Just a PSA.
Sorry to link to Reddit, but not only is the dev sloppily using using Claude to do something like 20k line PRs, but they are completely crashing out, banning people from the Discord (actually I think they wiped everything from Discord now), and accusing people forking their code of theft.
It’s a bummer because the app was pretty good… thankfully Calibre-web and Kavita still exist.
I think I can provide you a great equivalent. Firearms, they have utility, but there are people who make them a lifestyle choice, and there are people who make them their whole personality. There are also a lot of people just desperate for an excuse to use one. I grew up with a couple of farmers in the extended family, I would never argue guns should be entirely banned, but I am so glad I live somewhere with sane laws around gun ownership. It would be so nice if we had similar consideration around regulating LLMs.
The danger to open source as I see it is that LLMs degrade the quality and ability of developers while increasing their throughput, and I have never once heard someone complain that open source lacks quantity, but I hear a lot of people complaining about the quality.
I think that the problem, in both cases, is culture.
It’s not that either of those are bad, or bad for people; it’s bad for people of this culture or people of this society. It’s how the two intersect that is the problem.
It could be a tool that lifts up the worker or creative, but instead it’s a tool to devalue the creative and extract power and wealth.
It highlights that people with power get a different set of rules and laws than the rest of us, and they’re using that to further entrench and enrich themselves.
I will complain about quantity, many areas where open source projects are competing with closed source commercial products they have not achieved feature parity or a comparable level of polish, quantity matters. So does, as someone else touched on, quality of life improvements to the process of writing code like ease of acquiring and synthesizing information. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff, but how much is really being sacrificed depends on what exactly is being done with a LLM. To me one part of what’s described here that’s clearly going too far is using it to automate communication with other people contributing to the project, there’s no way that is worth it.
As for the gun thing, I will support entirely banning LLM powered weapons intended to kill people, that’s an easy choice.