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- Hacker News
- 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...
by bradley13 - Think of that the next time you take the train.by cicko
- Is the goal solving a problem or spending time over it?
Because then why do you ride a vehicle when you could walk?
Why do you use fire when a well-positioned mirror with sun could do?
Why a piezo ignition or lighter when a stick and lots of friction would do as well?
by xandrius - What stops a bad actor from buying a bunch of these apps on fdroid adding malware to them and then having fdroid handle the distribution for you? I people did something similar with a bunch of plugins in the wordpress plugin archive.by t1234s
- F-droid doesn't simply distribute build apps. It requires the source to be open and will build the apps itself. This does not guarantee there will be no bad actors trying to slip in malicious code. I do believe they also do initial audits before an app is allowed in their repos. It also often takes a while for an app update to show up in F-droid, I am not sure if that is due to auditing updates or something else though.
More here:
by creesch - 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..)
by alienbaby - > If they work, does it matter?
If you're using an LLM to write your code, odds are very high it does not work.
by bigstrat2003 - > 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.
- 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?"by voidUpdate
- I'm somewhat surprised about PipePipe. I had a look on the commits of the various components and nothing looks out of place to me. Commits look rather reasonable, comments look useful and don't show obvious LLMisms.
What are the AI smells there?
It would be nice to expand a bit on the reasoning behind the verdicts.
by jraph - 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. ”””
by valgaze - 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.
by 47282847 - Every codebase that is being actively worked on (closed/open source) will contain code that's AI generated. With the rising abilities of agents, expectations are sky rocketing in terms of productivity.
If you're as productive as an engineer in 2016, you're not at the level that's expected. A 7 day workflow back then should take you maybe a day or less to work on today.
by samayashar - I've worked with "engineers" that make one commit in 2 months and it's a spelling correction. I'm pretty sure that being 7 times faster than that is still quite slow compared to me :) I hear a lot of breathless enthusiasm, but this article is possibly the first time I'm seeing the question answered "If AI is so great, where are all the applications?"by panny
- Many of the projects here predate 2022, so they wouldn't be "ai-generated" in that sense.by Dwedit
- 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.by edg5000
- The AI machine can write better code. It can also write an interpreter which implements function calls by instantiating a new interpreter + entire standard library per function call. Or it will build a 300kloc cathedral of scaffolding and maintain that forever, never writing actual code. Or it will create a CI system that takes 2 hours to run and constantly fails, and the agent loops there all day, fixing a small bug and waiting 2 hours. (All things I’ve experienced latest frontier models do)
Agentic engineering faces all kinds of new problems that couldn’t exist before, and need experienced engineers to solve them.
by ModernMech - Skill issue thenby staszewski
- "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.
by 47282847 - For me the usefulness of a survey like this has nothing to with how effective LLMs are themselves. It's more that when someone's able to produce an app in an afternoon, and submitting the app to F-Droid becomes a checkbox, how confident can you be that they'll continue maintaining the app? Sure if it's open source you can have your own LLM maintain it, but at that point what's the value in having it on F-Droid?by ndiddy
- With the "intelligence" of code focused and capable llm in the last six months, the main problem I'm seeing now is where some total amateur who has no previous knowledge of coding tries to one shot a project. People who have previous experience and know how to architect things (and when to stop an LLM from doing something wrong that will cause maintenance and scale and extensibility problems in the future) are doing much better building actually useful things.by walrus01
- 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.by 9cb14c1ec0
- I have been working on a sub 1500 line rust init system for over a week. Hundreds of prompts. All with a local LLM running on my own GPUs because I expect to build with total sovereignty but also zero dependencies, no libc, no alloc, no std, and a test suite that proves the 20 implemented raw syscalls all use the right values by comparing against Linux kernel sources. This would be the only privileged code in my operating system so I must have absolute confidence it is perfect.
It would be too annoying for a human to ever write code to standards this high, and would have taken me months to write by hand, but with the help of AI I was able to get it done and built in a way I can easily review and reason about.
I have a memory safe baremetal tiny linux init now built to my exact requirements.
AI can help experienced engineers write better code in less time.
by lrvick - uh huh, sure it can.by nickphx
- > This would be the only privileged code in my operating system
What does that mean? Are you building a system without a root user or something?
by yjftsjthsd-h - > It would be too annoying for a human to ever write code to standards this high,
These are standards of a normal university operating systems course (assuming a university worth its salt anyway). Ridiculous to present it as some kind of feat that was "impossible" or even that rare.
by nicebyte - Cool, but I fail to see how it is relevant in the context of the article? You clearly have the knowledge, expertise and discipline to incorporate LLM in a workflow that, taking your word for it, delivers a very good result.
That makes you a) more unique than you realize b) not all that relevant in the context of the article.
a) Because a lot of people tend to lean towards use that absolutely leads to atrophying of skills and knowledge. b) well the article does explain the criteria it used fairly well and your project would not show up there. Well, also because your project isn't an android app.
by creesch - I guess the point you're trying to make is that apps developed by LLMs don't need to be all that bad, but the problem here is that you can't know who does their due diligence with auditing their own code and who doesn't, and you can't expect potential users to do it either. Especially not when similar apps get published at increasingly faster rates.
LLMs also helps inexperienced engineers (or people who do not have any own software engineering skills themselves) to write horrible code in less time.
Of course you also can't trust everything human developers publish either, but the issue is amplified by LLMs.
by autuni - I don’t even disagree that “AI can help experienced engineers write better code in less time”, but “It would be too annoying for a human to ever write code to standards this high” when the standards are “zero dependencies, no libc, no alloc, no std, and [correctness]” and the project is <1500 lines of Rust implementing 20 syscalls is a little much. All software ever written before 2023 was written by humans, remember?by minitech
- This is about apps on F-Droid, not F-Droid itself.