Hi,
Thanks for this Kooda!
I am also someone who hasn't been very vocal or active in the last few
years.
However, I support Kooda's sentiments.
There's essentially three parts to programming:
+ The programming
+ The debugging
+ The reviewing
AI thingies seem to be positioned to do a lot of the first (the
programming) however, for recreation programmers (or 'non-IT' or hackers
or whatever the word is) like us, that's the most enjoyable bit: that's
what we're here for (although I only speak for myself).
The second most important bit if, of course, the community: we'll go
around doing our programming in different places until we found a crowd
that we like to be with.
If AI does most of the programming and disintermediates most of the
community then I guess we're just left with the debugging and the
reviewing which is what I have to do at work all day anyway!
It's not the best bit.
(Although I must admit that do occasionally enjoy a really hard
debugging problem.)
Hi everyone, I know I haven’t been vocal or active at all really these
last few years so please feel free to disregard my input.
On 2/9/26 20:39, Rolando Abarca via Chicken-hackers wrote:
On the broader topic of LLM-assisted contributions: I work in BigTech,
and I can tell you things are moving faster than most people outside
these environments would expect. AI-assisted development is becoming
the norm, not the exception. I think the CHICKEN community (and
really, any open source project) will need to figure out how to handle
this sooner rather than later.
One idea: what if there was a way for agents to self-check
contributions before submission? Something like a CONTRIBUTING_AI.md
or similar document that outlines the specific code quality concerns,
style expectations, and common pitfalls. An agent could review the PR
against those criteria before a human even sees it. This wouldn't
replace human review, but it could raise the quality bar and focus
reviewer attention on what matters most.
Putting aside any ethical concern (and I’m not saying we should! it’s
just for the sake of the argument), I think there is one crucial thing
missing from that reasoning. Most people work on open-source projects
on their free time for the fun of it, and from what I’ve seen, to
escape the madness of their regular programming job.
Things in the open-source world are mostly voluntary unpaid work. What
you propose is to increase the burden on them, with usually low
quality code review, which is not why people work on these projects in
the first place.
That said, if the community isn't ready to tackle this now, I
completely understand. This work isn't blocking anything critical. It
started as a personal exploration to learn CHICKEN's internals, and it
served that purpose well. But if there's interest, it could also be an
opportunity to start thinking through how the project handles this new
wave of contributions.
What I see is that you robbed yourself of learning with this amazing
community. Everyone here is super nice and great programmers with a
lot of detailed knowledge, I would not hesitate to say that it’s the
place where I learned the most. Your exploration would have been more
rewarding, more correct and deeper, had you learned with the people
that actually know how things work and why things are the way they
are.
On a personal note, I have a really bitter taste in my mouth regarding
LLM, as the scrapers are the reason why I had to shut down my code
repository containing all my CHICKEN code.
--
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