Still, AI use is not inherently bad. It gets me unstuck. It finds subtle errors I wasn’t noticing, it writes documentation faster and better than I can. I hate the companies who are pushing it, the methods of it’s training, but the tool itself is just a tool and sometimes a very useful one. IMHO we shouldn’t shame every open source developer just for using it. As long as they are responsible with it, I’m fine with some AI code in my software.
Pass
Please, go ahead and remove everything “AI” in your life. No social media. No GPS. No assist when driving or being driven. No streaming of any kind. No meteo apps. Ask your boss to remove everything related to prevision in his company. Ask your doctor to not use any tool to help his diagnosis if you have a scanner for cancer.
Let’s see how many of those you can “pass”. Or let’s see if it helps you develop a critical mind about to use which tool for which job and how to use it.
I’m already full Linux at work. Location on my mobile is always OFF unless I need it on rare occasions. I don’t stream. I self host.
Say your last sentence into a mirror today.
Bro, you are on fucking Lemmy. We are all like you. You are not special. You never ever use GPS to locate yourself, right? You never go from a to b. You never go in a shop to buy food. You never go to the doctor. You never buy anything online. You never watch YouTube. Sure.
Who hurt you
I for news for you its the same thing. There is no difference besides maybe the prompt same AI is writing the code. And I do bit believe a coder is going over every single line of code.
I work for a major software company. They are bragging about how much is AI code now. It’s not just things like lutris.
Open source stuff is awesome and I really like people improving Linux in their spare time
But, to do it this way is basically saying “fuck you” to the community which is fucked up.
Could have talked about how AI helps him or how he uses it for templates or whatever and damn even if I didn’t agree with those points either that’s a lot better than being like “alright good luck finding it now then bitch”
I wouldn’t mess with anything this guy does anymore after this.
To be honest I don’t give a shit if a dev uses AI or not. As long as the code does what it is suppost to. In my personal experience AI, while still not anywhere near to capabilitys of a decent dev, can sometimes find and fix errors that I would have missed.
Hiding it won’t make the code any better genius.
you can criticise them but ultimately they are a unpaid developer making their work freely available to the benefit of us all. at least don’t harass the developer.
You make a fair point, but I feel like the trolling reaction they gave was asking for more backlash. Not responding was probably the best move.
It’s typical of dev burnout, though. Communication starts becoming more impulsive and less constructive, especially in the face of conflicts of opinions.
I’ve seen it play a few times already. A toxic community will take a dev who’s already struggling, troll them, screenshot their problematic responses, and use that in a campaign across relevant places such as github, reddit, lemmy… Maybe add a little light harassment on the side, as a treat. It’s a fun activity ! The dev spirals, posts increasingly unhinged responses and often quits as a result.
The fact that the thread is titled “is lutris slop now” is a clear indication that the intention of the poster wasn’t to contribute anything constructive but to attack the dev and put them on their back foot.
The fact that the thread is titled “is lutris slop now” is a clear indication that the intention of the poster wasn’t to contribute anything constructive but to attack the dev and put them on their back foot.
No, it was literally an important question to have answered. And booooy did the dev answer.
Is it appropriate to ask a stranger a question by first calling their work “slop” ? Is that how you communicate with people ? How is that working out irl ?
Y’all are so immersed in bully culture that this seems normal to you smh
I see your point. I might also have responded poorly to that, on some level at least.
Yeah same. I’d like to think i’d answer “I’ll use AI, if you don’t like it you can fork the project and i wish you good luck. Go share your opinion on AI in an appropriate place.”. But realistically there’s a high chance it catches me on a bad day and i get stupid.
… You’re right. I definitely wouldn’t be above such a response.
The problem is, a lot of people here - myself included - were/are also being impulsive about their responses to this issue, at least partially due to all the shitty stuff caused by GenAI.
There might be some toxic people too, I wouldn’t be surprised - but this can happen without them, too.
The thing is, toxic people thrive in mob situations and are often found leading or even manufacturing them. I tend to be wary around this kind of setups as they are easy to get caught up in and hard to get out of.
Trolling? They gave a pretty good answer explaining their reasoning.
I’ve removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what’s generated and what is not.
Seems pretty obvious to me that they knew this wouldn’t go over well. It was inflammatory by design.
Yeah ok. True. I think the rest of the post has much more weight, though. But yeah, he should have swallowed that last sentence.
I agree with you with the current state of things in the world is hard to keep up and easy to complain. I’d say instead of asking the guy to not use AI ask him what he needs for help. He’s clearly stating that he’s in burnout.
I don’t have the time or skills to help so I wouldn’t go complaining.They were at least. Now they’re making Claude’s code freely available.
They are on liberapay if you want to support the project btw. Combined with Patreon, they sit at less than 700$ a week. That’s like half a dev before tax
?
Yes, that’s Liberapay. You may have noticed that I mentioned Patreon.
You might as well donate to Anthropic.
They want to put clanker code that they freely admit they don’t validate into a product that goes on the computers of people who’s experience with Linux is “I heard it’s faster for games”
It’s irresponsible to hide it from review. It doesn’t matter if AI tools got better, AI tools still aren’t perfect and so you still have to do the legwork. Or at least let your community.
Also, you should let your community make ethics decisions about whether to support you.
Overall it was a rash reaction to being pressured rudely in a GitHub thread; but you know AI is a contentious topic and you went in anyway. It’s weak AF to then have a tantrum and spit in the community’s face about it.
Nothing is being hidden from review. The code is open source. They removed the specific attribution that indicates which parts of the code were created using Claude. That changes absolutely nothing about the ability to review the code, because a code review should not distinguish between human written code and machine written code; all of it should be checked thoroughly. In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
Oh, it’s more than subconscious, as you can see in this thread.
Lutris developer makes a perfectly sane and nuianced response to a reactionary “is lutris slop now” comment, and gets shit on for it, because everybody has to fight in black and white terms. There are no grey opinions, only battle lines to be drawn to these people.
What? Are you all going to shit on your lord and savior Linus himself for also saying he uses LLMs? Oh, what, you didn’t know?!?
The response is only nuanced until the “good luck” sentence. If he swallowed that it would be an almost perfect response. But that sentence is a quite big “fuck you”.
A little personal flourish doesn’t invalidate the rest IMO. Humans get aggravated and humans are aggravating.
Yes, and I didn’t say that. I even argued in favor of his response thoughout this whole post (getting a shit ton of downvotes all along). But I think that doesn’t invalidate my point either: without this one sentence, his whole chain of arguments would have been pretty good and reasonable. It was just unnecessary to then add this snarky remark. It’s understandable if he’s pissed, but just because you are pissed when you say something doesn’t make what you said a clever move.
I get it. You can’t get by “Ai iS slOp” at top level comments anymore. I get that kind of ending because I would add it… but then I also don’t mind collecting downvotes so ymmv I guess.
It’s not as much of a “fuck you” as much as “I’m tired of this same fucking response, when all I’m trying to do is get some work done, which I do for fucking free, by the way”.
I mean, I get if you wanna use AI for that, it’s your project, it’s free, you’re a volunteer, etc. I’m just not sure I like the idea that they’re obscuring what AI was involved with. I imagine it was done to reduce constant arguments about it, but I’d still prefer transparency.
I tried fitting AI into my workloads just as an experiment and failed. It’ll frequently reference APIs that don’t even exist or over engineer the shit out of something could be written in just a few lines of code. Often it would be a combo of the two.
Yeah I mean. It’s not like AI can think. It’s just a glorified text predictor, the same you have on your phone keyboard
It’s like having an idiot employee that works for free. Depending on how you manage them, that employee can either do work to benefit you or just get in your way.
Only it’s not free. If you run it in the cloud, it’s heavily subsidized and proactively destroying the planet, and if you run it at home, you’re still using a lot of increasingly unaffordable power, and if you want something smarter than the average American politician, the upfront investment is still very significant.
Yeah I’m not buying the “proactively destroying the planet” angle. I’d imagine there’s a lot of misinformation around AI, given that the products surrounding it are mostly Western, like vaccines…
Vaccines are misinformation? What.
Not even free, just cheaper than an actual employee for now, but greed is inevitable and AI is computationally expensive, it’s only a matter of time before these AI companies start cranking up the prices.
You might genuinely be using it wrong.
At work we have a big push to use Claude, but as a tool and not a developer replacement. And it’s working pretty damn well when properly setup.
Mostly using Claude Sonnet 4.6 with Claude Code. It’s important to run /init and check the output, that will produce a CLAUDE.md file that describes your project (which always gets added to your context).
Important: Review everything the AI writes, this is not a hands-off process. For bigger changes use the planning mode and split tasks up, the smaller the task the better the output.
Claude Code automatically uses subagents to fetch information, e.g. API documentation. Nowadays it’s extremely rare that it hallucinates something that doesn’t exist. It might use outdated info and need a nudge, like after the recent upgrade to .NET 10 (But just adding that info to the project context file is enough).
Agreed, I don’t understand people not even giving it a chance. They try it for five minutes, it doesn’t do exactly what they want, they give up on it, and shout how shit it is.
Meanwhile, I put the work in, see it do amazing shit after figuring out the basics of how the tech works, write rules and skills for it, have it figure out complex problems, etc.
It’s like handing your 90-year-old grandpa the Internet, and they don’t know what the fuck to do with it. It’s so infuriating.
Probably because, like your 90-year-old grandpa with the Internet, you have to know how to use the search engine. You have to know how to communicate ideas to an LLM, in detail, with fucking context, not just “me needs problem solvey, go do fix thing!”
Just yesterday I had one of those moments of grace that are becoming commonplace.
Basically I have to migrate a service from a n8n workflow to an actual nodejs server for performance reasons. I spent 15 minutes carefully scoping the migration, telling it exactly what tools to use and code style to adopt. Gave it the original brief and access to the n8n workflows.
The whole thing was done in 4 minutes and 30 seconds. It even noticed a bug which has been in production unnoticed for the past year. Gave me some good documentation on how to setup the Google service account, the kind of memory usage to expect so I can dimension the instant accordingly. Another five minutes and I had a whole test suite with decent coverage. I had negotiated with the client that it would take around a week, well that was the under promise of the year…
People who go around telling it doesn’t work are incompetent, out of their minds or straight up lying.
Most people on Lemmy probably haven’t given it a single minute let alone 5 minutes.
It’s not really that simple. Yes, it’s a great tool when it works, but in the end it boils down to being a text prediction machine.
So a nice helper to throw shit at, but I trust the output as much as a random Stackoverflow reply with no votes :)
I feel like there needs to be a dedicated post (and I don’t want to write it, but maybe I eventually will) that outlines what a model really is. It is not just a statistical text prediction machine unless you are being so loose with the definition of “statistical” that it doesn’t even mean anything anymore.
A decent example of a statistical text prediction machine is the middle word suggested by your phone when you’re using the keyboard. An LLM is not that.
In the most general terms, this kind of language model tokenizes a corpus of text based on a vocabulary (which is probably more than just the words in the dictionary), uses an embedding model to translate these tokens into a vector of semantic “meaning” which minimized loss in a bidirectional encoding (probably), that is then trained against a rubric for one or more topic area questions, retrained for instruction and explainability, retrained with reinforcement learning and human feedback to provide guardrails, and retrained again to make use of supplemental materials not part of the original training corpus (resource augmented generation), then distilled, then probably scaled and fine tuned against topic areas of choice (like coding or Korean or whatever) and maybe THEN made available to people to use. There are generally more parts to curriculum learning even than that but it’s a representative-ish start.
My point being that, yes, it would be nuts to pose ANY question to a predictor that says “with 84% probability, the word that is most likely follows ‘I really like’ is ‘gooning’ on reddit”, but even Grok is wildly more sophisticated than that and Grok is terrible.
Edit: And also I really like your take at the start of this thread: user error is a pretty huge problem in this space.
The training is sophisticated, but inference is unfortunately really a text prediction machine. Technically token prediction, but you get the idea.
For every single token/word. You input your system prompt, context, user input, then the output starts.
The
Feed the entire context back in and add the reply “The” at the end.
The capital
Feed everything in again with “The capital”
The capital of
Feed everything in again…
The capital of Austria
…
It literally works like that, which sounds crazy :)
The only control you as a user can have is the sampling, like temperature, top-k and so on. But that’s just to soften and randomize how deterministic the model is.
Edit: I should add that tool and subagent use makes this approach a bit more powerful nowadays. But it all boils down to text prediction again. Even the tools are described per text for what they are for.
but in the end it boils down to being a text prediction machine.
And we’re barely smarter than a bunch of monkeys throw piles of shit at each other. Being reductive about its origins doesn’t really explain anything.
I trust the output as much as a random Stackoverflow reply with no votes :)
Yeah, but that’s why there’s unit tests. Let it run its own tests and solve its own bugs. How many mistakes have you or I made because we hate making unit tests? At least the LLM has no problems writing the tests, after you know it works.
I’ve had better luck with using it in a TDD style. “Write a test for this issue, watch it fail, then make it pass.”
At a minimum, the agent should be compiling the code and running tests before handing things back to you. “It references non-existent APIs” isn’t a modern problem.
I don’t know what they are using cause all agents routinely do that. I suspect they are fibbing or tested things out in 2024 and never updated their opinion.
The symptoms you describe are caused by bad prompting. If an AI is providing over-complicated solutions, 9 times out of 10 it’s because you didn’t constrain your problem enough. If it’s referencing tools that don’t exist, then you either haven’t specified which tools are acceptable or you haven’t provided the context required for it to find the tools. You may also be wanting too much out of AI. You can’t expect it to do everything for you. You still have to do almost all the thinking and engineering if you want a quality project - the AI is just there to write the code. Sure, you can use an AI to help you learn how to be a better engineer, but AIs typically don’t make good high-level decisions. Treat AI like an intern, not like a principal engineer.
“It can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong.”
It’s not about stupid or smart. It’s a tool, not a person. If you don’t get the same results that other people get with the same tool, then what could possibly be the problem other than how the person is using the tool?
“it’s your fault that it just made up tools that don’t exist” is a bold statement, bro.
The junior analogy comes to mind. If you hire a fresh face and they ship code that doesn’t work, it’s definitely on you, bro.
No, it’s not. It doesn’t have intention. It’s literally just a tool. If you don’t get the results you expect with a tool when other people do get those results, then the problem isn’t the tool.
I create custom embedded devices with displays and I’ve found it very useful for laying things out. Like asking it to take secondly wind speed and direction updates and build a Wind Rose out of it, with colored sections in each petal denoting the speed… it makes mistakes but then you just go back and reiterate on those mistakes. I’m able to do so much more, so much faster.
I had the same experience. Asked a local LLM about using sole Qt Wayland stuff for keyboard input, a the only documentation was the official one (which wasn’t a lot for a noob), no.examples of it being used online, and with all my attempts at making it work failing. it hallucinated some functions that didn’t exist, even when I let it do web search (NOT via my browser). This was a few years ago.
This was a few years ago.
That’s 50 years in LLM terms. You might as well have been banging two rocks together.
Yeah, now we’re in the iron age!
…Where we get to bang two ingots together
I expect because it wasn’t a user - just a random passer by throwing stones on their own personal crusade. The project only has two major contributors who are now being harassed in the issues for the choices they make about how to run their project.
Someone might fork it and continue with pure artisanal human crafted code but such forks tend to die off in the long run.
Considering the amount of damage AI has done to well-funded projects like Windows and Amazon’s services, I agree with this entirely. It might be crucial to help fix bigger issues down the line.
I’m the opposite. Its weird to me for someone to add an AI as a co author. Submit it as normal.
It’s mostly not a thing developers do. It’s a thing the tools themselves do when asked to make a commit.
Oops. Guess I’m uninstalling Lutris.
Personally, I have blocked Claude on GitHub, which helpfully puts a huge banner on any project it has infected.
Then unless I have absolutely no choice but using it, I get rid of it.
