I don’t usually share what I build. Most of it lives on Codeberg or Github as a glorified off-site backup. 3-2-1 and all that. If I nuke my drive, I can pull it back down. That’s the whole point for me.
A while back I mentioned Pimaps here, a few people asked to see it, so I posted it. Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted (documentation and review- flagged with AIP). Similar story with Cliparr. I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
What does the community actually expect from devs when sharing a project? I’m not assuming everyone here is a professional dev - though I’d guess the overlap is significant - so I’m wondering where the bar sits.
Polish? Full handwritten codebase? Something else?
How much of the sausage making do you actually want to see?
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In this post and your linked post you come off as quite confrontational while exaggerating the dissent and underplaying the support. It’s a great way to get comments that strongly disagree with you. In all of that commotion, it sounds like you’ve missed the point: You’re regretting the AI disclosure, when really people were voicing their opinions in hopes that you’d regret/rethink the AI use.
Personally, I really like the AI disclosures. I like seeing how the sausage is made and what it’s made with. If the sausage is stuffed with hot dog “meat” I want to know. I’ll also avoid it like I avoid junk food, because that’s what it is. LLM-generated code is the junk food of programming. It’s a waste of resources, it’s bad for your (and everyone’s) health, and it can’t be trusted.
Some people really like junk food and hot dogs, and that’s fine. We just need to be clear that that’s not healthy and encourage healthier habits like eating fruits and vegetables (or at least real meat). People like ignoring the externalities of junk food and LLMs; both are responsible for a lot of pollution and societal harm (increased healthcare costs, dark patterns, misinformation, etc.). That’s enough reason for some people to completely remove them from their lives and be understandably vocal about how others should too.
The occasional sweet treat isn’t bad, but making sweet treats at home is always better. At home, I have more control over what ingredients I use and where I buy them from. Though I know I’ll never be able to use zero resources to make a good cinnamon roll, I can at least make the most optimal choices for myself. Ask yourself this: what value does text I generate provide? Could someone else, given the same information, generate the same text? Could someone else write functionality similar text without boiling the oceans and massive copyright infringement? I think any LLM-generated content that anyone could reasonably generate and use themselves is worthless and a net negative impact on the world. If it’s LLM-generated content that can’t be immediately/easily used, then you’re at least providing some real value by doing some work to make it usable.
AI disclosure doesn’t protect you against other people’s opinions. Some people will buy and consume the product, some people will try out the product and decide it’s not for them, some people will discover the product is made very unethically and decry it publicly in hopes that others won’t enable the ethical violations.
My intention isn’t to be confrontational, though I am genuinely perplexed, and that’s probably what you’re reading.
I don’t believe highlighting the AI tribalism is exaggerated. Technology is literally one of the top communities on Lemmy - one rarely (never?) sees positive comments about AI there. Hell, FuckAI is literally a thing.
On regret: why should anyone “regret” using a tool? If we need to take moral consideration into tool use… well…should we regret using mobile phones? I would argue they are just as reprehensible.
If a dev used a local model to spelunk the codebase and write the documentation, would that sit better? Why? I’m not sure the line is where people think it is.
I demand that you code in assembly. Javascript is too high-level. Natural language is too high-level.
Assembly?
I’ll toggle transistors with a paper clip, thankyouverymuch.
I found your Pimaps to be fabulous.
Haters gonna hate, there’s no help for it.
AI is a tool. Slop happens, but it doesn’t necessarily need to happen. I imagine there were many misguided, unnecessary, and just plain wrong trenches dug just after invention of the backhoe.
Go on and do even greater stuff.
Show us how the
carrotsausage is made. Not all lemmy hates AI. I used it myself on a project I could otherwise not have made in my limited free-time. Just be honest about it, as you have so far, and people will tolerate.yeah I have problems with ai but not against it per se. I have a feeling people like that are not as vocal.
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I don’t see how you were “dunked on”. There was one (1) person who went farther than voicing legitimate concerns… and then you were a twat and a half about it in the edited post. “Politely go fuck yourself” with a smile is worth a downvote.
Developers have been getting criticism for using particular tools for decades. For using Electron, for using systemd, for developing in Rust, for not developing in Rust, for using GTK or Qt… but when LLMs get involved, it’s suddenly verboten and you get to take some reductive moral high ground because “it’s just a tool”?
(edit) Just to answer the actual question:
- If you don’t need to use AI, don’t. Messy, undocumented, human-authored code deserves more respect than clean code with dubious authorship.
- Show how the sausage is made. Don’t just push your project as a single squashed commit; it makes you look like you have something to hide. (edit 2) If a commit contains AI-generated anything, mark it as such.
- Again, don’t be a twat when you inevitably get pushback. As a developer
of supposedly 25 years, you should be familiar with thatof no particular renown, you should learn how to handle it gracefully before a reputation develops around you.
Ok, fair enough about “dunked on”. The exact nuance of Americanisms occasionally escapes me, in the same way “rooting for the home team” means something very different once you cross the equator. I’ll concede that, and stop trying to translate into lingo that isn’t mine.
On sequencing of events: I posted about my project as a genuine “hey, look at this cool thing I did”, with no intention to share the codebase until others asked for it. Literally no intention, grabbing for likes or stars on Github.
Someone responded by calling me “fluent in slop” - directed at a person who is, for what it’s worth, autistic. I wrote the original post and then rewrote the AI disclosure with some cheek baked back in. So, the twattery had a catalyst.
Which, I’ll note, is a word you’ve used twice in one comment while advising me not to be one :)
Finally: you’re conflating me with the author of Cliparr. I’ve never claimed 25 years of development (and if anything, I prefer not to talk about professional roles on social media). He’s the gent being called a slop merchant preemptively in the other thread, who inspired this one.
I think you’re trying to gaslight us and yourself into believing that this post has standing and that you didn’t fuck up.
Stop with the stilted arguments and actually listen to what people are telling you (after you asked for it) in a much nicer tone than I am using right now.
you’re conflating me with the author of Cliparr
My mistake, I’ve edited the comment to reflect this. Although I don’t understand, then, why you even brought Cliparr up. You’re not involved, and only taking offence on someone else’s behalf.
That also means that the lovely message of “Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)” was precipitated by a single negative interaction and a handful of downvotes. Regardless of linguistic and cultural differences, that’s just being a dick, and it should be pointed out. Perhaps you should reexamine how you handle criticism.
I brought up Cliparr because someone was being pre-emptively called a slop merchant before anyone had looked at their code. You don’t have to be personally involved to think that’s worth pushing back on.
On the catalyst: you’ve characterised it as “a single negative interaction and a handful of downvotes.” You’ve also already acknowledged you missed the deleted posts. Those two things are doing quite a bit of work together. The comment that preceded the edit wasn’t a downvote - it was being told I was “fluent in slop”, and that my app might kill someone, directed at someone who is autistic. That’s the interaction we’re talking about.
I’ll take the broader point that the phrasing was undiplomatic. But “perhaps you should reexamine how you handle criticism” is a bit rich from someone who’s called me a twat twice and is now on their third comment about it.
posted it. Got dunked on for AI slop
101 upvotes and 14 downvotes… dunked?
Anyway, I stopped reading and downvoted after the
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
typing the word “politely” or a smiley doesn’t make a very rude remark any less rude.
Moreover, splitting the community into a pro-AI faction and an anti-AI one isn’t healthy (for the community, whether it’s healthy for you is a can of worms that I don’t want to open right here and now) and ridiculing the other “faction” can only radicalize things and we already have more than enough of that, both in lemmy and, sadly, also IRL.
So, personally, I donwvoted your post, not your project.
There also only seems to be one comment chain mentioning the AI, which has been mod deleted. The test of the comments don’t mention AI or aren’t critical because of the AI.
You are of course free to downvote as you see fit - that’s what it’s there for. Likewise, I’m am free to write as I do / not sand down how I write for the sake of votes.
On the vote count: you may have missed the deleted posts here and elsewhere. The ratio wasn’t the issue.
On the rest - “whether it’s healthy for you”, “splitting the community”, “radicalize” - that’s a lot of weight to put on someone asking a straightforward question about community norms. You’ve framed a genuine query as a faction rally, and slipped in a dig about my wellbeing while doing it. That’s the part I’d call unfair, and I think you know it.
Sir… You came to us for these comments this time. Are you just here for a fight? It’s not clear what you want from us.
I don’t find your project interesting enough for me, but I was happy you did it. I prefer to keep my infrastructure at home in a controlled environment and take my maps out with me, but I don’t use navigation, I just record GPS tracks.
Now with this post, I’m starting to wonder what your motivations are altogether, particularly considering your responses here.
Huh? I’m not here for a fight. I posted a genuine question about community expectations around AI disclosure. What I didn’t anticipate was needing to defend my character and sequencing of events across a dozen comments in order to get there.
The “motivation” is pretty simple: we should discuss what the bar actually is, because every time people try to meet it, the bar moves. That’s the thread. Nothing more sinister than that. See https://aussie.zone/post/37216287
Glad you’re recording tracks either way, sounds like the right tool for your use case.
I just looked back over your post and your answers there and in here. With respect, your writing style sounds combative. I would never ask you to change it for anyone, but you should understand how it comes across.
Regarding the AI disclosure stuff, you aren’t the first burgeoning dev posting to Lemmy to go through this exact gauntlet of “AI slop” accusations. You are on a platform used by a fairly specific group of people who were pissed off enough to leave reddit, so not the usual general “tech enthusiast” crowd, and a fairly militant bunch.
The way I see it, AI is 1) already here and 2) just a tool. It’s being used in the background of a LOT of projects and there is by now simply no way to cover our ears and pretend it doesn’t exist. For better or worse, it’s also changing the pace of development, check out how fast PS5 emulation is happening because of AI tooling.
That said, developer practices that took us 40 years to make standard are still valuable, so folks have legitimate reason to call out your commit and documentation practices. If there is anything I objected to in your project, it might be that.
Ultimately, a created work starts to live a different life once it is public. You started without sharing it, shared the source, and now you have to make a decision: continue sharing and accept that not everyone will like it, or stop sharing. It’s really that simple.
“If it gets out what gets into the sausage we make, we’ll get into a place we won’t get out anymore.”
As far as I remember we had a hunch you weren’t completely honest with us because some of the code and design smells of AI as well. The rest is just crazy, like the spacebar and enter key on your keyboard are jammed.
And not sure if disclosing it in some reply is all that great. IMO there should be a “co-authored by …-AI” in the commits. And transparency in the Readme, where people actively look for that kind of information. You didn’t do that.
Your recollection is either misremembered or conflated with something else.
Irrespective, a hunch and a smell aren’t evidence. If you spotted something specific in the codebase, I’m genuinely open to hearing it - “it feels like AI” is doing a lot of j’accuse there.
As for the spacebar and enter comment - I’m not sure if that’s a formatting critique or something else entirely.
In any case, none of this is on topic here, with the topic being: what exactly is the expectation? As I said on the Cliparr thread -
- Don’t disclose - slop
- Disclose with AIP - not specific enough, still assume slop
- Disclose more specifically - “slop”
I’m genuinely trying to get a read of the room. Because when I explicitly described how the sausage was stuffed, I got harassed and called a clanker. I’ve seen that happening on other threads also…to the point at which I question the utility of tagging posts.
I think we’ve been clear
Maybe the people asking for your projects and the ones slamming them for you using AI in any capacity are different people.
I for one think AI is a tool and if you’re competent or it’s for one-off tasks, you can use it. It’s the agentic vibecoding by complete non-IT people (or techbros, or absolute beginners) that grinds my gears.
Clasic goomba funnel fallacy
Yes, we want to know how the sausage is made, just like with all FOSS.
what does the community actually expect from devs
Don’t flood the zone.
It really isn’t so long ago when making an app required various stages of completion and testing, usually including other people. I expect from devs that they follow that well-established road and stop with the silly “who has the time” argument I’m hearing so often lately. Sorry, you didn’t actually say that.
Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?
Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?
Yes, actually :) (or near by, at least).
for me the issue isn’t so much the AI usage, but rather the intent behind the project. The reason I stopped browsing /r/selfhosted (and most of reddit) was the huge volume of people announcing their latest github star farming project, usually something that already exists or otherwise re-invents the wheel. The worst ones were the soulseek clones that caused massive disruptions because of their poor implementation of the protocol.
If a project is well written (and maintained) AI assisted coding, then that’s fine. But the problem is that the deluge of pure slop has made separating the two much harder, and thus I tend to assume anything that looks AI assisted is a waste of time.
I don’t understand this behaviour. They’re little stars on a website.
Stars.
I mean…why not go for unicorns or rainbows or something?
Are you 6? Or what?
Anyway, I agree with you. That is probably the main reason for not interacting on Reddit for me too (the LLM fora are even worse with it). The only thing I can surmise is that GitHub stars somehow equal social validation equals…I don’t get what.
Once again, little fake shiny yellow stars.
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
Clearly years of caffeine have burnt out my dopaminergic receptors.
As a dev i dont care for ai, but i will only hate/judge/completly ignore programms/tools/documentation thats clearly vibecoded slop.
Meaning if you let ai fix your Gramnar/Sentece structure okay, i dont care its probably better. But if you let ai write your documentation and i find most of the information wrong, broken or halucinated its a no go.
Same with your code if its full of sloppy hacky bullshit, repeats and useless libs, i will assume you vibecoded it without nowing anything
Edit: Also remember there will always a loud group of haters. There a probably many like me that saw ypur posts and just didnt care/react at all.
You will need to choose if you want hate from all ai is bad people when disclaiming it or if you want to add the other peoples hate when it inadvertently is found out that you used ai.
Honestly, I don’t know what people expect either, and I do think there’s a fair bit of snobbery and gatekeeping around what this community rightly calls AI slop (and don’t get me started on reddit’s /r/selfhosted lol).
I’ve been interested in code from afar, but my life priorities and passions mean learning to code properly has to take a back seat. That said, I have ideas, I’m rigorous, and I can read and learn. So I use Claude to vibe-code a whole bunch of tools that fill a real gap in what already exists for my hobbies and my two jobs. Whether I use AI or not is my responsibility, and every public repo I have carries a disclaimer about AI usage.
For me, the bar should be: does it work, is it documented, and is the AI involvement disclosed clearly ? If yes to all three, I’m curious enough and big enough to review the repo and try it myself.
Mods here have proposed tags and standards to tell apart projects with varying degrees of AI involvement. Yet the systematic backlash makes me hesitant to share tools that could genuinely help some people, spark ideas for others, or maybe even lead to a collaboration with someone skilled enough to build something exceptional for the community. In my case, AI is a very useful tool, but it only ever produces stuff for me alone.
Which is a shame.
I feel in this case you should just publish it on Github anyway. But skip the advertisement post in some general Lemmy community. I think that’s a good compromise. And transparency is very welcome. It doesn’t feel that way in some public discussion by random people online. But we also got a lot of people who appreciate it.
