Selfhosted

Some devs are afraid to admit that they used AI to help them code because there’s so much hatred towards using AI to code.

I would say there is a lot of truth to that statement. The backlash is immediate and punishing. I've said before, I think there are a lot of young devs who would like to contribute to the opensource/selfhosting community, but lack the experience.

Some devs are afraid to admit that they used AI to help them code because there’s so much hatred towards using AI to code.

Cowards. "Some devs" would not survive five minutes in the real world as a queer person.

Warning, anecdote:

I was unexpectedly stuck in Asia for the last month (because of the impact of the war), turning an in-person dev conference I was organising into an "in-person except for me" one at a few days notice.

I needed a simple countdown timer/agenda display I could mix into the video with OBS; a simple requirement, so I tried a few from the standard package repos (apt, snap store, that kind of thing.)

None of them worked the way I wanted or at all - one of them written in Python installed about 100 goddamned dependencies (because, Python,) and then crashed because, well, Python.

So I gave up and asked my local hosted LLM model to write it for me in Rust. In less than 10 minutes I had exactly what I wanted, in a few hundred lines of Rust. And yeah, I did tidy it up and publish it to the snap store as well, because it's neat and it might help someone else.

Which is more secure? The couple of hundred lines of Rust written by my LLM, or the Python or node.js app that the developer pinky-promises was written entirely by human hand, and which downloads half the Internet as dependencies that I absolutely am not going to spend time auditing just to display a goddamned countdown clock in a terminal window?

The solution to managing untrusted code isn't asking developers for self-declared purity test results. It's sandboxing, containers, static analysis... All the stuff that you are doing already with all the code/apps you download if you're actually concerned. You are doing those things, right?

Yeah. Maybe it’s time to adopt some new rule in the selfhosted community.

Tho I chafe against rules and regulations, I realize they are necessary.

I just want some say in what I install on my computer. And not be fooled by someone into using their software.

Me too. It's why I try to carefully pick seasoned projects, and I don't jump on the bandwagon just because it's a new twist to an old solution. I selfishly want others to be my beta testers. LOL Hey, I admit it. Also, I am truly thankful that there exists in the community, those who can and do look at the code and understand the issues involved. I do not possess those skills. I know a limited amount of code and use it for me locally. I would never dare publish it tho. I'm too afraid of what the ramifications would be should someone use my code and the wheels fall off their server. I would feel very responsible. It's the reason I do not even publish my notes to a wiki of some sort.

Here’s the disclosure you need: all projects you see have involved AI somewhere, whether the developers like to admit it or not. End of. The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not going back in. Railing against it really isn’t going to change anything.

I've said it before, AI is here to stay. It's not a fad. Kind of like when the internet first started to become publicly available. Lots of people deemed it a fad. It's now a global phenom and it is the basis by which we do business on the daily, minute by minute, globally. I do think that AI needs some heavy governmental regulation. It would be great if we could all play nicely together without involving the government(s). Alas, we don't seem to be able to do that, and so, government(s) has to step in, unfortunately. The problem with that is, imho, surveillance capitalism has worked so well that governments also want to take a peek at that data too. I have nothing to back up that conspiracy theory, it's just a feeling I get.