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The problem isn't AI integration in code editors; the problem is people who let it think for you and blindly accept the results.
It's great for automating repetitive tasks and setting up frameworks but you're bananas if you let it commit for you.
It's why if I have to use AI integration, I'll specifically prompt it to give guidance and links to interesting articles on how do do things and have it teach me how to do things not just do dump all the code out already completed.
Let's deal with the mountain of AI slop garbage in the same way as what worked before:
We need some kind of reputation system for open source contributors. If you push slop, I don't want to see your PR. If you consistently make worthwhile contributions, I'll check out your PR.
I felt like I had imposter syndrome at my tech job, and then we got a boss whose only contribution is to make chatgpt goals and objectives. Which he can't understand them himself, because he gets called out in the meeting for obvious bullshit, and he defends himself by saying he has chatgpt summarize it.
AI has made me feel better about my own capabilities, because I realize most people are idiots. AI makes them clearly visible to everyone, and theyre too dumb to realize how obvious it is. Its a trap for the lazy, the 40% that do nothing at their job, and they are too clueness to understand what they're doing.
most people are idiots. AI makes them clearly visible to everyone, and theyre too dumb to realize how obvious it is
It has been kind of amazing. I'm sure they'll catch on, eventually.
I am pretty strict on my standards but every day I spend jobless I dissappoint my family and green squares on github are the main thing recruiters look at.
On the bright side I found out if you change date in linux and commit, the green squares will fill in retroactively.
May or may not write a script.
I've never shared my opensource work and still gotten jobs. IMO having opensource profiles is a liability for those who don't have well known projects. Mine are nearly all explorations into unknown stuff and quickly thrown together. If they looked at my profile, it wouldn't be a reflection of my capabilities.
You might want to look into git commit --date
Abandon git, return to subversion.
Why aren't people moving away from Github?
I write open source software because it’s fun, and I publish on Github because it gives me a stronger professional profile.
So yeah for me it’s the potential difference between putting food on the table or not. Github stars suck for many reasons but they do help you stand out.
How moving to other source control systems would help? People can still generate code via LLMs and submit changes for review
Less popular, less traffic - double edged sword.
Makes sense, wouldn't call being less popular a true con if all you care it's indexed for search and is accessible
I wonder how many of these folks just don't know about the alternatives. I've come across otherwise capable developers who think git and GitHub are the same thing. People come to software from all sorts of backgrounds so I can't blame anyone for not knowing.
I also imagine that if people are aware, the activation energy of switching is too high. It's more than just setting a new remote and pushing. You have to learn the new system, maybe migrate tickets, wrestle with CI, etc. For a hobby project it's probably easier to shut it down and just go do something else. I also don't blame them here. There's more to life than open source, and its amazing people are able to contribute when they can.
A lot of people study CS or programming because they have been told it would make them a lot of money. If you just want to make money and don’t care about anything else you’re always just going to put in the minimum effort required, so I’m not surprised people just can’t be bothered to switch.
i wonder where they are getting that info from, im not in tech but i was visiting forums where cs has pretty low job prospects for a least a decade+ almost all the forums about cs, tech says that.
Those people don't run open source projects
Fair point, but OP didn’t specify open source projects, just why “people” don’t move away from GitHub.
oh you're right
I hate that. I'm the worst salesman ever, so I'm super bad at interviewing, but I'm a good programmer. Companies are very critical and wary though, because some people are very good salesmen but very bad programmers. I don't blame them, but t's a rough environment
My re-spec online classes started by installing VS Code and connecting it to user's own GitHub repository that was then used to upload homework in Jupyter notebook format. It was pretty streamlined, that is good when you want to fast-forward into making students write their own first code lessons, leaving off technicalities, but there we didn't heard a word about if any of these three choices are necessary to start coding. I only recently got interested enough to research other options, at the same time I left Windows as a default OS. I'm not sure any of my classmates would tho until something critical happens, and for many this pipeline is probably what they are still using by now.
I get the impression this is common. It seems like education hasn't caught up to the fact that a lot of people are wanting to learn software engineering, but they lack some fundamentals. There really should be an intro course going all the way from what is a file to maybe some basics about the ELF format? Sort of something that can lead into the OS course, but lay the foundation for just basic computer use. Let the nerds get their easy A, but give everyone else a better understanding and some fundamentals to build on.
Ok admission time. I have a project in GH that I could, for example, migrate to GitLab but I’m concerned it would break the pipeline or have a disastrous customer facing impact.
Edit: there are people (ahem) who might know code… but not everything re consequences of shifting a repo.
Is your pipeline tied to GitHub actions or something?
I hope this is a good question:
What happens in a couple years when all this code that's been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, "OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!" Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.
Right now it's no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they're happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those? Plus, any successful apps are then basically free/no cost contributed projects?
Bonus: Also, what happens when AI is trained on AI-written code that was initially wrong by AI? Is the system doomed to never really improve because of so many inaccuracies?
What happens in a couple years when all this code that’s been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, “OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!” Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.
courts have already ruled that AI can't own copyright. if it's not generated by humans, it doesn't generate copyright.
How does that interplay with the whole "Corporations are people" and if the corporation owns the llm, it could theoretically claim ownership of what the llm generates? (To be clear I agree with the decision that ai shouldn't get a copywrite and don't think corporations are people but I am genuinely curious)
dunno. I'm not an IP lawyer. however i've read a few case summaries where they've tried to say putting inputs into an LLM gives copyright and the courts ruled it didn't. if it doesn't work for humans, it doesn't work for corporations either.
granted, the area of law i work in, there's lots of difference between legal outcomes if you're merely set up as a partnership instead of a corporation so who knows.
Right now it's no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they're happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those?
At least in the US:
The vast majority of commenters agreed that existing law is adequate in this area and that material generated wholly by AI is not copyrightable.
So it seems unlikely that they would be able to claim any ownership.
As for the rest of your comment (the parts around ownership): you always own the copyright for any copyrightable work you create, including code. When you post on a website, according to the ToS of that site, you're licensing your comment/code/whatever to the website (you need to for them to be able to publish your work on their website).
Some (many, most depending on what you use) websites overlicense your work and use it for other purposes as well (like GitHub), but in the US the judges have basically ruled that AI companies can pirate whatever works they want without any attempt to license them and still be fine, so the "overlicense" bit is more of a formality at this point anyway.
LLMs have made it so that it takes longer to determine whether content is bad than it takes to make bad content. The solution SHOULD be to demand that people examine the content themselves and turn it into high-quality content, but that's not going to happen so long as it is possible for anyone to submit pull requests. The only solution that will actually work is to restrict who is allowed to submit content to your projects.
So many things are ruined when friction is completely removed.
Meaningful friction my beloved
hey i like spherical cows
I knew physics class sucked... Always ignoring friction to do calculations...
Time to go back to email lists. Anyone can come along sure. But it's only going to be the most determined.
AI agents can trivially send email. I don't know what the solution is, other than to disallow submissions from people who already have a good reputation with the project. Even that's not a good solution, because there really isn't a way to get a reputation that is open to humans, but can't be easily gamed by bots.
There's a lesson to be learned about making tools that need to be used with subtlety and making them more approachable than a fisher price hammer, and then getting shocked that people use them inappropriately.
I'm sure *this time* humanity will learn it's lesson.
Even projects on other repo systems have shut down. Too many AI submissions for them. LLMs are integrated so deeply into certain IDEs that some developers I've seen literally did not know they were using them (no, they couldn't tell me why they thought writing a prompt in the IDE wasn't hitting an LLM).
It's a systemic issue that GitHub exacerbates but it's by no means limited to it.
I can see people not realizing the LLM autocomplete was an LLM. But not the prompting.
And even then, that’s some fancy ass autocomplete if it’s not LLM powered…
I mean, using an LLM inherently asks you to not think and the kind of person to use them, intentionally or not, is obviously not the smartest cookie in the toolbox
In a nutshell, the network effect. At an individual level, if someone wants to leave GitHub, they absolutely can. But unless they're a repo owner or a BDFL, the project(s) they were working on would still be on GitHub. And that means they can't access the GitHub PR process for development, or open tickets for new issues, or any other number of interactions, except for maybe pulling code from the repo.
On the flip side, at a project level, if the project owners agree that it's time to leave GitHub, they absolutely can. And while they could convince the primary developers to also leave with them, the occasional contributors might still be left behind on GitHub. Moving away from GitHub could potentially cut the number of contributors down by a lot. And what's guaranteed is that the project will have to retool for the new space they move to. And if it's self-hosted, that's even more work to do, all of which is kinda a distraction from whatever the project was meant to do.
The network effect is the result of the sum being more useful than its parts. When the telephone was invented, a single telephone on its own is entirely useless, because nobody else has one to use. But with ten telephone, one person has the potential to call any of 9 other people. With 10,000 telephones, that's over 9000 people they could call, or those people calling them. At a million phones, the telephone is well entrenched into common usage. Even when more and more people despise making phone calls, the telephone is still around, having changed forms since the 1980s into the modern smartphone.
Why? Because networks are also stable: if a few thousand people give up their smartphones per year, the utility of the telephone is not substantially changed for the grand majority of telephone users. The threshold to break the network effect varies, but I hazard a guess that if 1/3 of telephone users gave up their numbers, then the telephone's demise would be underway. Especially in the face of modern replacements.
I would regard GitHub as having a network effect, in the same way that Twitter should have collapsed but hasn't. Too many local governments are invested into it as their sole social media presence, and in doing so, also force their citizens to also subscribe to Twitter. GitHub is not a monopoly in the sense that anti-trust laws would apply. But they are a monopoly in that they own the platform, and thus own the network.
But there's an upside: communities of people are also networks. Depending on how cohesive the contributors to a particular GitHub repo are, enough people can make the move away and would sway the unwilling to also move with them. This is no different than convincing family members to move to Signal, for example. Yes, it's hard. But communities look out for their common interests. And if AI slop is affecting a community, then even though they didn't want to deal with it, they have to make a choice.
Be the community member you want to see. Advocate for change in your network of people, however big or small. Without critical mass, a community will only splinter when acting unilaterally.
Also, it might be helpful to think less in terms of switching and more in terms of transitioning. Rather than moving from Github entirely all at once, start by making a Codeberg (for example) account and moving some of your things there.
How do you know those projects are shutting down and not moving?
Laziness.
momentum can be a pain in the buttocks. the time lost working on project, chasing mistakes that come with migrating tools, getting everyone across the globe on board.
must seem like k2 when you are hanging on janky anchors to begin with ...
