And I will add on one more thing - I also agree with you Brian that people
shouldn’t be trying to contribute code they don’t understand to other
people’s project. :D

Dealing with poorly written code is actually something I have to do in my
day job. Most of the time it’s coming from junior engineers, not AI however.

-George

On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 9:41 AM Kenneth Pettit <[email protected]> wrote:

> Brian, George,
>
> I understand how you could feel this way Brian, especially regarding code
> authorship, and I appreciate you having my back.
>
> However, I wss not put out in any way ... I *did* ask George to post the
> updates Claude made.  And I was kinda checking email every 8 hours to see
> if he had done so. :)  I wanted to get an idea what the AI believed the
> issues was (suspsected I already knew, though also learned about Apple's
> specific thread requirements) so I could either pull in the changes or make
> my own.
>
> Also George, I believe you have been very forward in identifying that
> Claude was making these changes, which I appreciate.
>
> I'm just happy someone is able to get some kind of use out of the socket
> interface that has been sitting idle for so many years!  :)  And all of
> this new discussion / use of VirtualT has gotten me off my tail to push my
> 2 year old changes to my repo.  After my trip to CES I will focus on
> pulling in other PRs that have been identified.
>
> So as far as I'm concerned regarding this, all is good.
> Ken
>
>
>
> On 12/27/25 6:21 AM, George M. Rimakis wrote:
>
> I'm quite sorry, I didn't mean to "send anyone over the top".
>
> Of course I did not plan to share or commit anything regarding Claude's
> changes back to anyone here. Until of course Ken specifically asked me to,
> presumably out of curiosity.
>
> So I can only hope your reply here is merely a misunderstanding,
> perhaps for not having read prior emails quite thoroughly enough. I have no
> desire to take ownership of the generated code, because quite frankly it
> was generated for my personal use. Nobody will be poisoned by the MCP
> server running on Mac Mini.
>
> - George
>
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 8:51 AM Brian K. White <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> On 12/26/25 16:08, B9 wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On December 25, 2025 2:54:55 PM PST, Kenneth Pettit <[email protected]>
>> wrote:
>> >> On 12/23/25 2:39 PM, George M. Rimakis wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> He (please bear with my anthropomorphizing of the LLM), found out
>> that somehow it was causing the GUI to crash.
>> >>>
>> >>> I honestly don’t exactly know what he did, but he modified the code
>> so that he was able to safely push keys at the same time as a user in the
>> GUI, without the app crashing.
>> >>>
>> >> Would be really interested to see what changes Claude made to resolve
>> the GUI crash / deadlock / garbled output if you are up to sharing them.
>> >
>> > For the sake of science, I'm glad to see George has let Claude file the
>> bug report instead of typing it up himself. Understanding the code — or
>> trying to — would end George's experiment in "vibe coding" in which one
>> "embraces exponentials and forgets the code exists".
>> >
>> > I'm fascinated seeing a hybrid approach happening in real-life: We have
>> a vibe coder making a patch for existing code that an expert coder will
>> examine.
>> >
>> > Clearly it saved George, the vibe coder, time and effort. If he had to
>> understand the original program, identify the bug, and learn enough to
>> write a patch, he  probably wouldn't have even tried.
>> >
>> > Now, the question is: How much time and effort will it cost Ken, the
>> expert programmer, to handle the AI generated report? Would it have taken
>> Ken more or less time if he had used Claude interactively to fix the bug?
>> >
>> > Bug reports with patches have traditionally been very helpful, but
>> there are costs, especially with AI. Does Claude's description match the
>> code generated? Has it identified the actual source of the error? Is it the
>> correct fix? Does the patch break anything else? Does it add extraneous
>> changes? Does it take an incremental approach when refactoring would be
>> more appropriate (or vice versa)? Are the changes written in a way that
>> will be easy to understand and maintain in the future?
>> >
>> > Ken, if you don't mind, please let us know what your experience is and
>> if you would welcome more patches from vibe coders in the future.
>> >
>> > --b9
>> >
>>
>>
>> I'll just say this much:
>>
>> I haven't commented on this thread at all yet because John doesn't like
>> us to be mean to each other here. But I am very much in the Daniel
>> Stenberg camp on this.
>>
>> The latest post where George regurgitated the AI's own explanation for
>> what it did (instead of understanding and explaining, and taking
>> ownership himself) sent me over the top.
>>
>> Ken is nice, but that just means Ken is nice. Good for Ken and lucky for
>> George.
>>
>> It's still basically abusive of others to submit work from an unthinking
>> unknowing tool that you yourself can't explain, vet, sign-off on, and
>> put your own name on and take responsibility for.
>>
>> But a non programmer doesn't understand what the problem is, and I'm
>> unable to write the explanation in a way that is likely to be read.
>>
>> Actually it's not even really a programmer thing, it's a respect for
>> others thing.
>>
>> If I asked for a cake recipe, and you used an ai to generate a cake
>> recipe and gave it to me without yourself being able to say that the
>> cake recipe will never poison anyone, or even just taste bad or fall
>> apart in all expected usage scenarios, then how can you live with
>> yourself? If I asked for the formula or table to map how much water a
>> field will need based on the type of soil and the type of crop, and
>> instead of performing the research to actually know the correct data,
>> you just had something generate an answer that who knows, might be
>> right, how can you live with yourself?
>>
>> Somehow people do it for coding and think it's fine.
>>
>> --
>> bkw
>>
>
>

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