PS5 Linux lead quits as open-source projects have become “a bunch of noobs using LLMs” that “they don’t even understand”

[u/Wargulf]

https://frvr.com/blog/news/ps5-linux-lead-quits-as-open-source-projects-have-become-a-bunch-of-noobs-using-llms-that-they-dont-even-understand/

[u/T3-Trinity]

I'm fairly new to coding. The more I learn (I do use AI to explain concepts and learn what I messed up) the more I realize how inefficient it can be.

[u/Heavy-Flow-2019 → u/T3-Trinity]

Its more on you being new to coding than AI being bad. AI can be very good at it, anyone claiming otherwise is in denial right now. Emphasis on can though. You need to know exactly what you want it to do, how you want it do get there, and what you dont want it to do.

You, being new, wouldnt have that ability to guide it so well. You wont be able to design the product as well, to prompt it as effectively. Simply asking for a end product wont work, but having worked somewhere with both absolute amateurs using AI, and actually competent seniors treating it as another tool rather than a genie, I can safely say you will be able to get a good product once you get some experience.

Which you are on the way towards, with learning the concepts and mistakes made.

[u/UseWhatever → u/T3-Trinity]

There’s nothing wrong with using LLMs to learn. The fact that you actually ask it to explain things already puts you ahead of vibe coders

[u/Kurrizma → u/T3-Trinity]

I’ll preface this by saying I’ve never used Claude Code or any of the paid versions, but with the free versions, for anything more than simple scripts I’ve had basically no luck using LLMs for coding. It’s more time efficient for me to actually learn the modules I’m trying to use and write it myself than it is for me to fight with ChatGPT to get the code they wrote to work properly.

[u/PrettyBaker2891 → u/Kurrizma]

I’ll preface this by saying I’ve never used Claude Code or any of the paid versions

i mean yeah thats why you had no luck using LLMs for coding lmao

paid versions are 1000x better than the free ones in the chat. its literally a night and day difference

like the other guy said. claude code/codex is a life changer

[u/GregBahm → u/PrettyBaker2891]

This does make all conversations about AI code on reddit quite tedious.

Where I work (a normal tech company), we used to have unlimited tokens. Now each employee's token usage is capped at $500,000 a year. So my daily life as a programmer is very significantly altered. Astra makes tasks that used to take years, take days.

But the conversation about AI on reddit is dominated by people who chat using some free tier and develop their opinion off of that. It's like trying to discuss the experience of home ownership with guys who have only ever lived on their friend's apartment's couch.

[u/PrettyBaker2891 → u/GregBahm]

exactly, you put it perfectly

and damn im jealous of that token budget lmao i "only" get 5000$ per month

can i ask where you work?

[u/GregBahm → u/PrettyBaker2891]

I think my linkedin shows up if you google my name. But my employer Microsoft is kind of at the low-end of the dial here, because Apple/Google/Meta/Amazon/OpenAI/Anthropic all pay their engineers more.

I assume the $500,000 limit is temporary, and they'll raise it back up later. The average cost basis of an employee is $500k, so the cost basis of my team of 8 is many millions of dollars. But we can do soooo much more with new models like Astra then I could historically have done with just 8 normal employees. And tech doesn't operate on margin: their appetite for production is infinite. So this seems to purely be a logistics hurdle that will go away once they finish building those new data centers Reddit is so mad about.

[u/aphrodite-in-flux → u/GregBahm]

It feels like a lot of willful blindness. The world is changing and code is becoming cheap, and that scares dudes who base their whole feeling of superiority on writing it by hand (read: using boilerplate and copying old assholes on SO)

[u/Mistuv → u/Kurrizma]

The gulf between free vs paid is bigger than dial up vs fiber, as someone who has experienced both. But I am glad for existence of people like you, at least this way I am still within reach of being able to afford the PC component if one breaks.

[u/Waffles912 → u/Kurrizma]

The difference between paid and free models isn't just capability, it's also quantization. Lower quants take up less memory and are inherently less accurate. In something like coding that can make a big difference. In short they're hardly even comparable. For basic scripts and shit the free Ai included in Google search is generally good enough so long as you can actually understand the code it's writing, and guide it when it forgets things, but with paid models you can one shot an entire indie game with one prompt and zero intervention (no it will not be great and will obviously have bugs, but it WILL launch and be playable, graphics effects, sound, movement, projectiles, physics, etc). They really aren't even comparable. The last like 3 months if you haven't been tuned into Ai news has been insane.

No you shouldn't trust the Ai, yes it screws up, no it's not perfect. But I can tell an agent to hunt down a bug I've had in some obscure package on my local Ai virtual environment, and it can find it in 1 minute that there's a conflict between 3 python packages that are 1000+ lines long and it's like 2 lines that need a variable adjusted for my specific hardware. I spent hours hunting that because I didn't want to give a frontier model access to my hardware, before I said fuck it, and it was fixed in a couple of minutes with a full explanation and chain of reasoning. 

They have their uses for sure. 

[u/jjwax → u/Kurrizma]

It is definitely capable of writing good code - but it also relies heavily on the quality of the prompt/harness/user driving.

You should try Claude code/codex - just to see what it’s capable of - it’s so much more than the web based chatgpt

[u/LeadIVTriNitride → u/Kurrizma]

I tried to use Claude to add a second drive to my fstab config, after KDE’s gui didn’t automount on reboot. it couldn’t even do that correctly. Ended up figuring it out myself after wasting more time trying to use an AI to put the pieces together

[u/Fantastic-Sea9696 → u/T3-Trinity]

That’s cuz ur still a beginner, and I encourage you to learn coding. But once you really figure it out and master it, you will realize that AI is genuinely insane at programming, especially the advanced modern models.