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> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

There are two separate things here that are getting silently conflated.

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before

This could be good on an individual level, if say, a doctor wants to vibe code an app of some sort for his individual practice.

>to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

This is where it goes off the rails. If they couldn't meaningfully contribute before, they aren't going to suddenly be able to discern that whatever slop they want to contribute is of value to the community. That's just another way of saying, if I wanted an AI opinion on something, why wouldn't I get it directly from the source, and write the prompt myself, instead of have some intermediate human prompt the AI for me?

by noahgolmant14 hours ago|

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The human has unique context. They may work in a niche domain or they talked to people and observed an unsolved problem. Then they express a potential solution via OSS. It's like product sense. Then they share that with others who find it interesting. The code is a great way to encapsulate the idea. It is usually the result of research and back and forth not a single prompt. It would be way harder to think through or build a solution without AI even if they had context.

by fragmede11 hours ago|

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Because of the convenience. Why should I have to go and spend my time prompting an AI, if someone else has already done that for me. Same thing with food. I know how to cook a chicken risotto, but sometimes I like having someone else do it for me.

by Jblx27 hours ago|

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This is some unknown stranger offering partially cooked ingredients to you because they want you to finish off preparing the meal they want to eat.

by smcg15 hours ago|

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Who is going to verify that an AI-driven project is a unique idea? How do you distinguish between a genuinely unique project, a grifter who is shilling their "unique" project, and a new enthusiast who is convinced their project is unique, but is not? This is an impossible moderation task. The only options I see for a community are to either totally ban AI-generated content, or be totally consumed by it.

by noahgolmant14 hours ago|

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I don't really know. Certainly we need a higher bar. The Kafka example in the post may be hyperbolic but I agree it pollutes the space. But we also can't swing the other way and rely completely on out of date proxies. If you ban AI code there will be very little code to see in a year. It'll take time but we'll arrive at new norms. We built semi successful ways to filter content farms in the earlier internet days. The signal has to shift to "did they think hard about this problem" which has some observable properties. Like how they articulate the problem, or why it became important to them.

by intended4 hours ago|

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Just because we get new norms, doesn’t mean the new norms are good.

Feudalism had norms.

AI is ending an era of large public communities which will likely never come again.