I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an AI buff. I use it (unpaid) mostly for a search aid or assistance with setting up services in my homeserver (new to homelabbing) when I get stuck, as I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to devote to it due to life obligations.
My question is: Do you feel it is ethical and/or moral to use AI to develop FOSS?
I’m genuinely torn on this issue. Part of me feels it’s counterintuitive, yet the another part of me knows the probability of it going away are slim to none and using it to develop FOSS is a way to “use it against itself”, for lack of a better term.
This is my first post on Lemmy. I’m asking to please keep it cordial. I’m not looking for an elitist lecture. I genuinely want to know the community’s thoughts.
P.S. I’ve toyed with local models, but I don’t have the hardware to make them remotely useful. I’m still learning and tweaking to see what can be achieved on limited hardware.
A really important part of FOSS is testing and bug fixing. Often the bulk of code is done by a small number of people but what makes their software truly useful is the testing and fixing contributions. Unless LLMs could deliver bug-free code, the FOSS projects that have community and userbase would always be more reliable and therefore useful than bespoke LLM-written software. I wouldn't write my own grep with some custom feature. I'd use GNU grep and augment it with another tool, or perhaps get an LLM to add the feature I need to it.
What made me think along those lines is that someone I know vibe-coded their own personal/private XMPP client recently. I'm sure it has lots of problems, but it does what they need and has a nice UI that looks how they wanted. In their case, it doesn't need to be bug-free - just bug-free on their machine, for the tasks that they do with it.
But for some software, I definitely agree about the reliability and edge-cases / environments. Knowing 1000s of people have tested my backup software and ironed out the bugs is a big plus. I can't imagine many people would want to use a vibe-coded one.
Thinking about Blender, IIRC, their filetype is effectively a memory dump of the process. So, if I worked in an animation studio and wanted a custom feature, I'd definitely write a plugin instead of making a bespoke tool. But then again, if I could export to
.ofxor another common format, and have everything import perfectly, I'd be more tempted to go for a bespoke tool again. It's interesting to think through the scenarios.That's related to the proverb "writing code was never the main part of software engineering." Also related to the difference in difficulty of writing the first 90% and the last 10% of useful software.