I Am Not a Reverse Centaur(blog.miguelgrinberg.com) |
I Am Not a Reverse Centaur(blog.miguelgrinberg.com) |
There is an implicit social contract with writing that the writer has put more effort into writing than the reader will need to read something. Sure you get crackpots still, but there are only so many Gene Rays in this world, so the volume is limited.
I think the same applies to PRs. Pre-AI , it was usually obvious when a PR was either completely terrible or very half-baked, and the required effort to create even a shitty PR was usually more than that required to reject it.
AI makes it trivial to make a completely terrible PR, and much easier to make a not-immediately-obviously-bad PR.
This is toxic behavior that unfortunately rewards a selfish writer. I'm worried the AI push incentivizes this too much, to where in corporate situations a reader can't say no to doing work for a selfish writer.
The problem is that this is increasingly seen as a non-productive workflow slowing everyone else down, so the pressure is growing for writers to just shove massive PRs out the door and reviewers to use LLMs to make that tractable. I suppose those advocates have more faith in LLM output compared to humans than I do.
Then suddenly LLMs happened and it's like the mask is off: no one's reading them still, but also no one is writing them either.
Which is perhaps a drop in the ocean of the insanity which is "we need you to work on the Jira tasks" as basically a job title.
They've still put more effort into writing their crackpottery than you will put into reading it, and at worst it's entertaining. The late Ivor Catt's articles on "the death of electric current" - where he expounds the idea that current and indeed electric charge does not exist, because of stuff involving Maxwell's equations where the maths looks about right to me but I'm not a good enough mathematician to prove - were pretty damn odd, but his writing in 1989 on how it would be vital for an interconnected network of computers for information sharing to treat censorship as damage and route around it and some ideas for doing this was bang on the money (as we now see) and his writings on how American business management methods result in the worst possible outcome for everyone that's not already a billionaire have also proven oddly prophetic.
So maybe there's something in the crackpots after all.
As a maintainer of a few FLOSS projects, this tracks.
The Pavlovian PR notification response has gone from, "Oh! What do we have here?" to "Groan. Do we have _anything_ here?"
I won't get specific but I just had to remove a contributor from a project after multiple submissions of either cutesy, fluffy bullshit (add ASCI animations!) or "rewrite entire project in other language". Not only did the PRs result in wasted time and energy but they also resulted in conversations about how to deal with this sort of spam. (Probably good to get out of the way and set policy but still...) So, this person probably spent fifteen minutes prompting together these stupid PRs and multiple maintainers had to spend hours agonizing over what to do about them.
There's one project where I need to download a new version once in a while and I just rebase my changes.
That's a good thing; OSS projects don't want drive-by contributors, they want a community. A small bit of friction is a good thing.
After all, we can see what happens with frictionless contributions.
We almost need like ... noncanonical software? Not so much forks, but like ... Maybe software as like a cluster? an ecosystem? On-demand app store where features / forks are shared/upvoted/evolved by the community where the maintainers don't have to get burnt out, and when it inevitably becomes a ball of mud oh well it does the job? I really don't know!
I hope we can think about some answers and not get tribal though because this is really a huge problem and also a huge opportunity and so a minor reminder that there is a baby in that bathwater?
I ran a bunch of different compilers on it, including some open source ones.
Some of them failed some tests, and it was natural to have my LLM (Claude Fable 5) root-cause the issues, and to double-check my test bench wasn't to blame.
But now I stood with all these patches that I couldn't just throw at the upstream maintainers all at once. I ended up just filing a few issues and moved on to other things.
It felt weird to just file issues when my LLM had already spent a lot of time root-causing and fixing the issues. But then, maybe they could just have their LLMs do the same.
Still not sure if it was the right call?
I feel bad for people like him who get the brunt of dilettantes who can "code" polluting his time and focus. Reminds me of that mitch hedberg joke: "When someone hands you a flyer, it's like they're saying here you throw this away." but for PRs
> My initial task when a new unexpected PR arrives is to determine if there is a person behind it or not, and luckily this is easy to figure out in just a few seconds.
OK. How? That would have been an interesting explanation to me.
> I do not want an LLM-generated novel with chapters, bullet points and emojis, just a simple description of the problem in your own voice.
> If I don't see proof of human involvement, then I'm not interested
By vibe. That's what people who believe they can detect AI do.
Have you never seen vibe-slopped PRs?
Review is indeed the main bottleneck now for open source, and we need to solve it. Introducing more friction is hardly helping.
A company is usually already a high-trust environment, where people use real names and have real reputations. So creating an issue cannot serve the purpose of increasing trust.
I can see why that doesn't sound great particularly on a team where everyone knows each other and is working together but it totally makes sense for me if I were maintaining a project that was large enough to get a lot of low-effort PRs coming into it.
The worst ones are fully autonomous AI agents looking for open source projects and adding random pull requests.
But in some cases, I find a legit bug that needs fixing. For example, I want to get a particular program working in Wine/FEX on aarch64 [1], or I find a 12 second hang in Darktable [2]. The problem is that, as a software engineer working in a totally different discipline, I have no knowledge of the low level C code to fully understand what the problem even is, or how to fix it. All I want to do is to fix the issue and help other people avoid running into the same issue. Right now, on my machine, I maintain a set of custom patches to get everything working. But I am too dumb and ignorant to figure out how to create the fix by hand, so I can't submit a pull request (or when I do, I feel really bad about it. I honestly feel like a horrible person, e.g. when a project added a "No AI" policy soon after I submitted some AI-generated PRs [3]). Going forward, I feel like this sort of scenario is going to be way more common.
[1] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/issues/5512
[2] https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/21069
[3] https://github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/commit/8c85096f98084ca9438b16...
I maintain the hope that those technically minded who are really interested in coding and care about doing things properly using their own reasoning on all levels of detail will find each other and maybe become less diluted as a community by the coding-just-for-money crowd than in the past decade or two.
I wouldn’t pretend to have an answer. of course. Opens Source means, always meant, different things to different people.
I know what always counted for me:
1. Copyleft License
2. No CLA or Copyright assignment
3. Diverse group of contributors
I sympathize with Miguels point but it bothers me it clashes with point 3 in my list. If you hand select your contributors[1] you will never reach the diversity necessary to effectively make relicensing impossible. Without that Open Source matters less to me.
[1] I admit that controlled set of known contributors has other advantages too.
Let those agents bankrupt their owners in a loop of neverending improvements and changes.
I can understand wanting to minimize your interaction with LLMs, so this might not be an attractive solution. But it seems like a worthwhile feature to have on the platform level for people who would like to continue to accept pull requests without the frustration.
Well, no. A centaur is a normal person with stronger-than-human legs. That is, it's an augmented person who drives the powerful machinery underneath. Think of a person driving a car.
A reverse centaur is the opposite, namely, a machine making the choices and a frail human following them. In this context, a reverse centaur is an AI spitting thousands of LOC for a human to find the good ones.
Well also more numerous than human legs... And the whole two torsos thing
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c8/Te...
a copy of the repo.
Are there concrete patterns that somebody could write a linter to auto evaluate for this?
On the other hand, there are also people who start coding with AI, and those people will love a large part of code that isn't pretty but works.
Some will say that messy code will ruin software in the long run, while others will think otherwise. This reminds me of Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap. This means that for any type of thing, there are quality items and inferior ones, and quality items make up about 10%. The 10% of code created by AI will be valuable, and only 10% of human-written code was valuable. AI has just increased the amount of crap.
Whenever I think about these issues, I always think of Undertale. Undertale's code is overwhelmingly messy, yet it's a masterpiece often cited as one of the best games. I love it too. But Leaked Undertale code (its quality) is terribl
Ultimately, it seems that AI's usefulness and harmfulness are determined by the purpose for which it is used.
If someone enjoys code quality, long-term perspective, and intellectual exchange and interaction with people from these kinds of discussions, they will be hostile toward AI.
On the other hand, someone like me, who is in a community that has a hostile attitude toward on-time delivery for clients and learning (based on mockery and disregard), will be receptive to AI.
Honestly, I am a direct beneficiary of AI. I'm on the side of consuming the results managed by open-source maintainers, so I can't fully understand their position. I just think, 'That must be incredibly hard for them.'
In my case, AI writes English functions and documentation, and by using AI to refactor English function/variable names that were previously hard to use, I can now write code that's easier to read.
But since my role mainly involves assembling things using IoC on top of frameworks, I see more advantages. The downside is that my coding skill declines, I suppose. I'm a traveling contract programmer who often goes on-site to work with legacy codebases and add features to them.
Actually, my workflow hasn't changed much. It's just that the legacy codebase has become an AI-generated codebase. My workflow of debugging and tracing the flow there hasn't changed, so I'm probably in the beneficiary camp.
Conversely, people like the OP have seen a massive change in the number of PRs they need to handle, so it's understandable. The intellectual exchange with people they've always had, and the values that come from that, have been damaged.
This is a really difficult problem.
I think it does but there are weird dynamics I don’t fully understand. I’m curious about HNs thoughts.
My theories: Centralization around key projects due to AI pointing new users towards them. (At the same time this drives up the PR deluge onto these projects. Especially from newer users already heavily using llms.)
So many low effort AI-generated open source libraries that it becomes harder to tell signal from slop. More movement to the bigger projects because they are perceived as safer bets.
Sucks, because open source was a really wonderful thing for many years but we should not continue to create fuel for the theft machines
I have a Jira queue. It drives what work I do. I may have some leeway in how I do the work, and what tickets I pull, but Im absolutely at the behest of the ticketing behemoth.
Tickets have been my life since I started helpdesk. And future roles will also be ticketed. And they almost all are customer-facing or system-breakage (which impacts lots of customers).
Im not sure what IT roles im capable of doing wouldnt have tickets. So, yeah. Reverse centaur.. But not an AI driven reverse centaur, yet.
I think there are so many hard questions right now for "Does open source even matter any more?" and many of those questions seem particularly demotivating to me right now, especially because we don't seem to be at risk of getting some, much less better, answers any time soon.
I learned Flask from Grinberg, god bless the man.
My lawn == I'm not wasting any of my dwindling old man time on bullshit people vomit out. You want to do that, you fork and leave me out.
At the same time, OP is in the right to reject contributions they don’t want. Nobody providing open-source software is under any obligations to take changes. Forking is still a viable option in 2026. And I don’t think we need an on-demand app store either because the trust issues will still exist for good reason. We can have highly produced software coexisting with LLM agents.
The crux is here somewhere.
A massive group of people (A), don't fully understand or care about code, but they care about arbitrary specific outcomes that serve their needs and desires VS a tiny group of people (B), who initiate, architect and maintain successful projects, who care deeply about the health and cohesion of the codebase over it's lifetime, because that serves everyone.
Group-A is now liberated for better and worse. For the first time they can force their will upon a codebase without understanding. They are making selfish changes, and that's fine, this is hacking for the masses. The problem is they still don't realise these are selfish changes, because they have not been forced to tread the path of the programmer to understand they are selfish changes.
The response from FOSS maintainers seems inevitable from this perspective... But I think what's going to be more interesting is watching how Group-A over time respond to creating their own personal hell.
As group-A accrete more and more unsupervised selfish changes into their forks - at what point will they implode and turn into LLM-token-tarpits, at what point will Group-A notice, and I wonder what their response will be.
In a pre-LLM world, a classic software team would have PMs, designers, and engineers.
Of those three, the PM wouldn't have any real role in writing code. And they would rarely contribute a ton to the design. What they would be contributing is ideas, market insights, coordination, prioritization, etc.
When the product ships, one would expect the PM to feel a real sense of accomplishment. They helped this idea become a _real thing_! All of that pride, despite not writing a single line of code nor polishing any pixels themselves. And I don't think anybody would reasonably look down on them for that feeling.
Same thing with using LLMs. Sure, you didn't write the code. But you caused the thing to exist! That's exciting!
Given that any coding effort relies heavily on a much greater amount of work as a prior than the code you yourself are writing... Why do you feel accomplishment?
Making things is fun, using tools to make things can continue to be fun. I have fun woodworking with hand tools and I also enjoy using my CNC where the job permits. Both bring joy.
2. The world has changed in such a way that X now exists
3. You took even a tiny action towards #2
Even if the main goal was #2, Is it really hard to see how there might not be some sense of accomplishment? Many investors take pride in the impact the companies they invested in have on the real world; this is the same thing in the small.
What matters is that they are wasting the time & patience of someone who is doing good work that others benefit from.
Any happiness gained from doing that to someone is parasitic.
I've always said that by only writing ASM can you get any sense of accomplishment from authoring software.
I have a good friend who is a VP at a telecom company who has never written a line of code. He's been using Claude to create interactive web pages to help him understand parts of the company.
He was so excited when he got something to work he called me immediately.
I'm sure the code isn't what you or I would write, but it is good enough for my friend. That said, heaven help him if he loses access to Claude. ;-)
As another commenter said, for a ton of people this is the first taste of the computer working for them and being able to dream something up then have it exist. This is very cool!
That in no way invalidates the concern of amateur slop going to maintainers! I think the problem here is we as society haven't caught up to this new idea of personal software vs community (architected, maintained) software. We're so early in this space we haven't even figured out the good ways to do such a split - even the totally new to software folks are bleeding edge early adopters.
Someone having pride doesn’t mean what they did has value
But, since I'm not that much of a slot machine aficionado, I just completely stopped pulling the lever.
However, I can see that for the right people, this level of difficulty might encode or mimic, purposely or not, many of the features that are collectively termed "gamification."
Everyone building a software will just mean people can produce code which others might not really care for and might even be particularly be mean. That’s how the Internet works unfortunately.
The current logic seem to be confusing two things. One AI as a technology and wisdom of the crowd using AI. One might ground breaking tech and improve over time while the other might not move the needle at all.
A user would have to be someone who doesn’t have access to an LLM to make bespoke software themselves, and isn’t able to use existing software. I think that’s a vanishingly small segment of people.
You absolutely don't need LLMs for that.
Its the very description of most corporate JavaScript developers, and probably most Java developers. I say that as somebody who wrote corporate JavaScript full time from 2008-2023. Most of these people had no idea what they are doing. They could throw something together using their favorite abstraction library/framework but then struggled to maintain it. If there were performance or accessibility problems that came up there were only three outputs: hostility, crying, or starting over from scratch. The insecurity was real. You can still see it today. As an experiment take React away and note the response.
You mean some modern version of vb or php?
That is the entire point of low-code and no-code.
As an example, the android options for printing to my outdated brother printer were all terrible (ad supported nokoprint for example), so I used my template to create https://print.walden-gabrielw.workers.dev/ (This one a put a cloudflare worker in front of because it's just a static html+js page and I didn't want to pay for uncached traffic but the principal is basically the same). No one will likely ever use this but me and my wife, but the cost to keep it up is basically 0, the cost to build it was very reasonable, and if it ever breaks I'm fairly confident the latest LLM will be able to debug it without too much trouble.
There's a billion ways of opening a markdown and doing things with it and generally they all coexist hapily
I think no answers are needed.
If anyone can build the software they need, no ecosystem will be needed. There will be no maintainers because no one will be using his thing.
If it makes sense (economical, but no limited to it), then it will progress in that direction. If it makes no sense it is a fad that eventually dies out.
There may or may not be a baby in the bathwater. In truth nothing in this bathtub matter too much.
It was already very fuzzy (Excel?). Soon, this line be non-existent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License
It'd also be really nice that if you received some such software that you'd have the right to run the program as you wish, study how the program works and change it to make it do what you wish, and the freedom to redistribute either the original, or your modifications to the software?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...
...we can dream though, can't we?
There was nothing stopping them from making software before... Over the past ~15 years, the amount of resources to learn programming, and to make the whole process approachable, is staggering. It just took some time and effort. People are just excited that they can skip past the effort part now. But we've lost something in the process.
Our CEO just took a design mock-up of a new landing page and threw it into Fable, and it spit out an objectively better iteration of the component's design. The hierarchy made more sense, the typography was more polished, and it naturally incorporated some elements we hadn't added yet.
We won't implement everything it changed of course, but it's the first time I've seen a model take a decent draft of a webpage mockup and improve it in a way that feels like a more evolved version of the original instead of just LLM-ifying it.
maintainers like the sense of power and it's not really more complicated than that. perfectly valid emotion to chase!
What? Pride of what? What accomplishment?
The sense of accomplishment does not necessarily require much accomplishment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
and
It's like people being proud of the AI slop art they produce
I don’t want software written by plebs.
You can make art with a literally piece of shit, or a toilet if you want to be more traditional, at least in 1917.
You can't be a craftsperson without mastery of your domain and its tool.
You can be a artist without craftsmanship and vice versa.
You can also be popular without any or both of these.
There is a lot to entangle there but the point is that it depends on your goal. You can judge others based on your own value system but there goals might not be yours.
Orders of magnitude more people can now make an absolutely "Hollywood quality" movie, precisely due to their nice modern iPhone cameras.
The only question now is, how do we make it so more people can see the good ones?
If you want to stick with the PM analogy, it would be akin to the manager spending 30 minutes writing up a draft spec, passing it off to their employees and then spending the rest of their time watching TikTok in their office. It would be strange if they felt pride in that.
If you can vibecode your app, you can vibecode your cryptography as well.
You may object to it but that, too, would be elitism. And the person vibecoding has no idea why proper cryptography matters anyway. Or why proper anything matters.
This is the ultimate realization of "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge".
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
But don't share that shit with others and expect them to feel similarly proud of what you did.
edit: if anyone wants to enlighten me, why do you care if someone is proud of something? does it hurt you somehow?
If you order a pizza from an app, and assume you can pick ingredients from a checklist, would you consider it "making" a pizza? Would people get the feeling of accomplishment?
By pushing that PR, i might be annoying a grouchy maintainer, but at the same time helping tens or hundreds of other users of the software.
Imho the beauty of open source is as long as you're adhering to the licenses, you can do whatever the heck you want =)
The very concept of "reverse centaur" implies a balance towards the "order pizza online" side of the equation.
If you only want to speak German for its own sake, then maybe it does seem silly to be proud of what the brain computer did for you.
But there are many other reasons to want to be able to speak German. Thanks to his brain computer, a French cheese maker could travel to Germany to promote his cheeses in a new market to great success without having to rely on the German speaking skills of expensive to hire people, and without wasting years to learn German on his own when all he wanted to do was to make cheeses and grow his customer base for his cheese. German in and of itself was never a goal to him.
Just like computer programming is not a goal in and of itself to a lot of people, and who would otherwise have to spend time to learn programming instead of doing the thing they want to do, or having to hire software engineers that might cost more than they could ever hope to afford.
And even though the computer is doing something for the person, they are leveraging that for something that they feel pride and accomplishment in. Such as for example to use German (done by the computer) to expand your cheese customer base into Germany (your own accomplishment that was only possible thanks to the existence of the German speaking skills of the computer).
Now I can focus on the reason why I wanted to learn German in the first place, like appreciating German culture or talking to German people.
Note this is not saying "why learn the language at all there's a translator" since learning a language lets you experience the culture more intimately and communicate better -- lots of things are "untranslatable". But if somehow the implant gave you that necessary context, why not?
would i care if someone else is proud in that scenario? also no.
Some of this is the funny situation where the faithful will state: "This writes better code than I do!" and miss the irony of: "yes, yes it does"
"Blessed are the humble ..."
Prompting an LLM neither requires comparative effort nor is comparatively challenging, thus it's would be odd to feel a sense of pride from any associated outcomes.
I cannot believe this even requires an explanation.
Prompting an LLM to produce good code isn't a lot of work for you. Writing hex without an assembler or compiler would be a lot of work for you.
People have ideas, and now they have better tools to turn those ideas into reality. They aren't doing it like you would do it, but they're getting it done all the same, getting their needs met, and enjoying the ride.
Maybe just let people have fun, and when they report that they are in fact having fun... believe them.
The difference between the skill & effort required to build vs prompt your way to something is orders of magnitude different. If it took just as much effort, people would just do it by hand anyways.
Similar is true for a lot of software. Credit list on video games… I don't want to say it "mostly" isn't coders, but only because I've not done an exhaustive study. My guess is the top will either be QA or art.
Those professionals are professionals not because they own an iPhone and use it to shoot something.
But on that- whether folks have knowledge and taste, demonstrate responsibility for their impact, pay attention to their work quality, show up to the work environment with respect, etc. are all elements at the domain of human relations. This discussion is conflating how people use tools with how people work with each other. The tools don't matter here. I think we're sayin' the same thing.
No. Just the fact that they have a tool does not automatically make them a professional, doesn't automatically make them skillful, and doesn't automatically make their output worth something.
This is the meaning of "When they shoot a little artistic clip with their nice modern iPhone camera, it does not mean they get to insert it into a Hollywood movie."
There's nothing elitist about it.
I’ve had so many perfectly acceptable PRs rejected over the years simply because they didn’t “fit the vision” of the maintainer, despite being +1’d by many members of the community or even other contributors. I don’t even mean to imply they were rude or anything, just uninterested in actually merging anything where they didn’t architect the changes themselves upfront.
On one hand I get it, you’ve spent so much time building something it’s fair to want to hold on tightly to that level of control, but to me it's just always felt antithetical to the entire idea of open source.
Makes me feel like I’m not contributing to a true open source project, just doing free labor for someone.
I certainly understand things are different nowadays, I’m talking pre-LLM proliferation.
Do you think that maintainers lack domain expertise? A nice bug report is way more helpful than a random pull request. A patch, even when correct, can be counterproductive, if it conflicts with the roadmap and goal of the project.
The goal of open source is to give you freedom in maintaining your own version and extending it. Collaboration is not a requirement.
