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.
Maybe the people asking for your projects and the ones slamming them for you using AI in any capacity are different people.
I for one think AI is a tool and if you’re competent or it’s for one-off tasks, you can use it. It’s the agentic vibecoding by complete non-IT people (or techbros, or absolute beginners) that grinds my gears.
Clasic goomba funnel fallacy
As a dev i dont care for ai, but i will only hate/judge/completly ignore programms/tools/documentation thats clearly vibecoded slop.
Meaning if you let ai fix your Gramnar/Sentece structure okay, i dont care its probably better. But if you let ai write your documentation and i find most of the information wrong, broken or halucinated its a no go.
Same with your code if its full of sloppy hacky bullshit, repeats and useless libs, i will assume you vibecoded it without nowing anything
but i will only hate/judge/completly ignore programms/tools/documentation thats clearly vibecoded slop.
If its disclosed and tagged, then keep that thought to yourself - its now OT (rule 3) or potentially a rule 1 violating comment depending on how its phrased. In either case, its not appropriate for the post.
If its not disclosed and/or tagged, report it.
As far as I remember we had a hunch you weren’t completely honest with us because the code smells of AI as well.
And not sure if disclosing it in some reply is all that great. IMO there should be a “co-authored by …-AI” in the commits. And transparency in the Readme, where people actively look for that kind of information. You didn’t do that.
Disclosure is for the post, not comments.
If you see it in comments but not in a post, report it. Not comments, but reporting, otherwise its just more cleanup later.
Yes. OP is fine as per the community rules. I was going for how there isn’t disclosure on the project page. It’s just in a post which is a reply to another post. So only Lemmy users will know. But maybe that’s alright.
Thats about all that we can control on this side, though. It would be great if more people made use of https://ai-declaration.md/, its what the rules here are (mostly) based on for disclosure, but half the time even a proper readme is more than what a repo will contain.
At least as a post here we can address appropriately.
Thanks! I didn’t know this existed. It’d solve a lot of my grief with AI coding if we just added transparency like this.
Your recollection is either misremembered or conflated with something else.
Irrespective, a hunch and a smell aren’t evidence. If you spotted something specific in the codebase, I’m genuinely open to hearing it - “it feels like AI” is doing a lot of j’accuse there.
As for the spacebar and enter comment - I’m not sure if that’s a formatting critique or something else entirely.
In any case, none of this is on topic here, with the topic being: what exactly is the expectation? As I said on the Cliparr thread -
- Don’t disclose - slop
- Disclose with AIP - not specific enough, still assume slop
- Disclose more specifically - “slop”
I’m genuinely trying to get a read of the room. Because when I explicitly described how the sausage was stuffed, I got harassed and called a clanker.
Don’t disclose - slop
“Don’t disclose” means report, not commenting.
Disclose with AIP - not specific enough, still assume slop
Not specific enough because it requires a disclosure, any comments of “slop” should be reported not interacted with.
Disclose more specifically - “slop”
“Slop” with an appropriate disclosure is a rule 1 violation. Report.
Yeah, I think the room is divided. You got a lot of upvotes. In fact I think you mainly got upvoted?!? Seems those people think you did alright. Some people also disliked something about it.
Sometimes you can’t make them all happy. I’d say be as transparent as possible. Just be honest. It doesn’t really matter whether random internet people think you are. What matters is what you are. And you’re the one person who knows the facts. Just be genuine and upfront. Set your assistant to reveal itself in the commits. Add information in the Readme about what’s AI and what’s human. Add a paragraph on if you’re planning to maintain the project (you did that). That way everyone knows what to expect. And then have fun coding stuff. Stay positive. If a handful of people tell you they’re using your stuff and they’re glad it exists, you probably contributed something to the world.
Edit: Similarly, if someone like me decides to question your coding style, you’re free to have a conversation about it. Or decide not to discuss it. That’s up to you. I just opened a conversation. And by your usage of words like “fuck” and “shit” I figured you’d be open to a more direct conversation style, so I just skipped polishing my sentences and just straight up said what’s on my mind.
It’s all good. I’m more than happy to talk shop…but I genuinely don’t know if that appreciated or wanted here. I think I’m just overall a little fuzzy as to heck is ok and isn’t ok in this space. I have trouble parsing Lemmy sometimes.
I think we’ve been clear
for me the issue isn’t so much the AI usage, but rather the intent behind the project. The reason I stopped browsing /r/selfhosted (and most of reddit) was the huge volume of people announcing their latest github star farming project, usually something that already exists or otherwise re-invents the wheel. The worst ones were the soulseek clones that caused massive disruptions because of their poor implementation of the protocol.
If a project is well written (and maintained) AI assisted coding, then that’s fine. But the problem is that the deluge of pure slop has made separating the two much harder, and thus I tend to assume anything that looks AI assisted is a waste of time.
I don’t understand this behaviour. They’re little stars on a website.
Stars.
I mean…why not go for unicorns or rainbows or something?
Are you 6? Or what?
Anyway, I agree with you. That is probably the main reason for not interacting on Reddit for me too (the LLM fora are even worse with it). The only thing I can surmise is that GitHub stars somehow equal social validation equals…I don’t get what.
Once again, little fake shiny yellow stars.
🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟
Clearly years of caffeine have burnt out my dopaminergic receptors.
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?
