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.
ew, what the hell ?
If he’d just forgone that last paragraph…
Im.not against the usage of AI in general. The problem only comes up if the human literally relies on it, but if you are using it for learning, quickly scrolling documentation or make code in a critical manner and with years of normal programming experience, that’s fine. Bro had 30 years of development experience so I guess he knows what good code looks like
Even then, it feels dishonest to hide when such a historically unreliable tool is being used.
Yeah, this is actually one of the good things a technology like this can do.
He’s dead right, in terms of slop, if it’s someone with training and experience using a tool, it doesn’t matter if that tool is vim or claude. It ain’t slop if it’s built right.
It ain’t slop if it’s built right.
Yeah but the problem is, is it? They absolutely insist that we use AI at work, which is not only insane concept in and of itself, but the problem is that if I have to nanny it to make sure it doesn’t make a mistake then how is it a useful product?
He says it helps him get work done he wouldn’t otherwise do, but how’s that possible? how is it possible that he is giving every line of code the same scrutiny he would if he wrote it himself, if he himself admits that he would never have got around to writing that code had the AI not done it? The math ain’t matching on this one.
the problem is that if I have to nanny it to make sure it doesn’t make a mistake then how is it a useful product?
When was the last time you coded something perfectly? “If I have to nanny you to make sure you don’t make a mistake, then how are you a useful employee?” See how that doesn’t make sense. There’s a reason why good development shops live on the backs of their code reviews and review practices.
The math ain’t matching on this one.
The math is just fine. Code reviews, even audit-level thorough ones, cost far less time than doing the actual coding.
There’s also something to be said about the value in being able to tell an LLM to go chew on some code and tests for 10 minutes while I go make a sandwich. I get to make my sandwich, and come back, and there’s code there. I still have to review it, point out some mistakes, and then go back and refill my drink.
And there’s so much you can customize with personal rules. Don’t like its coding style? Write Markdown rules that reflect your own style. Have issues with it tripping over certain bugs? Write rules or memories that remind it to be more aware of those bugs. Are you explaining a complex workflow to it over and over again? Explain it once, and tell it to write the rules file for you.
All of that saves more and more time. The more rules you have for a specific project, the more knowledge it retains on how code for that project, and the more experience you gain in how to communicate to an entity that can understand your ideas. You wouldn’t believe how many people can’t rubberduck and explain proper concepts to people, much less LLMs.
LLMs are patient. They don’t give a shit if you keep demanding more and more tweaks and fixes, or if you have to spend a bit of time trying to explain a concept. Human developers would get tired of your demands after a while, and tell you to fuck off.
Well, I’m not a code monkey, between dyslexia and an aging brain. But if it’s anything like the tiny bit of coding I used to be able to do (back in the days of basic and pascal), you don’t really have to pore over every single line. Only time that’s needed is when something is broken. Otherwise, you’re scanning to keep oversight, which is no different than reviewing a human’s code that you didn’t write.
Look at it like this; we automated assembly of machines a long time ago. It had flaws early on that required intense supervision. The only difference here on a practical level is about how the damn things learned in the first place. Automating code generation is way more similar to that than llms that generate text or images that aren’t logical by nature.
If the code used to train the models was good, what it outputs will be no worse in scale than some high school kid in an ap class stepping into their first serious challenges. It will need review, but if the output is going to be open source to begin with, it’ll get that review even if the project maintainers slip up.
And being real, lutris has been very smooth across the board while using the generated code so far. So if he gets lazy, it could go downhill; but that could happen if he gets lazy with his own code.
Another concept that I am more familiar with, that does relate. Writing fiction can take months. Editing fiction usually takes days, and you can still miss stuff (my first book has typos and errors to this day because of the aforementioned dyslexia and me not having a copy editor).
My first project back in the eighties in basic took me three days to crank out during the summer program I was in. The professor running the program took an hour to scan and correct that code.
Maybe I’m too far behind the various languages, but I really can’t see it being a massively harder proposition to scan and edit the output of an llm.
slop is slop.
microslop
slopware
slopity slop slop.
And talking in absolutes without looking for nuance is not mature nor does it use any form of critical thinking.
I’m sorry. you’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t have said that.
It is awesome that you left the previous comment in place. Mad props!
If he’s using like an IDE and not vibe coding then I don’t have much issue with this. His comment indicates that he has a brain and uses it. So many people just turn off their brain when they use AI and couldn’t even write this comment I just wrote without asking AI for assistance.
Yeah, that’s my biggest worry. I always have to hold colleagues to the basics of programming standards as soon as they start using AI for a task, since it is easier to generate a second implementation of something we already have in the codebase, rather than extending the existing implementation.
But that was pretty much always true. We still did not slap another implementation onto the side, because it’s horrible for maintenance, as you now need to always adjust two (or more) implementations when requirements change.
And it’s horrible for debugging problems, because parts of the codebase will then behave subtly different from other parts. This also means usability is worse, as users expect consistency.And the worst part is that they don’t even have an answer to those concerns. They know that it’s going to bite us into the ass in the near future. They’re on a sugar high, because adding features is quick, while looking away from the codebase getting incredibly fat just as quickly.
And when it comes to actually maintaining that generated code, they’ll be the hardest to motivate, because that isn’t as fun as just slapping a feature onto the side, nor do they feel responsible for the code, because they don’t know any better how it actually works. Nevermind that they’re also less sharp in general, because they’ve outsourced thinking.
Hell most people turn off their brains when the word gets mentioned at all. There’s plenty of basic shit an ai can do exactly as good as a human. But people hear AI and instantly become the equivalent of a shit eating insect.
As long as your educated and experienced enough to know the limitations of your tools and use them accurately and correctly. Then AI is literally a non factor and about as likely to make an error as the dev themselves.
The problem with AI slop code comes from executives in high up positions forcing the use of it beyond the scope it can handle and in use cases it’s not fit for.
Lutris doesn’t have that problem.
So unless the guy suddenly goes full stupid and starts letting AI write everything the quality is not going to change. If anything it’s likely to improve as he off loads tedious small things to his more efficient tools.
The problem is I’ve seen people who supposedly have a brain start to use a high and over time they become increasingly confident in the AI’s abilities. Then they stop bothering to review the code.
Then they stop bothering to review the code.
This happens with human code reviews all the time.
“I don’t really understand this code, but APPROVE!”
“You need this thing merged today? APPROVE!”
“This code is too long, and it’s almost my lunch break. APPROVE!”
Over and over and over again. The worse thing you can insult me with is take code I spend days working on and approve it five minutes after I submitted it to you.
Do i feel bad about 10comments on my review, all with basic shit? Yes. Do i prefer that over Idiot managed to slip error surpression by review? Yes. At the end im Happy that someone looked deep enough to find my small stuff, so its not going to Master and life on for decades.
@gruk iz dis tru?
Somehow hiding the code feels worse than using the code. This whole thing is yuck.
Well when you have a massive problem of harassment, death threats and fucking retarded shit stains screaming at every single dev that is even theorized to use ai regardless if it’s true or not.
I blame fucking no one for hiding the fact.
This is on the users not the dev. The users are fucking animals and created this very problem.
Blaming the wrong people and attacking them is the yuck.
Scream at the executives and giant corpos who created the problem not some random indie dev using a tool.
Yeah, management wants us to use AI at $DAYJOB and one of the strategies we’ve considered for lessening its negative impact on productivity, is to always put generated code into an entirely separate commit.
Because it will guess design decisions at random while generating, and you want to know afterwards whether a design decision was made by the randomizer or by something with intelligence. Much like you want to know whether a design decision was made by the senior (then you should think twice about overriding this decision) or by the intern that knows none of the project context.
We haven’t actually started doing these separate commits, because it’s cumbersome in other ways, but yeah, deliberately obfuscating whether the randomizer was involved, that robs you of that information even more.
Every extra person using all these AI tools is only adding to the issue.
No, literally the opposite. They are going to do this until it is not financially viable. The more frugal and conscientious people are with their AI, the longer it is financially viable. If you want to pop the bubble, go set up a bot to hammer their free systems with bogus prompts. Run up their bills until they can’t afford to be speculative any more.
I think the simple fact is that some of the people in this thread don’t understand is that the people they’re asking to vet the code don’t know how.
They may mean that the people who can vet code should do so before making a fuss about the AI written portions of it, but I don’t know that most of the people in opposition to their comments understand that context.
I haven’t coded anything since the 90’s. I know HTML and basic CSS and that’s it. I wouldn’t have known where to start without guides to explain what commands in Linux do and how they work together. Growing up with various versions of Windows and DOS, I’d still consider myself a novice computer user. I absolutely do know how to go into command line and make things happen. But I wouldn’t know where to start to make a program. It’s not part of my skill set.
Most users are like that. They engage with only parts of a thing. It’s why so many people these days are computer illiterate due to the rise of smartphone usage and apps for everything.
It’d be like me asking a frequent flyer to inspect a plane engine for damage or figure out why the landing gear doesn’t retract. A lot of people wouldn’t know where to start.
I fully agree that other coders on the internet who frequent places like GitHub and make it a point to vet the code of other devs who provide their code for free probably should vet the code before they make assumptions about its quality. And I fully agree that deliberately stirring shit without actually contributing anything meaningful to the community or the project is really just messed up behavior.
But the way I see it there’s two different groups and they have very different views of this situation.
The people who can’t code are consumers. Their contribution is to use the software if they want, and if it works for them to spread by word of mouth what they like about it. Maybe to donate if they can and the dev accepts donations.
If those people choose to boycott, it’ll be on the basis of their moral feelings about the use of AI or at the recommendation of the second group due to quality.
The second group are the peer reviewers so to speak and they can and should both vet the code and sound the alarm if there’s something wrong.
I suppose there’s a third subset of people in the case of FOSS work who can and often do help with projects and I wonder if that is better or worse for the reasons listed in the thread like poorly human written code and simple mistakes.
Humans certainly aren’t infallible. But at least they can tell you how they got the output they got or the reason why they did x. You can have a rational conversation with a human being and for the most part they aren’t going to make something up unless they have an ulterior motive.
Perhaps breaking things down into tiny chunks makes AI better or it’s outputs more usable. Maybe there’s a 'sweet spot".
But I think people also get worried that what happens a lot is people who use AI often start to offload their own thinking onto it and that’s dangerous for many reasons.
This person also admits to having depression. Depression can affect how you respond to information, how well you actually understand the information in front of you. It can make you forget things you know, or make things that much harder to recall.
I know that from experience. So in this case does the AI have more potential to help or do harm?
There’s a lot to this. I have not personally used Lutris, but before this happened I wouldn’t have thought twice about saying that I’ve heard good things about it if someone asked me for a Heroic launcher style software for Linux.
But just like the Ladybird fork of Firefox I don’t know that I feel comfortable suggesting it if this is the state of things. For the same reason I don’t currently feel comfortable recommending Windows 11 or Chrome.
There are so many sensitive things that OS’s, and web browsers handle that people take for granted. If nobody was sounding the alarm about those, I feel like nothing would get better. By contrast, Lutris isn’t swimming in a big pond of sensitive information but it is running on people’s hardware and they should have both the right to be informed and the right to choose.
AI is immeasurably shitty, both in terms of code quality and of morality. The fact that this developer is hiding his use of it from his community is despicable. I will never use Lutris again, nor will I allow PRs from this developer on any repos of mine. Fuck AI, and fuck strycore (deceitful bastard and Lutris “developer”).
you can criticise them but ultimately they are a unpaid developer making their work freely available to the benefit of us all. at least don’t harass the developer.
You make a fair point, but I feel like the trolling reaction they gave was asking for more backlash. Not responding was probably the best move.
It’s typical of dev burnout, though. Communication starts becoming more impulsive and less constructive, especially in the face of conflicts of opinions.
I’ve seen it play a few times already. A toxic community will take a dev who’s already struggling, troll them, screenshot their problematic responses, and use that in a campaign across relevant places such as github, reddit, lemmy… Maybe add a little light harassment on the side, as a treat. It’s a fun activity ! The dev spirals, posts increasingly unhinged responses and often quits as a result.
The fact that the thread is titled “is lutris slop now” is a clear indication that the intention of the poster wasn’t to contribute anything constructive but to attack the dev and put them on their back foot.
I see your point. I might also have responded poorly to that, on some level at least.
Yeah same. I’d like to think i’d answer “I’ll use AI, if you don’t like it you can fork the project and i wish you good luck. Go share your opinion on AI in an appropriate place.”. But realistically there’s a high chance it catches me on a bad day and i get stupid.
Trolling? They gave a pretty good answer explaining their reasoning.
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.
Seems pretty obvious to me that they knew this wouldn’t go over well. It was inflammatory by design.
Yeah ok. True. I think the rest of the post has much more weight, though. But yeah, he should have swallowed that last sentence.
They are on liberapay if you want to support the project btw. Combined with Patreon, they sit at less than 700$ a week. That’s like half a dev before tax
You might as well donate to Anthropic.
?
Yes, that’s Liberapay. You may have noticed that I mentioned Patreon.
They want to put clanker code that they freely admit they don’t validate into a product that goes on the computers of people who’s experience with Linux is “I heard it’s faster for games”
It’s irresponsible to hide it from review. It doesn’t matter if AI tools got better, AI tools still aren’t perfect and so you still have to do the legwork. Or at least let your community.
Also, you should let your community make ethics decisions about whether to support you.
Overall it was a rash reaction to being pressured rudely in a GitHub thread; but you know AI is a contentious topic and you went in anyway. It’s weak AF to then have a tantrum and spit in the community’s face about it.
Nothing is being hidden from review. The code is open source. They removed the specific attribution that indicates which parts of the code were created using Claude. That changes absolutely nothing about the ability to review the code, because a code review should not distinguish between human written code and machine written code; all of it should be checked thoroughly. In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
In fact, I would argue that specifically designating code as machine written is detrimental to code review, because there will be a subconscious bias among many reviewers to only focus on reviewing the machine code.
Oh, it’s more than subconscious, as you can see in this thread.
Lutris developer makes a perfectly sane and nuianced response to a reactionary “is lutris slop now” comment, and gets shit on for it, because everybody has to fight in black and white terms. There are no grey opinions, only battle lines to be drawn to these people.
What? Are you all going to shit on your lord and savior Linus himself for also saying he uses LLMs? Oh, what, you didn’t know?!?
The response is only nuanced until the “good luck” sentence. If he swallowed that it would be an almost perfect response. But that sentence is a quite big “fuck you”.
In this particular case, I think the use of AI is tolerable. But as someone who uses Lutris sometimes, I do have concerns about whether or not this will cause issues with running games through it. How do we know if the AI generated code is going to make Lutris slow or possibly cause games to not work properly that otherwise would have worked perfectly fine?
Whenever I’ve tried running games in both Wine by itself and Lutris, I have noticed that they do often run noticeably slower in Lutris. And I also don’t have the best PC to begin with, so this is a big concern of mine.
Worth mentioning that the user that started the issue jumps around projects and creates inflammatory issues to the same effect. I’m not surprised lutris’ maintainer went off like they did, the issue is not made with good faith.
Yes, both threads are led by two accounts with probably less than 50 commits to their names during the last year, none of which are of any relevance to the subject they are discussing.
In a world where you could contribute your time to make some things better, there is a certain category of people who seek out nice things specifically to harm them. As open source enters mainstream culture, it also appears on the radar of this kind of people. It’s dangerous to catch their attention, as once they have you they’ll coordinate over reddit, lemmy, github, discord to ruin your reputation. The reputation of some guy who never ever did them any harm apart from bringing them something they needed, for free, but in a way that doesn’t 100% satisfy them. Pure vicious entitlement.
I’d sooner have a drink with a salesman from OpenAI than with one of them.
Just, what kind of pleasure can one derive from harming these projects? It’s so frigging weird, man.
Throwing down people is the easiest way to stand above them. 😒
To admit some context: My company has strongly encouraged some AI usage in our coding. They also encourage us to be honest about how helpful, or not, it is. Usually, I tell them it turns out a lot of garbage and once in a while helps make a lengthy task easier.
I can believe him about there being a sweet spot; where it’s not used for everything, only for processes that might have taken a night of manual checks. The very real, very reasonable backlash to it is how easily a poor management team or overconfident engineer will fall away from that sweet spot, and merge stuff that hasn’t had enough scrutiny.
Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged on the senate floor that in a perfect world, where AI is owned by people invested in world benefit, moderate AI use could improve many people’s lives. It’s just sad that in 99.9% of cases, we’re not anywhere near that perfect world.
I don’t totally blame the dev for defending his use of AI backed by industry experience, if he’s still careful about it. But I also don’t blame people who don’t trust it. It’s kind of his call, and if the avoidance of AI is important enough to you, I’d say fork it. I think it’s a small red flag, but not nearly enough of one for me to condemn the project.
Even Bernie Sanders acknowledged on the senate floor that in a perfect world, where AI is owned by people invested in world benefit, moderate AI use could improve many people’s lives.
I don’t think you should make a claim like this while AI is being heavily subsidized and burning VC cash to stay afloat. The truth is whatever value it may add to such a society might actually be completely negated by it’s resource costs. Is even “moderate” AI use ecologically or economically sustainable?
For full disclosure, I remembered once someone claimed to me there are AI models that use much less power. But, to confirm that statement before replying, I looked up an investigation, and they say it’s much murkier, and that a company’s own claims are usually understating it. So, you’re on point.
It can be useful for generating switch cases and other such not-quite copy-paste work too. There are reasonable use cases… if you ignore how the training data was sourced.
And the incredible amount of damage and destruction it’s still inflicting on the environment, society, and the economy.
No amount of output is worth that cost, even if it was always accurate with no unethical training.
“if you’re gonna be the bitch, be the whole bitch”
I mean, I get if you wanna use AI for that, it’s your project, it’s free, you’re a volunteer, etc. I’m just not sure I like the idea that they’re obscuring what AI was involved with. I imagine it was done to reduce constant arguments about it, but I’d still prefer transparency.
I tried fitting AI into my workloads just as an experiment and failed. It’ll frequently reference APIs that don’t even exist or over engineer the shit out of something could be written in just a few lines of code. Often it would be a combo of the two.
The symptoms you describe are caused by bad prompting. If an AI is providing over-complicated solutions, 9 times out of 10 it’s because you didn’t constrain your problem enough. If it’s referencing tools that don’t exist, then you either haven’t specified which tools are acceptable or you haven’t provided the context required for it to find the tools. You may also be wanting too much out of AI. You can’t expect it to do everything for you. You still have to do almost all the thinking and engineering if you want a quality project - the AI is just there to write the code. Sure, you can use an AI to help you learn how to be a better engineer, but AIs typically don’t make good high-level decisions. Treat AI like an intern, not like a principal engineer.
You might genuinely be using it wrong.
At work we have a big push to use Claude, but as a tool and not a developer replacement. And it’s working pretty damn well when properly setup.
Mostly using Claude Sonnet 4.6 with Claude Code. It’s important to run /init and check the output, that will produce a CLAUDE.md file that describes your project (which always gets added to your context).
Important: Review everything the AI writes, this is not a hands-off process. For bigger changes use the planning mode and split tasks up, the smaller the task the better the output.
Claude Code automatically uses subagents to fetch information, e.g. API documentation. Nowadays it’s extremely rare that it hallucinates something that doesn’t exist. It might use outdated info and need a nudge, like after the recent upgrade to .NET 10 (But just adding that info to the project context file is enough).
Agreed, I don’t understand people not even giving it a chance. They try it for five minutes, it doesn’t do exactly what they want, they give up on it, and shout how shit it is.
Meanwhile, I put the work in, see it do amazing shit after figuring out the basics of how the tech works, write rules and skills for it, have it figure out complex problems, etc.
It’s like handing your 90-year-old grandpa the Internet, and they don’t know what the fuck to do with it. It’s so infuriating.
Probably because, like your 90-year-old grandpa with the Internet, you have to know how to use the search engine. You have to know how to communicate ideas to an LLM, in detail, with fucking context, not just “me needs problem solvey, go do fix thing!”
It’s not really that simple. Yes, it’s a great tool when it works, but in the end it boils down to being a text prediction machine.
So a nice helper to throw shit at, but I trust the output as much as a random Stackoverflow reply with no votes :)
but in the end it boils down to being a text prediction machine.
And we’re barely smarter than a bunch of monkeys throw piles of shit at each other. Being reductive about its origins doesn’t really explain anything.
I trust the output as much as a random Stackoverflow reply with no votes :)
Yeah, but that’s why there’s unit tests. Let it run its own tests and solve its own bugs. How many mistakes have you or I made because we hate making unit tests? At least the LLM has no problems writing the tests, after you know it works.
I had the same experience. Asked a local LLM about using sole Qt Wayland stuff for keyboard input, a the only documentation was the official one (which wasn’t a lot for a noob), no.examples of it being used online, and with all my attempts at making it work failing. it hallucinated some functions that didn’t exist, even when I let it do web search (NOT via my browser). This was a few years ago.
This was a few years ago.
That’s 50 years in LLM terms. You might as well have been banging two rocks together.
Yeah I mean. It’s not like AI can think. It’s just a glorified text predictor, the same you have on your phone keyboard
It’s like having an idiot employee that works for free. Depending on how you manage them, that employee can either do work to benefit you or just get in your way.
Not even free, just cheaper than an actual employee for now, but greed is inevitable and AI is computationally expensive, it’s only a matter of time before these AI companies start cranking up the prices.
Only it’s not free. If you run it in the cloud, it’s heavily subsidized and proactively destroying the planet, and if you run it at home, you’re still using a lot of increasingly unaffordable power, and if you want something smarter than the average American politician, the upfront investment is still very significant.
Yeah I’m not buying the “proactively destroying the planet” angle. I’d imagine there’s a lot of misinformation around AI, given that the products surrounding it are mostly Western, like vaccines…
Vaccines are misinformation? What.
At a minimum, the agent should be compiling the code and running tests before handing things back to you. “It references non-existent APIs” isn’t a modern problem.
I create custom embedded devices with displays and I’ve found it very useful for laying things out. Like asking it to take secondly wind speed and direction updates and build a Wind Rose out of it, with colored sections in each petal denoting the speed… it makes mistakes but then you just go back and reiterate on those mistakes. I’m able to do so much more, so much faster.
I expect because it wasn’t a user - just a random passer by throwing stones on their own personal crusade. The project only has two major contributors who are now being harassed in the issues for the choices they make about how to run their project.
Someone might fork it and continue with pure artisanal human crafted code but such forks tend to die off in the long run.
Considering the amount of damage AI has done to well-funded projects like Windows and Amazon’s services, I agree with this entirely. It might be crucial to help fix bigger issues down the line.
I’m the opposite. Its weird to me for someone to add an AI as a co author. Submit it as normal.
