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I Have a Confession: I Built This Site with AI – Please Forgive Me

43 points · 48 comments · joelberger

  1. jamwise · · focus · HN ↗
    I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.

    This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.

    1. DarmokJalad1701 · · focus · HN ↗
      > mostly offered their work for free

      And that means nobody can make money off of their derivative work? If I open source my work, that means it is open source (by definition). It is a gift[1] - to everyone. If someone uses it to create value, good for them!

      [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WTFPL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;WTFPL

      1. frizlab · · focus · HN ↗
        I have done a few open-source projects (none of those took off, but that’s OK). I did them because I wanted to give to the people, not greedy corporations. It was an implicit contract with the world, which has been broken by AI. You can say “but it was never written!” Maybe. It still hurts. (And it is also not really true: for example MIT requires attribution, which I’m still waiting to see in all of the AI-generated&#x2F;AI-helped projects…)

        It was also a joy to write things and know certain like-minded people would like it. Now I don’t really want to do that anymore.

        1. DarmokJalad1701 · · focus · HN ↗
          &gt; to the people

          And corporations are made up of people. People who decide to organize to form a legal entity so that they can operate as a business. Some people may choose to run it as a solo proprietorship - others want to raise money and form groups so they can do bigger things. They are still people.

          I feel amazing that code that I wrote contributed to development of this amazing technology. &quot;Greedy corporations&quot;? I can download Qwen 3.8 27B today for free and run it myself and not pay for anything but electricity. I get the same performance that I would have had to pay $20-$100&#x2F;mo. ~6 months ago (which frankly, was pretty cheap for what it got me).

          The &quot;greedy corporations&quot; btw, also spent billions and did a lot more than just dump the code into a gradient descent algo (RLVR and more) to get the models to the place they are at today. Simply dumping GitHub into a transformer neural net would not give you a coding model even close to what exists today - open or proprietary. For $20&#x2F;mo., I can now explore subjects that I wouldn&#x27;t have even considered looking at before. For me, personally, that is a good tradeoff.

          1. frizlab · · focus · HN ↗
            And yet, none of that invalidates what I said.
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