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edg5000 54 minutes ago [-]
Seems like the wrong question to ask. I've been programming my whole life but basically stopped writing code by hand in 2026. The LLM writes better code than I do, much better.
9cb14c1ec0 50 minutes ago [-]
Same here. I'm still a better software architect that AI, but there is no question that my AI generated and reviewed code has fewer bugs than code I hand write. It takes some humility to acknowledge that your coding prowess is less of a useful skill than it used to be.
cik 38 minutes ago [-]
There's an issue where people assumed the syntactic activity of writing code was what mattered. The reality is that this was always a smaller part of the role, as opposed to thinking about observability, serviceability, and test automation. The ability to write software that is properly separated from concerns and when to enact those separations matters.
At the same time, I think we're far too far down the systems path now. We've hit a point where interviewing has become purely systems design "because the AI writes the code".
Not that I'm ever asked, but I inherently believe the act of critical thinking, communication, and expression are the key skills for those who already have the appropriate coding/engineering/cs/etc background. I now only interview for those skills - but through the lens of impossible to solve systems design conversations as opposed to problems. It tells me a lot about how people think.
0x696C6961 10 minutes ago [-]
Writing is thinking
jeltz 20 minutes ago [-]
Not sure what you mean as system design conversations because while in theory those can be good in practice the ones I have been at had been techbro wankery where the interviewer had a particular answer in mind. Like designing your own memcached clone for example is a terrible task for systems design.
markb139 20 minutes ago [-]
Programming languages, design languages and architecture are all inventions made to help humans write understandable source.
LLMs don’t really need to do any of that. They can store very large trees of understanding and therefore implement any application in raw binary. Why bother with abstractions at all
jeltz 17 minutes ago [-]
LLMs for sure need those things. maybe not the same abstractions as humans do but without understabdable code an LLM will just fail to accomplish the task you ask it to do.
flir 15 minutes ago [-]
It might be less ambitious and more practical to target bytecode.
But you effectively lose the human review component.
_1 1 minutes ago [-]
There's more python and typescript in the training data than bytecode.
47282847 9 minutes ago [-]
"There are naïve questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question". (Carl Sagan)
Just because you don’t seem to be interested in the answer - then don’t read it? - doesn’t make the question wrong.
staszewski 35 minutes ago [-]
Skill issue then
xandrius 2 minutes ago [-]
Only people disliking AI for coding are the gatekeepers who think they are magicians and the plebs shouldn't be able to code like them, unless they become gud.
0x000xca0xfe 26 minutes ago [-]
I just asked Astra to bring an old Windows XP game to the browser. It objdump'ed the whole thing, built a fitting Win32-like wrapper that exposes required functionality like DirectDraw, DirectSound, SEH etc., then wrote an x86-32/x87 interpreter in WASM, benchmarked how the game runs, lifted the hotspots of the executable to WASM too and now it is playable!
I mean, I'm proud of my low-level skills too but this is some Fabrice Bellard level sorcery. Very, very few humans are able to do this without AI tools.
dakolli 50 minutes ago [-]
Well, you must have some low fkn standards.
xandrius 56 seconds ago [-]
I'm pretty sure you used chat gpt when it came out and literally stopped looking then.
GPT 5.6 sol and Astra can now one shot incredible stuff.
eloisant 48 minutes ago [-]
If you truly think LLM are not useful tools for programming, you haven't tried the right tools.
roblabla 29 minutes ago [-]
I tried a lot of tools. Claude code, deepseek with kilocode and OMP, codex... I still use claude quite a bit. But frankly, all of them produce some absolutely godawful code. Review load went way up with AI, and it's not just the volume that caused it, but also the quality. It's extremely verbose, hard to read, often repeats code instead of factoring it into reusable components. And yes, sometimes it's also buggy. Except now, you have to debug a problem that's in code you didn't write yourself, and is awful to read.
LLM is incredibly valuable for debugging complex problems, codebase exploration, and planning large changes. But the writing code part itself, I find, LLMs are just not very good at it yet.
user43928 4 minutes ago [-]
I don't have to debug anything.
Vaguely telling the agent what the issue is and what behavior I expect solves the issue with a fraction of the effort.
Some claim that the tech debt only keeps increasing and that the result will be unmaintainable. This is not my experience, and I don't think it is theirs either. These claims are often entirely speculative.
api 25 minutes ago [-]
I’ve had some luck prompting them to be concise, both in writing and in code, and with code doing an approach where they get it working, write tons of tests, and then refactor for conciseness and readability. All the tests prevent regressions doing this.
Without such prompting and a conciseness and clarity pass you get a slop grenade.
They overall work better with tests, and Rust is a great language for them. Overall they do better with lots of walls and alarms that go off if they mess up. I don’t need nearly as much of this, can mentally simulate it, which is a good “are we superintelligence yet” reality check. Still not even as good as my wet meat brain. But impressive given what was possible even two years ago!
The result is still not as clean as a good programmer but it’s better than the slop grenade you get first pass.
jeltz 41 minutes ago [-]
That is not the same topic. LLMs are useful tools, and that is despite them producing fucking awful code.
Gigachad 35 minutes ago [-]
I would have agreed with you 6 months ago but things have changed rapidly.
jeltz 26 minutes ago [-]
Not sure what I can say but the LLMs simply do not write good code without tons of handholding. As a C developer most LLMed patches I have seen the last couple of months have been awful and the few good ones I know from the author themselves that they did a ton of iteration and/or manual cleanup. Maybe they are less bad at writing other languages.
wizzwizz4 27 minutes ago [-]
People say this every 6 months. I've stopped even paying attention to it, because (A) the code quality remains below the floor, and (B) the people saying it continue to ignore all the other issues with LLM code generation.
LatencyKills 42 minutes ago [-]
I spent 22 years as an engineer split between MS and Apple. SOTA LLMs can write code just as good as most human engineers. I expect to see the "LLMs are just next token predictors!" crap on Reddit... not HN.
jeltz 39 minutes ago [-]
LLMs produce pretty crappy code but they are very useful tools for protyping, code search and finding bugs. Maybe LLMs in the future will be able to write good code but they are very far from that right now.
basilikum 31 minutes ago [-]
Perhaps it would be useful if both of you could provide examples of supposedly good and bad code – the latter being the result of a genuine effort to produce good code with state of the art models. Just asserting that LLM code is good or bad ends in a yes - no - yes - no back and forth circle immediately.
LatencyKills 23 minutes ago [-]
I just used an LLM (along with my decades of operating system development experience) to create a macOS tool [0] that lets me see through windows, instead of having to continually command+tab between windows.
The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have.
The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools.
I actually don't see any significant signs of AI use. There's Copilot listed in the contributor list, but I'm not seeing commits listed under it. Did they wipe it off Github?
Some seem to stamp Mostly AI based on weaker circumstantial like large init commits. Maybe it's just an artifact of human sloppiness.
Or maybe it was just the artifact of choosing these by last update, since vibe-coded apps genuinely do have an abnormal number of releases, and thus would be much more likely to show up.
Mylloon 43 minutes ago [-]
Usually AI is marked as co-author, so you can't find it in the commit list.
I use the contributor graph to find where the AI made the commits [1] and then I search using the date [2], I found 3 commits relative to a11y stuff.
Co-author is so strange. Like, would anyone credit an IDE or even a script generating code as co-author? Even legally, tools don't have the ontological requirement to be credited as author.
bpev 32 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure it's just because if the tool generates the commit, it auto-adds itself as co-author. Like the iPhone emails that say "sent from iPhone"
orbital-decay 2 hours ago [-]
> I also noticed a pair of very bizarre apps, both branded with the yellow “Don’t tread on me” flag: DuressKeyboard & UnlicenseLauncher. What’s most curious is that they have been in development for quite some time, yet all the changes are done not with git but through the GitHub web file editor! Someone go find that person and teach them to use git.
fer 1 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of a professor that displayed snippets of Haskell on MS Word in her lectures, formatted by hand. I don't blame her, this was >20 years ago, before Ctrl/Cmd + +/- became commonplace for zoom/font size.
bradley13 16 minutes ago [-]
It's an emotional problem. I love writing code to solve intricate problems. But knowing that a faster, and maybe better LLM solution is just a prompt away? Somehow that takes the joy out of it. Why spend hours, when you can get an equivalent result in minutes?
I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...
cicko 14 minutes ago [-]
Think of that the next time you take the train.
theandrewbailey 2 hours ago [-]
This is about apps on F-Droid, not F-Droid itself.
gib444 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah maybe title should be "How much on F-Droid is LLM generated?"
asimovDev 14 minutes ago [-]
The don’t tread on me person is fascinating. I wonder if they wrote the software from their phone using github codespaces in browser?
alienbaby 24 minutes ago [-]
If they work, does it matter?
Separate from building your own code, ,of course you may have your own standards to apply.
But for apps, well, I never had a chance to see how good or bad the code was before AI was about, so why should I care now, so long as what I paid for does what it says it does (and nothing nefarious..)
relevant_stats 12 minutes ago [-]
> If they work, does it matter?
The blog post provides something akin to answer to this question:
You see, the main allure of LLMs is that they allow the developer to be more lazy. That’s kind of the whole point! You just prompt, sit back and relax. So it should not surprise you to hear that this attitude is then reflected in everything the vibe-coder touches
As I understand it, one of concerns is that with the lowered barriers there comes a flood of low quality software, vibe coded by very lazy and not very talented people.
This might be actually more of a human problem, but it's a problem nevertheless.
voidUpdate 16 minutes ago [-]
Some programmers have ethical concerns around the use of LLMs. It's like saying "my clothes still work, why should it matter if child labour made them?"
whiteleopard 13 minutes ago [-]
Please stop labelling a project as slop just because it has been developed using AI. Coding agent are now replacing the IDE and code is now mostly written by the agents.
ivanjermakov 3 minutes ago [-]
It's not about who wrote the code, rather who made decisions.
valgaze 45 minutes ago [-]
FDroid can be very strange…
”””
F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access.
”””
47282847 17 minutes ago [-]
What do you find strange about trying to protect against tampering and theft?
I find it strange how little people seem to care these days and just widely share their users and company data across clouds. Plenty of supply chain attacks to learn from.
metalman 37 minutes ago [-]
Who/whatever does the layout and organisation of app categories is a blithering idiot and finding apps is best done with an external search as the internal one hides apps even when searched for directly by name.
And the fdroid app is relentless systems deperformance burden that often just failed, and updating manualy is simpler as a chore done after any android update.
Love a lot of the apps, and the concept of fdroid, but the fdroid UI is not good at all.
hnrprtlpdb 38 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
john_quakemac 31 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
amelius 2 hours ago [-]
How much of iOS is vibe coded?
skeledrew 1 hours ago [-]
> Hey Claude, make a load-bearing time machine set to 2016 – a time when I was a happy kid, nothing bad ever happened and all was good in FOSS-land.
At the same time, I think we're far too far down the systems path now. We've hit a point where interviewing has become purely systems design "because the AI writes the code".
Not that I'm ever asked, but I inherently believe the act of critical thinking, communication, and expression are the key skills for those who already have the appropriate coding/engineering/cs/etc background. I now only interview for those skills - but through the lens of impossible to solve systems design conversations as opposed to problems. It tells me a lot about how people think.
But you effectively lose the human review component.
Just because you don’t seem to be interested in the answer - then don’t read it? - doesn’t make the question wrong.
I mean, I'm proud of my low-level skills too but this is some Fabrice Bellard level sorcery. Very, very few humans are able to do this without AI tools.
GPT 5.6 sol and Astra can now one shot incredible stuff.
LLM is incredibly valuable for debugging complex problems, codebase exploration, and planning large changes. But the writing code part itself, I find, LLMs are just not very good at it yet.
Vaguely telling the agent what the issue is and what behavior I expect solves the issue with a fraction of the effort.
Some claim that the tech debt only keeps increasing and that the result will be unmaintainable. This is not my experience, and I don't think it is theirs either. These claims are often entirely speculative.
Without such prompting and a conciseness and clarity pass you get a slop grenade.
They overall work better with tests, and Rust is a great language for them. Overall they do better with lots of walls and alarms that go off if they mess up. I don’t need nearly as much of this, can mentally simulate it, which is a good “are we superintelligence yet” reality check. Still not even as good as my wet meat brain. But impressive given what was possible even two years ago!
The result is still not as clean as a good programmer but it’s better than the slop grenade you get first pass.
The solution required reverse engineering and internals knowledge that most human engineers don't even have.
The question is no longer "Can an LLM write code?". It can. The problem is that certain humans refuse to put in the effort required to properly utilize these tools.
[0] https://imgur.com/a/2CUEjmA
Yubico Authenticator https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter
I actually don't see any significant signs of AI use. There's Copilot listed in the contributor list, but I'm not seeing commits listed under it. Did they wipe it off Github?
Some seem to stamp Mostly AI based on weaker circumstantial like large init commits. Maybe it's just an artifact of human sloppiness.
Or maybe it was just the artifact of choosing these by last update, since vibe-coded apps genuinely do have an abnormal number of releases, and thus would be much more likely to show up.
I use the contributor graph to find where the AI made the commits [1] and then I search using the date [2], I found 3 commits relative to a11y stuff.
[1] https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter/graphs/contributo...
[2] https://github.com/Yubico/yubioath-flutter/commits/main/?sin...
I will be curious to see how I feel about AdventOfCode this year...
Separate from building your own code, ,of course you may have your own standards to apply.
But for apps, well, I never had a chance to see how good or bad the code was before AI was about, so why should I care now, so long as what I paid for does what it says it does (and nothing nefarious..)
The blog post provides something akin to answer to this question:
You see, the main allure of LLMs is that they allow the developer to be more lazy. That’s kind of the whole point! You just prompt, sit back and relax. So it should not surprise you to hear that this attitude is then reflected in everything the vibe-coder touches
As I understand it, one of concerns is that with the lowered barriers there comes a flood of low quality software, vibe coded by very lazy and not very talented people.
This might be actually more of a human problem, but it's a problem nevertheless.
””” F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. ”””
I find it strange how little people seem to care these days and just widely share their users and company data across clouds. Plenty of supply chain attacks to learn from.
> Make no mistakes
Don't forget the copium!