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?

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.

> 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.

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

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!

It's more akin to someone commissioning a piece of art, where they describe the piece in varying detail and then it's the responsibility of the artist to see it through, perhaps deciphering ambiguities in the p̴r̴o̴m̴p̴t̴ commission brief.

If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it off to their employees and then spending the rest of their time watching TikTok in their office. It would be strange if they felt pride in that.

I think that's fair for certain one-shot generations. For example, sending off a single prompt to an image or music generator and just accepting the output.

But I think most of this stuff is iterative, multi-turn. You type a thing in, see what comes back, and then repeat until you have something that satisfies your desire.

Taking the manager analogy. If you spent 30-minutes writing up a draft spec, waited for the outputs, had a review meeting where you provided good feedback, and then repeated that cycle until the product was done... Again, I think that manager (assuming, of course, that their feedback was useful) should feel some pride in shaping that output!

Taking the art commission approach, you go back and forth with the artist until you have what you want. Should you feel pride?

I think it's much closer to the art commission than it is to a manager who is managing humans, the constraints of the business, customers, etc.

Maybe a movie producer is a better analogy?

Some artists use a brush, but others use a chisel.

And then there's the bullshit artists.

Just because we never had the option of a chisel before doesn't mean all chiselers are bullshit artists.

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.

That's a poor analogy, because the intention is orders of magnitude greater on those things than with an LLM. You still need the intention to write Python instead of C, or C instead of assembly. You need an insignificant amount of intention for LLMs, which will happily spew code even for the worst, most incomplete or nonsensical commands.

I think most people feel pride when they put effort into doing something challenging and in return achieve a good result. You can use high level languages and libraries and still put effort into something that is challenging, thus feeling a sense of pride. Of course, they may feel more pride if they achieve the same result without libraries, or in a more challenging language.

Prompting an LLM neither requires comparative effort nor is comparatively challenging, thus it's would be odd to feel a sense of pride from any associated outcomes.

I cannot believe this even requires an explanation.

Developing a functional app that meets your needs with an LLM takes it's own kind of skill, and is substantially more difficult if you can't recognize when the machine is steering your architecture in the wrong direction. It takes actual, real work. It's certainly a completely different kind of work than writing most of the code yourself, but so is using Java when compared to hand writing x86 opcodes.

Prompting an LLM to produce good code isn't a lot of work for you. Writing hex without an assembler or compiler would be a lot of work for you.

People have ideas, and now they have better tools to turn those ideas into reality. They aren't doing it like you would do it, but they're getting it done all the same, getting their needs met, and enjoying the ride.

Maybe just let people have fun, and when they report that they are in fact having fun... believe them.

I'm not saying people can't have fun, I'm saying it's a misplaced sense of pride that gives me the ick when I sense it in others. I see plenty of people who readily disclose that their thing they "built" was just slopped together by an LLM and this is perfectly okay, because they aren't trying to take credit for accomplishments that they didn't put in the expected effort for.

The difference between the skill & effort required to build vs prompt your way to something is orders of magnitude different. If it took just as much effort, people would just do it by hand anyways.

I think “build vs prompt” is a false binary that frames the argument badly.

There are way more nuanced uses of LLMs than skill-free “write me a facebook clone.” Like, hey LLM, help me develop tests of X, review this design for X, help me articulate what is wrong with the code for X, give me ideas for simplifying X, suggest optimizations for X, help me debug this failure trace for X, help me apply this refactor across all of X, and on and on. Even these are stupid examples that way over simplify.

I’m super proud of the work I’ve created /alongside/ LLMs. I’ll let it build me development aides and such with little oversight and there’s no skill there. But you can use it deliberately and maintain control, and it’s amazing to have a tool that can look through your code with you from so many angles.

Yeah, there's something pathetic about being proud of something you didn't actually get challenged by making. Like, I love building Lego sets. It's relaxing, it's fun, and I enjoy having the completed model to put on a shelf and look at. But I would never in a million years say I was proud of those Lego models, or that I had a sense of accomplishment. That wouldn't be merited.

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.

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.

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

That thread is hilarious. They update the model and the guy thinks his art skills has improved. Something to consider when someone tries to tell you prompting is a "skill"...

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

Yeah, they created a team that accomplished something (or a team that created a team), so it's well-deserved.

I guess that's why I burned out as a manager: I do not get a sense of accomplishment when my team achieves something

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.

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.

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.

Amen.

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

> 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. ;-)

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Very well framed.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

Why not?

If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well.

You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters.

This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.

Because doing enough security reviews to remove all the security bugs gets expensive, and if you use well-reviewed code, it's already been done.

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.

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.

Not convinced this is clear at all? I'm typing a document in, lets say -- word.

I want it to say "Come to my awesome awesome awesome party."

If I type it out, it's not programming, but if I ctrl-c + then ctrl-v twice, it is?

Copy-pasting is not programming, no more than clicking the save button is. But text expansion may be seen as such, especially when it involves dynamic elements (like current date and time). It may not be a clean delineation but, IMO, it's the difference between writing a recipe and doing the dish. Copy-pasting twice is making a dish. Creating a button that let the computer do it is writing a recipe.

...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?

> 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.

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.

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.

> sense of pride and accomplishment

What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?

> 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

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.

It does matter. Drawing a stick figure and having a machine print over it with a realistic image doesn't make you an artist, and no, you shouldn't be proud of it.

is there a list somewhere that i can check what i am allowed to be proud of and what i am not allowed to be proud of?

edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?

No, but come on. If you insert a computer into your brain and wake up tomorrow speaking German, would you be proud you could speak German? Wouldn't you rather work diligently to learn the language and be proud of that effort?

Depends on why the person is wanting to be able to speak German.

If you only want to speak German for its own sake, then maybe it does seem silly to be proud of what the brain computer did for you.

But there are many other reasons to want to be able to speak German. Thanks to his brain computer, a French cheese maker could travel to Germany to promote his cheeses in a new market to great success without having to rely on the German speaking skills of expensive to hire people, and without wasting years to learn German on his own when all he wanted to do was to make cheeses and grow his customer base for his cheese. German in and of itself was never a goal to him.

Just like computer programming is not a goal in and of itself to a lot of people, and who would otherwise have to spend time to learn programming instead of doing the thing they want to do, or having to hire software engineers that might cost more than they could ever hope to afford.

And even though the computer is doing something for the person, they are leveraging that for something that they feel pride and accomplishment in. Such as for example to use German (done by the computer) to expand your cheese customer base into Germany (your own accomplishment that was only possible thanks to the existence of the German speaking skills of the computer).

Absolutely -- why on earth would I spend more time and effort than I have to?

Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German in the first place, like appreciating German culture or talking to German people.

Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all there's a translator" since learning a language lets you experience the culture more intimately and communicate better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why not?

would i? no.

would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario? also no.

Alright, we’re each entitled to our opinions on the matter.

Or we could, you know, let people feel proud of whatever they want?

Call me old fashioned but I take pride in things I work hard to achieve. I think it's embarrassing to be proud of AI output of any kind, be it software or art or writing.

Hope all your programs are written in machine code. Wouldn’t want to be proud of compiler output.

I mean yeah? Wouldn't you be more proud of your ability to write a program in machine code than you would in assembly? Or more proud of assembly than of C? Or more proud of C than of Python?

Each stage takes greater effort, effort which creates skill. Those hard-earned skills are accomplishments to be proud of.

When LLMs are remotely comparable to compilers, your analogy might hold water. But in the world of today, it holds none.

But you're acting like everything that you use AI to build is easy to achieve, and that doesn't seem to be true.

And I’m sure ctoth’s non-coder friends will be just devastated to hear that some random online account is embarrassed because they’re proud of a little app they created for fun.

Sure, you can feel proud of whatever you wish.

But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel similarly proud of what you did.

lol, you’re literally talking about non-coders that GGGP said they know. No one is sharing their AI stuff here asking you to be impressed.

> No one is sharing their AI stuff here asking you to be impressed.

That actually happens all the time on Show HN these days.

I get where you're coming from, but for completely non-technical people, it seems to me the more precise analogy is not "building" but "ordering online". Or hiring someone to do something for you.

If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?

That's a better analogy than my dumb drawing one. You can be happy you got your pizza and you can enjoy the taste but it is not an accomplishment to be proud of.

It's mostly that how much you decide to involve AI as a spectrum. To extend to the pizza analogy, I feel like you're telling me that because I used dough that I bought at the store, I shouldn't be proud of the pizza I made, even though I made the sauce and cut the pepperoni and the sausage and baked it myself on a peel covered with cornmeal. That's not the same as just ordering it on DoorDash.

Agreed there are nuances, but in the context of this conversation about TFA, the suspicion is that this is mostly on the "100% AI" side of dial. There's also a "high volume, low quality" aspect to the PRs, as evidenced by the fact that the bots (or humans) don't read or follow the repo's contribution guidelines.

The very concept of "reverse centaur" implies a balance towards the "order pizza online" side of the equation.

The pizza analogy smuggles in this idea of cheep/mass-produced. I'm talking about blind people who can now prompt their way to an accessibility mod for their favorite game, the sort of thing which literally would have never been written before. How you know it wouldn't've been written is by counting the accessibility mods pre and post LLM.

Now generalize this. Every tiny community, every person with a disability, everybody for whom the default software doesn't work right? Can now change it specifically for them. Not add peperoni, that's far too low-dimensional to capture what is happening. Actually build their own interface, be able to use something they simply didn't have access to before, and critically not depend on another programmer (there are like a dozen of us blind ones!) to build something for them.

It's not about cheap. It's about ordering vs building. If you tell an architect and a bunch of workers to build you a house, even if you pick some details and make some choices, it's them that are building the house, not you.

You can feel happy about the result, you can find the house useful, but you shouldn't feel a sense of building accomplishment, because you didn't build anything.

With AI & apps there's less friction, because you don't even have to hire another human being, it's just prompting. In that sense, it's definitely closer to ordering food from an app.

In any case, in the context of TFA, there's also a sense of low quality, cheaply made. The bots making the PRs aren't reading the contribution guidelines, so that's low quality all by itself. Drowning a human reviewer with a mass of PR is also a low quality way of contributing.

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!

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.

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.

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.

the analogy would be that your LLM/agent has a pass at a Spielberg script and peppers his inbox with inane production notes. A system like that would be untenable for all involved.

I think the attitude frequently adopted by open source maintainers - comparing themselves to Spielberg - has been a major roadblock to anyone looking to contribute to open source projects for years.

Agree that even prior to LLMs those projects weren't terribly welcoming as per Linus' famous email comments (chalk it up to cultural communication differences :) )

I don’t know if it’s just me, and these days I do understand it given the widespread adoption of LLMs, but I’ve always detested the idea that I need to reach out and have a conversation with the maintainer before opening a PR. Especially (mainly) when the PR is simply addressing an approved GH issue.

I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.

On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.

Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.

Why are you looking to contribute to open source projects? If you have a fix or a new feature, you can share the diff in variety of ways. The maintainers are not obligated to review, discuss, and accept your changes.

I’m not entirely following you. I generally don’t contribute anymore, but in the past I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.

> I’ve found a lot of maintainers are not actually looking for collaboration, rather free labor.

Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.

The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.

If you think filming is the only skill needed to make a film, may I suggest looking at the very long list of names that appears at the end of the film of which only a few actually do filming? Takes a lot to know what to film, and how to be good at using the tools you have.

Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.

Artists of all stripes (including audio, animation, cinematographers, lighting, environment, textures, etc,) including tech artists, designers, writers, musicians… the ratio of functionality to look-and-feel is dramatically different than in non-entertainment products, and the labor involved reflects that. It’s a real shame that some of the people that contribute most to what makes a game great are often the first to get dropped when people talk about how the game is made, (but most are perfectly happy to fly under the radar when a bunch of entitled kids start raging about the “lazy devs.” ;)

Films aren’t open open to random contributions by casual volunteers. It’s not about iPhones.

"You are not a photographer just because you have a camera" has been a standard saying since forever, and has nothing to do with elitism.

Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.

Exactly - it's just a tool. So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using _is_ elitist. You recognize that, but the comment I replied to centered on the tool, not the finer points of professionalism.

But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.

> So, trying to make the argument that someone's work is less-than because they used a cheaper/more amateur tool versus the tool the well-funded professionals are using

No. Just the fact that they have a tool does not automatically make them a professional, doesn't automatically make them skillful, and doesn't automatically make their output worth something.

This is the meaning of "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."

There's nothing elitist about it.

Professionals are professional because someone pays them, that is all.

The word has other meanings, too ;) E.g. "professional conduct" isn't one that is paid for:

1a. of, relating to, or characteristic of a profession

1c.1. characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession

3. following a line of conduct as though it were a profession

Professionals can be unprofessional, and amateurs can show professionalism, but only one gets paid.

Using Apple’s preferred practice of using no article before iPhone (ie. never “an iPhone” or “the iPhone” or even “iPhones”) makes you come off as a shill, by the way. It’s like if you unironically put a trademark symbol after it.

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.

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.

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?

I'm blind. I wish to hop in a robocar and drive from Denver to go visit my folks back home in Florida. Is the Denver Access-A-Ride going to take me? Which public transit is available?

Flight?

I want to drive. I want to bring my cat and bring some stuff back from my dad's house. My parents just drove up here to visit me, I would like to do the same. Not take a train. Not take a plane. I want to hop in a robocar and drive to Florida. The same thing that every other person with a car can do whenever they want to. Freedom.

I have a hard time imagining how driving a car is freedom but hopping on a bus is not. In my mind a car is a liability in ways the bus is not. You have to insure your car, find parking, get a license, you cannot drive drunk, your license plate is tracked, etc. etc. vs. a bus which you can just hop in (as drunk as you want) fall a sleep or whatever and when you arrive the bus just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life. For me that is true freedom.

now imagine a bus, but its smaller and private only for you. for me that is true freedom! not only can you hop in as drunk as you want, and fall asleep, but you can also control the climate and the music and spread out. and when you arrive the waymo just drives away and you don’t have to think about it ever again in your life

Like I said earlier, this technology does not exist. And even if it did, the infrastructure required for everyone to own and operate such a car would be orders of magnitude more expensive and much much much politically harder choice to approve then to build out public transit and to provide access services.

They specifically referred to it as a "waymo". Everyone wouldn't own one, they would hire one for the trip, like you can already do with a non-autonomous rental car for a cross-country trip.

Own or rent one, doesn’t matter, my point still stands. Access vans, busses, trains, plains, etc. are all technology which exists. Worst case your state can subsidize you a hired assistant with a drivers license who can do the driving. These are all technologies which exist today, and are available to mobility impaired individuals in many parts of the world. Only extremely limited areas have a "waymo" available and only for a limited number of trips. The former can be implemented as soon as there is a political will (and already has been implemented in many parts of the world) while the latter requires faith in a technology that does not exist yet.

>I have a hard time imagining how driving a car is freedom but hopping on a bus is not.

Try telling the bus driver to make a stop at a particular restaurant along the way.

Funny enough, my local bus line does that. Admittedly it is unique among my local bus system (due to the rural nature of my local area relative to the rest of the system; and the relative length between bus stops). However the same bus system (King County Metro) also operates the access van, so if you are mobility impaired you do have the option to hail a ride which gets you door to door.

We're talking about a robot car, right? So this won't change?

You're correct. I was trying to build on the parent comment about convenience.

Worst case this is an option I don't take, best case is that this would give me more time (shorter commute) with the benefits of being able to read or create.

> People can be wildly reluctant to just hand over a thousand or two dollars worth of equipment

Who owns a $2,000 phone which isn't insured and should they really be leaving their house?

I own a $60,000 dollar car that's insured, still doesn't mean I'm going to just let anyone use it when I depend on it.

I would assume that you cannot merely walk in to the nearest Apple car store and get a new car the same day if something bad happened to your car, so I don't really understand your statement as there is no equivalency here to exploit in your analogy.

I mean, you can go get a new car the same day, hence rental places while insurance figures everything out.

How about this, I'll pick a random day in your future while you're out doing stuff to show up and break your phone in half. How much is that going to ruin your day?

> tolerating vicious verbal attacks disguised by somewhat subdued body language

Two people arguing in public, words only, is close to a legal non-event in the US. So I would hope so?

The threshold for a surveillance system to affect societal norms is not necessarily "legal event", and potentially even lower than any observable reaction (from self-censorship).

Just consider how algorithmic moderation can shape language (=> people using weird constructs like "to unalive", or weird metaphors in chinese), even in contexts where it would technically be unnecessary.

A close US equivalent is the "cant google that, I'll end up on a list" notion. This is all quite undesirable from my point of view.

Until one of them communicates a threat, then it is a criminal matter.

Perhaps, depending on specific intent, credibility, and the nature of harm threatened.

But since this is about surveillance, I hope that detection of verbal threats is not a goal of government surveillance because it's difficult to imagine how that could be accomplished without significant loss of privacy or other liberties.

I can see it in court now. Our AI monitoring system did indeed know about the threat to the building where 800 people died on Sunday.

It says: " Agent: Voice to text detected: I have everything ready - all the XXX chemicals are ready in the van and I'm going to park in the 900 S Crap St now"

Agent: Thread Level HIGH.

Agent: Looking up local codes.

Agent: Mayor signed SB-1238 in 2026 - no surveillance devices may be used for audio threat determination.

Agent: Threat silenced, but logged.

Judge: Oh, that makes sense. Make sure to bag and tag and bill the families for the bags.

City Employee: We also know who parked the van, should we arrest them.

Judge: No it looks like SB-1238 would forbid us from using this data for the purposes of arrest. I guess send them a thank you letter for testing our laws.

Oh, only 800? Maybe you can pick a larger imaginary number to make me feel really guilty about not wanting to give up my rights to live free of surveillance.

Weird justification since 9/11 was a plane hijacking, not something on the streets.

They wrote a 600 page report about it and it included a ton of recommendations. Not many people remember at this point, but for months and even a few years after, the entire country was on edge about it happening again, in different means (trains, car wrecks on purpose, shootings). There is a reason they have called this a post-911 world ever since. That hasn't ended.

You forgot the paranoia after it. Along with surrendering anything in the name of anti-terrorist measures. And protecting children.

Appreciate the pushback, saltyoldman. Yes, we want to respond to credible threats. And, as always, courts and law enforcement can invade privacy when there's reason to believe someone is worth surveilling. But we're talking here about widespread, extremely cheap, technically easy surveillance of potentially everyone at all times. That's the endgame that some commercial and government interests have in mind.

Would you agree that sometimes an uptick in theoretical safety is not worth a downtick of definite lost liberties?

I used to be that way. However more recently I have come to prefer security over privacy, at least where I live. I do want to make sure human, drug and weapon traffickers are not exiting off my freeway ramp. I do get the issues with what you're saying, but let's think of ways to have both. The existence of a surveillance net with safegards. In other words yes let's have the conversation to make our country secure and also prosecute sherrifs spying on their girlfriends, make sure no API hole exists and some company isn't selling billions worth of data to China.

There is no way to have both. Surveillance is power and it corrupts in the same way as any other form of power. It's not just about patching some individual holes. You can't have too much of it for the same reason why you can't have a cop stationed at every single building in your city. For sure, doing that would make some people feel safer, but it would also make anyone doing something legal but disfavored by their government terrified, increase prosecutions for frivolous infractions and open the door for a future government to swoop in and make great use of all that free power lying around.

Besides, even if it was possible to do both (it's not), do you think this would ever actually happen? When it comes to surveillance, they only take and take and take and never give anything back, further encouraged by a terrified populace that wants more safety in a safer-than-ever world. It's a ratchet that only goes one way because it greatly benefits anyone vying for power in governments and businesses alike. Once you let them have it, you're not getting anything back.

I'm in Seattle and everyone knows exactly where human trafficking is happening and the police are doing nothing about it. Teenagers are being pimped out all along Aurora and literally nothing is happening despite literally years of public outcry.

The pimps get arrested again and again and then released without charges being filed.

Cameras aren't going to make a difference.

The interesting thing is how I was making a very contained point pertaining to cameras, and how cameras, which we were talking about in this thread, seeing a verbal confrontation, could not and should not make a call, because a verbal confrontation is not a legal event. You then took this into a totally different case involving ... what? hypothetical recording of a conversation between two hypothetical terrorists? To prove ... what? My point is that it is not a shortcoming of the camera that it is not making a judgement call on the thing OP was originally talking about. A verbal altercation between two people. I was not talking about a hypothetical bombing. I was not citing a specific law, I was not advocating that there should be a law, I was not advocating anything about whether or not we should ban collection of existing evidence. I was not making any of these moves. I was saying simply: a camera looking at two people in a verbal argument from far enough away that it cannot hear the conversation is not a failure of the technology. Not every negative interaction between two human beings is criminalizable.

You received a straw man and decided to engage it. You fell for the trap, and have already been put into a losing position. How are you supposed to recover from engaging this straw man.

alternatively, it turns out the voice to text ended up picking up on dialog from a movie the suspect was watching, and he opens the door to a SWAT team thinking that's his pizza being delivered.

This is essentially the Trolley Problem.

I don't think you're advocating to have our personal conversations continuously monitored whenever outside, but in the context of this thread, that's what it sounds like.

No, in the context of the thread it sounds like they're illustrating myrmidon's point about how the selective enforcement of crimes that are easy to catch on camera means that the police have less time (and less inclination, training, norms) for addressing more serious crimes, like interpersonal violence.

More broadly, they're not saying that we should make the cameras better to catch more crime, they're saying that when you make cameras the main way you catch crime, you shift the social definition of what crime is to "what cameras can catch".

> then it is a criminal matter.

In very limited and clearly defined ways only: https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...

Pretty much everything is a crime if you do it while blacker or trashier than the local baseline.

I keep seeing this and I want to speak to it.

When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"

Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.

It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"

It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.

Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!

Physics allows this, and actually taking advantage of it requires billions of dollars of unprecedented infrastructure buildout that is already destabilizing the power grid.

The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.

I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.

“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.

“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.

> This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.

So, the Baruch Plan?

The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year.

Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0].

[0]: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2017703360393318587

Since nobody uses GPT-2 any more it's more informative to compare the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 and the price to train GPT 5.5 in 2026. Unfortunately that cost is not disclosed but it's probably in the billions.

The point being: the price to train frontier models isn't coming down, nor is it going to come down because for models to remain on the frontier they have to keep getting bigger and bigger (and trained on more and more data).

> There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI.

In the US capitalist context, it's certainly inevitable, because AI is the biggest and most attractive source of profit and power out there right now. In that context, the broad strokes of what's happening currently, including the financial bubble, are predictable and inevitable.

What are the concrete steps which would allow us to "easily stop this train"? And why haven't we used steps like that to stop other cases where obscenely wealthy people have screwed everyone else over to increase their wealth? Is public control of the means of production involved, perhaps? If so, your definition of "easily" and mine are incompatible.

- Legislation

- Labor organizing

I grew up in a union household, and my dad and my grandfather fighting for better wages, healthcare and working conditions are the reason why I got a good education and work in Silicon Valley surrounded by Stanford assholes.

All of us who work for a paycheck can get together and say, “no, we will not allow you to record keystrokes and mouse movements to train our replacements. No, we will not have our performance or future employment based on an AI leaderboard.”

Previous generations fought and died for our right to do that, but in 2026 we just sit on our hands and complain on this forum. We can and should do better.

The U.S. is absolutely on fire right now with opposition to data centers. We, collectively, can extract concessions or ban their construction altogether.

These things aren’t “easy”. They are also eminently possible.

I think you're in denial about the reality of the situation.

The reality is that the US has been a story of increasing concentration of wealth and power. The people who "fought and died" bought some important (from a human rights perspective) but ultimately minor (from a capitalist perspective) concessions from the capital class. The battle you describe is one of defense of rights, not of gaining control.

The overall system of capitalist control remains unaffected, and it's why the buildout of AI is, in fact, inevitable under the current system.

You're essentially saying no, you want public control of the means of production instead. That might be great, if even a sizable fraction of the US population agreed with you. But due in no small part to decades of propaganda, they don't.

So your position is, “yes, workers have fought back against power in the past and won, but now it’s just too hard :(“

Ok, good luck

A US-China AGI ban treaty could prevent superintelligence indefinitely. Data centers are hard to hide. Have fun buying GPUs when you're cut off from all global payments. America would have to make some unpleasant concessions but that seems like a solid trade for preventing a wide variety of nightmare futures.

Is very difficult (not to say impossible) to ban a ill-defined thing.

I don't think we can stop it, but the people saying "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" are doing their best to accelerate it, which gives us less time to figure out what to do about it.

The people saying this is happening are competing with each other for resources, so there's no way for one of them to hold back without losing out to the others. We see this with people dropping Claude subscriptions in favor of ChatGPT because codex 5.5 > Claude Opus 4.6/7/8. Anthropic is losing money by not releasing Mythos.

You are proposing that going from N companies chasing AGI to N-1 companies chasing AGI will have zero effect on when AGI happens?

Aidenn0 said they're doing their best to accelerate it, and I'm saying "they're" isn't a single monolithic entity and that they're in competition with each other so they're incentivized to go as fast as possible, so it would be hard to hold them back.

This is a good point, but my point is that they chose to get into this business.

1. Some people have no ethical problems making bombs.

2. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs so do something else.

3. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs, but say "well someone else will make it if I don't" so they make bombs.

I think it is reasonable to argue against #3 as a reasonable position.

I would propose that it is very likely to have zero effect. Your argument supposes they are all working together, like many connected computers calculating primes.

It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.

The latter is far more likely if N>2

> When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"

I still believe Dario asks these questions in good faith. Nobody believes that about e.g. Sam Altman or Elon Musk. They compared themselves to Oppenheimer because it helped them get attention. When it started an actual regulatory conversation, they were suddenly less worried.

Hot take, but concentration camps were invented in the past. No need to use them, though

Roko works at Anthropic now?

Of course he doesn't, and of course you cannot find a single person at Anthropic who cares about this, and of course you are just looking for gotcha points. But even with that. Can we please try and couple to reality just a little bit?

I personally know anthropic researchers who cared deeply about roko's basilisk. Go to an EA meetup in the bay if you'd like to meet them yourself. Sure, theyve moved past it at this point, but they still care deeply about AI x risk, and many of them do already believe that their AI is sentient. And before you claim its all a psyop to prop up AI hype these people were AI doomers before openAI and anthropic existed, they had minimal financial incentive at that point to behave that way.

Treme, on externalities:

> I think they should probably ignore you and continue working on it seeing as they got accepted into YC.

Even if your core offering disappears you can do the same thing that every other SMS-sending thing can do?

I also notice you answered the question, but not in the way anyone who needs to depend on this service would want to hear. So yeah you're doing the Mac Mini thing.

I'm with landl0rd. This service should not exist, you should feel bad for creating it, and every time I get a spam iMessage I will think about you and curse your name. Hope the money's worth it.

> anyone who needs to depend on this service would want to hear

Are you implying you'd be cool with it if it was Apple sanctioned? That's pretty silly.

Not even the worst reading of their reply would lend to that implication.

It’s pretty obvious that they meant that anyone who depended on their service would/should probably run away kicking and screaming if they were looking for a dependable service that will do what they claim to in the long term.

If they were Apple sanctioned, then at least you’d have some reassurance that the service won’t die randomly one day when Apple has had enough, à la Beeper.

First, that's pretty obviously not what I said. Two things can be true. This is bad, and also if I were evaluating it for use in my business, it is obviously not something I can rely on.

But then just ...Um yes? I trust Apple to keep a handle on their iMessage network. Citation: having used iMessage for ~15 years. This would mean things like ensuring that I didn't get spam. Ensuring actual company identity (does anyone remember Messages for Business?) &c. This is pretty obvious and I am trying to understand your comment?