I don’t usually share what I build. Most of it lives on Codeberg or Github as a glorified off-site backup. 3-2-1 and all that. If I nuke my drive, I can pull it back down. That’s the whole point.
A while back I mentioned Pimaps here, a few people asked to see it, so I posted it. Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted (documentation and review- flagged with AIP). Similar story with Cliparr. I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
But now I’m mildly curious: what does the community actually expect from devs when sharing a project? I’m not assuming everyone here is a professional dev - though I’d guess the overlap is significant - so I’m wondering where the bar sits.
Polish? Full handwritten codebase? Something else?
How much of the sausage making do you actually want to see?
Having a discussion on this is perfectly fine, but I want to remind of two things.
- Rule 1: Be civil.
- Use the report button. Your comment is not a report. I do not get an alert about your comment unless its reported.
Lets keep it friendly and constructive.
The AI disclosure is important. Which one, where, how and why. Just to show an example why it’s important, it’s basically the same as this thing that is absolutely needed and normal in the food industry precisely because we allow people to do things the wrong way:
This food product is processed in the same tanks, conveyors belts and filters that also process Imperiling Allergen.
In this post and your linked post you come off as quite confrontational while exaggerating the dissent and underplaying the support. It’s a great way to get comments that strongly disagree with you. In all of that commotion, it sounds like you’ve missed the point: You’re regretting the AI disclosure, when really people were voicing their opinions in hopes that you’d regret/rethink the AI use.
Personally, I really like the AI disclosures. I like seeing how the sausage is made and what it’s made with. If the sausage is stuffed with hot dog “meat” I want to know. I’ll also avoid it like I avoid junk food, because that’s what it is. LLM-generated code is the junk food of programming. It’s a waste of resources, it’s bad for your (and everyone’s) health, and it can’t be trusted.
Some people really like junk food and hot dogs, and that’s fine. We just need to be clear that that’s not healthy and encourage healthier habits like eating fruits and vegetables (or at least real meat). People like ignoring the externalities of junk food and LLMs; both are responsible for a lot of pollution and societal harm (increased healthcare costs, dark patterns, misinformation, etc.). That’s enough reason for some people to completely remove them from their lives and be understandably vocal about how others should too.
The occasional sweet treat isn’t bad, but making sweet treats at home is always better. At home, I have more control over what ingredients I use and where I buy them from. Though I know I’ll never be able to use zero resources to make a good cinnamon roll, I can at least make the most optimal choices for myself. Ask yourself this: what value does text I generate provide? Could someone else, given the same information, generate the same text? Could someone else write functionality similar text without boiling the oceans and massive copyright infringement? I think any LLM-generated content that anyone could reasonably generate and use themselves is worthless and a net negative impact on the world. If it’s LLM-generated content that can’t be immediately/easily used, then you’re at least providing some real value by doing some work to make it usable.
AI disclosure doesn’t protect you against other people’s opinions. Some people will buy and consume the product, some people will try out the product and decide it’s not for them, some people will discover the product is made very unethically and decry it publicly in hopes that others won’t enable the ethical violations.
My intention isn’t to be confrontational, though I am genuinely perplexed, and that’s probably what you’re reading.
I don’t believe highlighting the AI tribalism is exaggerated. Technology is literally one of the top communities on Lemmy - one rarely (never?) sees positive comments about AI there. Hell, FuckAI is literally an active community here.
On regret: why should anyone “regret” using a tool? If we need to take moral consideration into tool use… well…should we regret using mobile phones? I would argue they are just as reprehensible.
If a dev used a local model to spelunk the codebase and write the documentation, would that sit better? Why? I’m not sure the line is where people think it is.
My intention isn’t to be confrontational, though I am genuinely perplexed, and that’s probably what you’re reading.
Meanwhile…
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
“Fork it, fix it or fuck it” - dealers choice :)
Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted
I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
Anyway:
On regret: why should anyone “regret” using a tool? If we need to take moral consideration into tool use… well…should we regret using mobile phones? I would argue they are just as reprehensible.
I think you’re finally getting to the realization: doing things without considering the moral or ethical implications is inherently, uhhh, immoral and unethical. Do you do more good than bad with your smartphone? Does it use thousands of watts (hours) every time you use it? Do you replace your phone every year with the new model, maximizing your environmental impact with the manufacturing? What do you think makes using a smartphone just as bad as using an LLM?
Look, I get it: considering all of the consequences of your actions all of the time is tiring. I don’t like doing it either. Clearly companies don’t do it at all (at least not for external consequences). Look where that has got us. Apathy is not an option.
If a dev used a local model to spelunk the codebase and write the documentation, would that sit better? Why? I’m not sure the line is where people think it is.
Local models are better in many ways, yes. The local user has control over how much power they use (for the query, not on training), other resource usage (water, electrical power sources), what model (and by extent the training data it uses), and exactly what documentation they get out (depending on the query/ies). The best option is still obviously to write the documentation yourself, as the subject-matter expert.
Meanwhile…
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
“Fork it, fix it or fuck it” - dealers choice :)
Got dunked on for AI slop despite explicitly marking which parts were AI-assisted
I get it - Lemmy hates AI in any capacity.
Hang on though; you’re glossing over a lot of salient context.
See: https://aussie.zone/post/37281785/25338365
That’s neither here nor there. Let’s talk turkey.
I think you’re finally getting to the realization: doing things without considering the moral or ethical implications is inherently, uhhh, immoral and unethical. Do you do more good than bad with your smartphone? Does it use thousands of watts (hours) every time you use it? Do you replace your phone every year with the new model, maximizing your environmental impact with the manufacturing? What do you think makes using a smartphone just as bad as using an LLM?
Actually, I think it’s worse. A lot worse.
Smartphone (Ericsson LCA): 57 kg CO₂e (Carbon Dioxide Equivalent) total over 3-year lifetime. Manufacturing dominates. https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/research-papers/life-cycle-assessment-of-a-smartphone
Smartphone (Carbon Trust): ~80% of footprint is production, embedded before you even turn it on. https://www.carbontrust.com/news-and-insights/insights/circular-economy-and-net-zero-how-can-carbon-footprinting-reinvent-the-mobile-phone-market/
Meanwhile - LLM inference: 0.3–0.4 Wh per query (short), up to ~17 Wh for long reasoning runs. https://arxiv.org/html/2505.09598v1
Even at 500 AI-assisted coding sessions (heavy runs at that), I’m looking at 3–4 kg CO₂e. That’s 4–6% of a single smartphone’s manufacturing emissions.
And that’s without touch the harms from direct resource mining etc.
So no, they’re not “just as bad.” Individual smartphone ownership is orders of magnitude worse environmentally than individual, occasional LLM use for a hobby project. And people typically replace their mobile phones every 2-3 years
https://blog.andymasley.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about
You’ve ignored all of the other impacts of LLMs while comparing different lifecycles.
If you’re going to include the manufacturing of smartphones, you must also include the “manufacturing” of LLMs. That requires everything from the construction of datacentres and the manufacturing of computers which go into them to the less “real” copious scraping, training, and shutdown that is required.
Here’s some other numbers that I found for a mix of ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 (since the stats for newer models are hard to find):
- Around 10K GPUs were used to train the model
- Each GPU has a manufacturing carbon usage of around 164 kg CO2e (8 GPUs per server)
- GPU usage accounts for 85-95% of CO2e emissions (5-15% manufacturing and other impacts) for a 3 year usage lifespan
That puts the total per-card emissions around 3280 kg CO2e and the total usage around 32 800 tonnes CO2e just for one model. Per your smartphone metrics, that’s about equivalent to 560K people’s smartphone use. If you use a smartphone that is more carefully constructed, you can get that up to 1.13M. So for the same atmospheric pollution as 0.5-1 million people buying a phone, we made one model run for 3 years. Now consider there are multiple models and they usually get replaced more often than once every 3 years.
Most people rely on a smartphone these days, very few people need an LLM. Phones are significantly less polluting than an LLM datacentre so you’d be better off using your phone.
Now for other concerns, including the rest of the environmental devastation, which smartphones and most other products do not have. Most of these are still unknown or hard to quantify because the tech industry has long since abandoned open development of new products. I’m just going to list the problems because no one wants to read anymore paragraphs from me:
- Societal impacts
- Reduced barrier to misinformation
- Increased concentration of power (the political kind, not electricity)
- Reduced barrier to professional skills
- (this might seem like a good thing, but LLMs are not competent by themself, so)
- Increased danger in safety critical applications
- Increased ease of embedding malicious elements
- Reduced confidence in professionals
- AI psychosis
- Isolation
- Increased bot traffic
- Reduced access to infrastructure
- Reduced access to critical resources
- Other environment impacts
- Increased water usage
- Land destruction
- Noise pollution
- Water pollution
- Ground toxicity/pollution
- Increased raw material demands (feedback loop for the other env impacts)
The only real positive of the tech industry shenanigans is that prices have gone up, which is discouraging people from buying these significantly environmentally impactful products and instead extending the lifespan of existing hardware.
That’s not a 1:1 comparison.
One person uses one phone. The embodied cost - energy, materials, waste - maps directly to that one device.
But one person doesn’t bear the full cost of a GPU, a data centre, or a training run. Those costs are distributed across every user of that system. If we’re arguing per-capita impact, the LLM side of the ledger needs to be divided by its actual user base, not compared whole against a single handset.
You’d need to compare either one phone to one person’s proportional share of LLM infrastructure, or the entire phone industry against the entire LLM industry.
And given rare earth extraction, cobalt supply chains, labour abuse, e-waste generation and global market scale, that industry-level comparison probably doesn’t favour phones as cleanly as you’d expect.
And that’s before associated social harms enter the ledger, which the phone industry has a considerable head start on (eg: adolescent mental health, attention economy design, surveillance capitalism, algorithmic radicalisation, proliferation of gig economy…)
why are you comparing manufacturing to inference? compare it to training.
Because 1 person is responsible for 1 person’s cost of inference.
Training is a whole industry manufacturing analogue, which is exactly the point: that cost must be amortised across every user, not attributable to one person.
We can compare 1 person to 1 person, or 1 industry to 1 industry. We can’t fairly compare 1 person to 1 industry.
See my reply elsewhwere to NGram.
I demand that you code in assembly. Javascript is too high-level. Natural language is too high-level.
Assembly?
I’ll toggle transistors with a paper clip, thankyouverymuch.
Let me know when you get to handwaving.
I found your Pimaps to be fabulous.
Haters gonna hate, there’s no help for it.
AI is a tool. Slop happens, but it doesn’t necessarily need to happen. I imagine there were many misguided, unnecessary, and just plain wrong trenches dug just after invention of the backhoe.
Go on and do even greater stuff.
Deleted by author
Show us how the
carrotsausage is made. Not all lemmy hates AI. I used it myself on a project I could otherwise not have made in my limited free-time. Just be honest about it, as you have so far, and people will tolerate.yeah I have problems with ai but not against it per se. I have a feeling people like that are not as vocal.
“If it gets out what gets into the sausage we make, we’ll get into a place we won’t get out anymore.”
sounds great. those of us who work in industry understand thats not how any of this works and AI is the standard for development now. What the “AI Slop” People don’t understand is that development with AI depends on the person using it. You cannot give a chess novice AI and make them a master but if you give a chess master AI they become unstoppable. I wrote about this exact problem https://themildtake.com/articles/2026-04-18-ai-development-communication-problem/ here. I tend to mostly do the same thing as you I run a forgejo instance and mirror upstream to github as a backup.
your experience is not universal.
No, but I for one find it familiar.
I don’t see how you were “dunked on”. There was one (1) person who went farther than voicing legitimate concerns… and then you were a twat and a half about it in the edited post. “Politely go fuck yourself” with a smile is worth a downvote.
Developers have been getting criticism for using particular tools for decades. For using Electron, for using systemd, for developing in Rust, for not developing in Rust, for using GTK or Qt… but when LLMs get involved, it’s suddenly verboten?
Ok, fair enough about “dunked on”. The exact nuance of Americanisms occasionally escapes me, in the same way “rooting for the home team” means something very different once you cross the equator. I’ll concede that, and stop trying to translate into lingo that isn’t mine.
On sequencing of events: I posted about my project as a genuine “hey, look at this cool thing I did”, with no intention to share the codebase until others asked for it. Literally no intention, grabbing for likes of start on shithub.
Someone responded by calling me “fluent in slop” - directed at a person who is, for what it’s worth, autistic. I wrote the original post and then rewrote the AI disclosure with some cheek baked back in. So, the twattery had a catalyst.
Which, I’ll note, is a word you’ve used twice in one comment while advising me not to be one :)
Finally: you’re conflating me with the author of Cliparr. I’ve never claimed 25 years of development (and if anything, I prefer not to talk about professional roles on social media). He’s the gent being called a slop merchant preemptively in the other thread, who inspired this one.
I think you’re trying to gaslight us and yourself into believing that this post has standing and that you didn’t fuck up.
Stop with the stilted arguments and actually listen to what people are telling you (after you asked for it) in a much nicer tone than I am using right now.
Fucked up…what, exactly? Calling out someone for harassing the cliparr dev or someone else for saying a person with ASD 1) sounds like a machine and 2) that their hobby project could kill someone if used?
Or the gent above telling me off for (in their words) being a twat by calling me a twat multiple times?
None of these are gaslighting…they’re literally a click away. Look.
I have no interest in making this about personalities. It’s about this -
- Don’t disclose - slop
- Disclose with AIP - not specific enough, still assume slop
- Disclose more specifically - still slop
There’s literally no disclosure the Cliparr dev (or others) could have made that that would have been accepted in good faith. I see that a lot on Lemmy. It’s irrational.
From one autistic person to another, I’m going to make it extremely clear. The primary issue here is not that you used AI to write part of your project (although it is a legitimate source of concern for some). The issue, where you fucked up, is your response. You were unnecessarily rude, offensive, and confrontational in your initial reaction, and continued acting like that once people pointed it out after you asked.
Also, as a person with ASD myself: how dare you use your condition as an excuse for your behaviour. It’s fucking shameful, and that’s the most polite I’m willing to be about it.
You desperately want to make this personal? Fine.
How dare I? How dare you.
Where was I “rude?” Cite it or retract it.
Four times from you, unprompted:
[1] “you were a twat and the half”
[2] “don’t be a twat when you inevitably get pushback”
[3] “that’s just being a dick”
[4] “how dare you use your condition… It’s fucking shameful”
That’s your conduct. Here’s the catalyst - other commenters calling my project “slop machine” output and suggesting people could die from using it:
[1] “some slopper decided to remove all its data just after you leave cell coverage”
[2] “This just looks like Comaps ran through the slop machine”
[3] “Probably because OP is fluent in slop. Their job was done the moment the prompt was finished”
and on the Cliparr thread, someone likewise accusing that dev of similar, over having agents.md in their repo -
https://aussie.zone/post/37216287
I pushed back against those accusations first. Should I just smile politely?
You waded in later with name-calling.
You understand “twat” isn’t a throwaway word, right? And you think pushing back against “slop merchant” accusations constitutes “rudeness” warranting four separate insults?
Prove where I crossed the line. Otherwise stop calling me names and claiming moral high ground.
you’re conflating me with the author of Cliparr
My mistake, I’ve edited the comment to reflect this. Although I don’t understand, then, why you even brought Cliparr up. You’re not involved, and only taking offence on someone else’s behalf.
That also means that the lovely message of “Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)” was precipitated by a single negative interaction and a handful of downvotes. Regardless of linguistic and cultural differences, that’s just being a dick, and it should be pointed out. Perhaps you should reexamine how you handle criticism.
I brought up Cliparr because someone was being pre-emptively called a slop merchant before anyone had looked at their code. You don’t have to be personally involved to think that’s worth pushing back on.
On the catalyst: you’ve characterised it as “a single negative interaction and a handful of downvotes.” You’ve also already acknowledged you missed the deleted posts. Those two things are doing quite a bit of work together. The comment that preceded the edit wasn’t a downvote - it was being told I was “fluent in slop”, and that my app might kill someone, directed at someone who is autistic. That’s the interaction we’re talking about.
I’ll take the broader point that the phrasing was undiplomatic. But “perhaps you should reexamine how you handle criticism” is a bit rich from someone who’s called me a twat twice and is now on their third comment about it.
Yes, we want to know how the sausage is made, just like with all FOSS.
what does the community actually expect from devs
It really isn’t so long ago when making an app required various stages of completion and testing, usually including other people. I expect from devs that they follow that well-established road and stop with the silly “who has the time” argument I’m hearing so soften lately. Sorry, you didn’t actually say that.
Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?
Not sure why we should be interested in the Polish though. Are you from there?
Yes, actually :) (or near by, at least).
Honestly, I don’t know what people expect either, and I do think there’s a fair bit of snobbery and gatekeeping around what this community rightly calls AI slop (and don’t get me started on reddit’s /r/selfhosted lol).
I’ve been interested in code from afar, but my life priorities and passions mean learning to code properly has to take a back seat. That said, I have ideas, I’m rigorous, and I can read and learn. So I use Claude to vibe-code a whole bunch of tools that fill a real gap in what already exists for my hobbies and my two jobs. Whether I use AI or not is my responsibility, and every public repo I have carries a disclaimer about AI usage.
For me, the bar should be: does it work, is it documented, and is the AI involvement disclosed clearly ? If yes to all three, I’m curious enough and big enough to review the repo and try it myself.
Mods here have proposed tags and standards to tell apart projects with varying degrees of AI involvement. Yet the systematic backlash makes me hesitant to share tools that could genuinely help some people, spark ideas for others, or maybe even lead to a collaboration with someone skilled enough to build something exceptional for the community. In my case, AI is a very useful tool, but it only ever produces stuff for me alone.
Which is a shame.
I feel in this case you should just publish it on Github anyway. But skip the advertisement post in some general Lemmy community. I think that’s a good compromise. And transparency is very welcome. It doesn’t feel that way in some public discussion by random people online. But we also got a lot of people who appreciate it.
what does the community actually expect from devs
I don’t think the average self-hoster actually realises what’s going on in the dev community. ‘Vibe coding’ is very different from AI-assisted workflows. All but the most die-hard devs are using AI in some way.
‘No AI whatsoever’ is unrealistic and if that’s your red line you’re gonna see a smaller and smaller pool of things you can download and use.
Sure, if you go with that attitude.
What attitude?
posted it. Got dunked on for AI slop
101 upvotes and 14 downvotes… dunked?
Anyway, I stopped reading and downvoted after the
Ipso facto, for all the AI “Akshually” pedants, I’ve tagged this as AIP. Politely go fuck yourselves :)
typing the word “politely” or a smiley doesn’t make a very rude remark any less rude.
Moreover, splitting the community into a pro-AI faction and an anti-AI one isn’t healthy (for the community, whether it’s healthy for you is a can of worms that I don’t want to open right here and now) and ridiculing the other “faction” can only radicalize things and we already have more than enough of that, both in lemmy and, sadly, also IRL.
So, personally, I donwvoted your post, not your project.
You are of course free to downvote as you see fit - that’s what it’s there for. Likewise, I’m not going to sand down how I write for the sake of votes.
On the vote count: you may have missed the deleted posts here and elsewhere. The ratio wasn’t the issue.
On the rest - “whether it’s healthy for you”, “splitting the community”, “radicalize” - that’s a lot of weight to put on someone asking a straightforward question about community norms. You’ve framed a genuine query as a faction rally, and slipped in a dig about my wellbeing while doing it. That’s the part I’d call unfair, and I think you know it.
Sir… You came to us for these comments this time. Are you just here for a fight? It’s not clear what you want from us.
I don’t find your project interesting enough for me, but I was happy you did it. I prefer to keep my infrastructure at home in a controlled environment and take my maps out with me, but I don’t use navigation, I just record GPS tracks.
Now with this post, I’m starting to wonder what your motivations are altogether, particularly considering your responses here.
Huh? I’m not here for a fight. I posted a genuine question about community expectations around AI disclosure. What I didn’t anticipate was needing to defend my character and sequencing of events across a dozen comments in order to get there.
The “motivation” is pretty simple: we should discuss what the bar actually is, because every time people try to meet it, the bar moves. That’s the thread. Nothing more sinister than that. See https://aussie.zone/post/37216287
Glad you’re recording tracks either way, sounds like the right tool for your use case.
I just looked back over your post and your answers there and in here. With respect, your writing style sounds combative. I would never ask you to change it for anyone, but you should understand how it comes across.
Regarding the AI disclosure stuff, you aren’t the first burgeoning dev posting to Lemmy to go through this exact gauntlet of “AI slop” accusations. You are on a platform used by a fairly specific group of people who were pissed off enough to leave reddit, so not the usual general “tech enthusiast” crowd, and a fairly militant bunch.
The way I see it, AI is 1) already here and 2) just a tool. It’s being used in the background of a LOT of projects and there is by now simply no way to cover our ears and pretend it doesn’t exist. For better or worse, it’s also changing the pace of development, check out how fast PS5 emulation is happening because of AI tooling.
That said, developer practices that took us 40 years to make standard are still valuable, so folks have legitimate reason to call out your commit and documentation practices. If there is anything I objected to in your project, it might be that.
Ultimately, a created work starts to live a different life once it is public. You started without sharing it, shared the source, and now you have to make a decision: continue sharing and accept that not everyone will like it, or stop sharing. It’s really that simple.
There also only seems to be one comment chain mentioning the AI, which has been mod deleted. The test of the comments don’t mention AI or aren’t critical because of the AI.
