The vibe coded aspect of this article seems quite irrelevant to me. If I read this correctly, an exec team (or just CEO?) got sold a terrible piece of software without proper vetting. Very bad software has existed for a long time, and this is an age-old story. Vibe-coded garbage perhaps has increased the volume of terrible stuff to wade through, but is secondary to a familiar story of dumb leaders making dumb decisions.
> The vibe coded aspect of this article seems quite irrelevant to me.
IMO not really, because of your own point:
> Vibe-coded garbage perhaps has increased the volume of terrible stuff to wade through
This is not a hypothetical, nor an incremental difference. People are drowning in garbage, and if they don’t use garbage generation themselves, they get pushed out because they have to review a ton of garbage and they have to bump their stats (CLOC, PRs etc).
> but is secondary to a familiar story of dumb leaders making dumb decisions.
Well, sure. Both can be true. The social lessons will take a long time. MBA style leadership doctrines typically last for a decade or more, until overwhelming anecdotal evidence pushes them into the next hype. In the meantime, we’re definitely in for a ride.
> This is not a hypothetical, nor an incremental difference. People are drowning in garbage, and if they don’t use garbage generation themselves, they get pushed out
I think of special notice is that even Apple and Disney are doing this. Two companies who have traditionally been far more cautious and extremely protective of their image. When entities like these are caving, I think it's safe to say we're well into Bizaro land.
Disney is the best example here. Iger recently suggested Disney+ users could make short form personalized content using Disney characters. This is very surprising to hear from a company who is extremely protective of those characters and the image of those characters. We do not yet have control over these image and video generation such that we can absolutely prevent certain classes of generation from happening. If they go through with it I'll give it a week (a month tops) before someone is able to generate porn with it. But hey, maybe the hit in stock will not be greater than the rise from the hype. But maybe that's part of the problem. Though they also don't appear to be getting any of that hype money either...
"hype". People spend a shitton of money to go to a Disney resort so their daughters can see a Disney princess up close and personal and have her say their name and ask them how they're doing. $299.99 for a TikTok where your daughters favorite princess asks her how's she's doing and tells her she's the best? Iger's gonna be buying the bank!
At what cost? Investors typically only care about returns in the quarter or the year. But shouldn't the company be ensuring its continued survival? These groups should be at odds but aren't, and that's concerning
I worked for a few years at a 100+ year old privately owned (same family) B2B supplier with insane profits. Website was outdated but highly practical, sales/CRM (if you can call it that) systems were mostly command line and hadn't changed fundamentally since the 1980s. These systems worked, and any proposal to change anything took months of meetings and debates and review of every cost/benefit possible. Proving that a change directly translated to a clear revenue metric was nearly impossible– for at least this niche, would more modern sales software actually translate to more orders? (answer: not really, a question reanalyzed every few years in depth). Would a nicer website get more conversions? (also no, something A/B tested to death every few years). Changing the position of one product grouping by a few pixels might be a 6 month job, lol.
By contrast, their fulfillment center was cutting edge, highly automated, and relatively experimental– if it improved the speed and cut costs, they jumped right on. These are much easier to measure as profitable.
>It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today
lol, the bar is not high. It can be both the smoothest and extremely janky at times. Let's be honest with ourselves here. (and I do agree, it's among the best running... but also janky).
+100. There is very little QGIS cannot do as well or better than ArcGIS. For any shortcomings, there are generally other specialized tools that can fill the gaps. It's really just a training issue more than technical one at this point imo.
The _one_ thing I wish would be improved is the georeferencing pipeline.
The fact Arc gives you a transparent live preview of where your image will end up is 1000x better than QGISs, "save a tiff, load it, check it, do it again" approach.
It’s been a while since I georeferenced in qgis, but there used to be some great plugins. Looks like some of those are gone now, and the core module has improved a lot. This newer plugin looks promising, though: https://github.com/cxcandid/GeorefExtension
There is exactly one thing that I would have ever needed ArcGid for and thats for Non Rectangular Map Borders. That does not yet exist in QGIS. But i managed to do using a GMT.jl.
Did you actually read the post? The author describes exactly why. It's not to filter and dismiss, but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't actually understand anyway. If you can articulate how you used AI, demonstrate that you understand the problem and your proposed solution (even if AI helped get you there), then I'm sure the maintainers will be happy to work with you to get a PR merged.
>I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
>but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't
This is very much in line with my comment about doing it to filter and dismiss. The author didn't say "So I can reach out and see if their clear eagerness to contribute extends to learning to code in more detail".
I doubt a PR is going to be buried if it's useful, well designed, good code, etc, just because of this disclosure. Articulate how you used AI and I think you've met the author's intent.
If the PR has issues and requires more than superficial re-work to be acceptable, the authors don't want to spend time debugging code spit out by an AI tool. They're more willing to spend a cycle or two if the benefit is you learning (either generally as a dev or becoming more familiar with the project). If you can make clear that you created or understand the code end to end, then they're more likely to be willing to take these extra steps.
Seems pretty straightforward to me and thoughtful by the maintainers here.
> I doubt a PR is going to be buried if it's useful, well designed, good code, etc, just because of this disclosure
If that were the case, why would this rule be necessary, if it indeed is the substance that matters? AI generated anything has a heavy slop stigma right now, even if the content is solid.
This would make for an interesting experiment to submit a PR that was absolute gold but with the disclaimer it was generated with help of ChatGPT. I would almost guarantee it would be received with skepticism and dismissals.
The rule is necessary because the maintainers want to build good will with contributors and if a contributor makes a bad PR but could still learn from it then they will put effort into it. It's a "if you made a good effort, we'll give you a good effort" and using AI tools gives you a very low floor for what "effort" is.
If you make a PR where you just used AI, it seems to work, but didn't go further then the maintainers can go "well I had a look, it looks bad, you didn't put effort in, I'm not going to coach you through this". But if you make a PR where you go "I used AI to learn about X then tried to implement X myself with AI writing some of it" then the maintainers can go "well this PR doesn't look good quality but looks like you tried, we can give some good feedback but still reject it".
In a world without AI, if they were getting a lot of PRs from people who obviously didn't spend any time on their PRs then maybe they would have a "tell us how long this change took you" disclosure as well.
> While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
If it's bad code from a person he'll help them get it fixed. If it's bad code from an AI why bother?
This is usually okay... what's not okay is that usually this narrative is broken up by ads, a constantly changing layout as you scroll, and eventually jumping so many times you can't resume scrolling, then eventually crashing because too many trackers/ads/etc overwhelmed the browser (on mobile).
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