There's a bit of drama going on with the popular game manager Lutris right now, with users pointing out the developer using AI generated code via Claude.
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.
Personally, I have never seen LLM generated code that works without needing to be edited, but I imagine for routine blocks of code and very common things it probably does fine. I dont see why a programmer needs to rewrite the same code blocks over and over again for different projects when an LLM can do that part leaving more time for the programmer to write the more specialized parts. The programmer will still have to edit and verify the generated code, but programming is more mechanical than something like art.
However, for more specialized code, I would be concerned. It would likely not function at all without editing, and if it did function it probably wouldn’t be optimized or secure. However, this programmer claims to have 30 years of experience, and if thats the case then he likely knows this and probably edits the LLM output code himself.
As I have said before, Generative AI is a tool, like PhotoShop. I dont see why people should reject a tool if it can make their job easier. It won’t be able to completely replace people effectively. Businesses will try, but quality will drop off because its not being used by people that understand what the end result needs to be, and businesses will inevitably lose money.
However, for more specialized code, I would be concerned. It would likely not function at all without editing, and if it did function it probably wouldn’t be optimized or secure.
That’s not completely true. Claude and some of the Chinese coding models have gotten a lot better at creating a good first pass.
That’s also why I like tests. Just force the model to prove that it works.
Oh, you built the thing and think it’s finished? Prove it. Go run it. Did it work? No? Then go fix the bugs. Does it compile now? Cool, run the unit test platform. Got more bugs? Fix them. Now, go write more unit tests to match the bugs you found. You keep running into the same coding issue? Go write some rules for me that tell yourself not to do that shit.
I mean, I’ve been doing this programming shit for many decades, and even I’ve been caught by my overconfidence of trying to write some big project and thinking it’s just going to work the first time. No reason to think even a high-powered Claude thinking model is going to magically just write the whole thing bug-free.
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Personally, I have never seen LLM generated code that works without needing to be edited, but I imagine for routine blocks of code and very common things it probably does fine. I dont see why a programmer needs to rewrite the same code blocks over and over again for different projects when an LLM can do that part leaving more time for the programmer to write the more specialized parts. The programmer will still have to edit and verify the generated code, but programming is more mechanical than something like art.
However, for more specialized code, I would be concerned. It would likely not function at all without editing, and if it did function it probably wouldn’t be optimized or secure. However, this programmer claims to have 30 years of experience, and if thats the case then he likely knows this and probably edits the LLM output code himself.
As I have said before, Generative AI is a tool, like PhotoShop. I dont see why people should reject a tool if it can make their job easier. It won’t be able to completely replace people effectively. Businesses will try, but quality will drop off because its not being used by people that understand what the end result needs to be, and businesses will inevitably lose money.
That’s not completely true. Claude and some of the Chinese coding models have gotten a lot better at creating a good first pass.
That’s also why I like tests. Just force the model to prove that it works.
Oh, you built the thing and think it’s finished? Prove it. Go run it. Did it work? No? Then go fix the bugs. Does it compile now? Cool, run the unit test platform. Got more bugs? Fix them. Now, go write more unit tests to match the bugs you found. You keep running into the same coding issue? Go write some rules for me that tell yourself not to do that shit.
I mean, I’ve been doing this programming shit for many decades, and even I’ve been caught by my overconfidence of trying to write some big project and thinking it’s just going to work the first time. No reason to think even a high-powered Claude thinking model is going to magically just write the whole thing bug-free.