It’s interesting that this is from an active contributor. I suspect they were just trying Claude out to see if it could make a simple change like this.
On some level I understand the allure and the curiosity, and at least it’s decently transparent and by someone who isn’t just taking the piss. It’s about the nicest way AI could be introduced to MicroPython but still *gestures defeatedly at thread*
Being well versed in Claude is fairly tangential if not outright antithetical to making worthwhile contributions IMHO. Could have saved all that bluster about AI to explain the impetus behind the change. 🤷 it’s not my project, but I’m not going to pretend the use of AI doesn’t disgust me.
It’s not like every other change has “I fired up my computer, opened VSCode and searched for ‘blah’ and then typed some code to change ‘blah’ to ‘monkey’ and now it’s all monkeys.”
The whole thing reads more like an advert than a sincere change.
If we're going to replace people being motivated to gain a deep understanding of the platform and become useful, long-term contributors with just asking a computer to hallucinate code changes then the long-term health of FOSS is critically endangered.
The short term fallout is that for anyone to actually review changes barfed up by someone and their pet AI they either have to put their trust in an AI themselves - effectively forcing adoption - or put in the effort to research and understand the code being modified.
So what we effectively end up with, in the worst case, is swathes of the codebase that are not understood by a single maintainer and depend upon the assessments and whimsy of third party tools for ongoing maintenance. When economics inevitably catch up with this nonsense, FOSS will be pay to play.
We've let the AI hucksters and even the critics write the narrative around "how well it works" and not "how deep we're going to bury ourselves by adopting this."
There's time aplenty to discuss the implications, everything a computer could hallucinate today it could do 10x faster in ten years.
Like... really, there's no rush to use this stuff. If the investment and hype have any credibility whatsoever then nothing you could do or learn now would prepare you in any meaningful way for what a fifteen year old could do in ten years. Either it snowballs, or you're just building technical debt.
The metrics change if you're in business. If you want to burn the long term for short term gains and fake it 'til you make it then sure, why not, it might work out for you, and maybe your revenue will outpace your smart-computer bill... but FOSS projects don't *need* to move at a breakneck pace 🫠
Hold on a second . Why change the default behavior when you can just add one extra word to your command ? When you have solutions in search of a problem this is what you end up with. This offers absolutely no benefit imho. The enslopification begins
Maybe I’m just an old man yelling at cloud, but I’m glad others at least, see the the cloud too.
I too “don’t want to get left behind”, so I honestly try Ai whenever I can but the devil is in the details …. You already have to know it’s wrong to tell the Ai it’s wrong . A dangerous game
If the hype is real then we won’t get left behind, we’ll just skip the crappy early access beta testing phase and go straight to the “make me an application” button 🤣
Unfortunately they didn’t need horses to drive cars either.
Comments
It’s a slippery slope though.
The whole thing reads more like an advert than a sincere change.
If we're going to replace people being motivated to gain a deep understanding of the platform and become useful, long-term contributors with just asking a computer to hallucinate code changes then the long-term health of FOSS is critically endangered.
There's time aplenty to discuss the implications, everything a computer could hallucinate today it could do 10x faster in ten years.
I have to concede that there’s some merit to making things more logical and less surprising. But I tend to agree this does the opposite.
I too “don’t want to get left behind”, so I honestly try Ai whenever I can but the devil is in the details …. You already have to know it’s wrong to tell the Ai it’s wrong . A dangerous game
Unfortunately they didn’t need horses to drive cars either.