I don't get it.

(I'm not trying to throw shades at the author. I know they have no obligation to maintain an open source project. I'm simply having a hard time gasping what's happening.)

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epolanski 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Seems like the author is abandoning software because in his opinion due to AI explosion employers don't care anymore about code quality and only quality.

I don't get it either, because that has always been the case, thus most of his post is borderline non sense.

Imo, what happened is that he took the opportunity of him entering academia to vent some stuff and quit maintaining his project.

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shiomiru 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I don't get it either, because that has always been the case, thus most of his post is borderline non sense.

Yes, making software development cheaper has been the main priority of the industry for a long time. The new development is that there's now a magic "do what I want" button that obviously won't quite do what you want but it's so cheap (for corporations, not humanity...) that you might as well pretend it does. (Compared to paying professionals who might even care about doing a good job, that is.)

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tracker1 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I've been a web application developer for nearly 30 years now. I care about the craft and discipline immensely. Then you pull up something like the Jack-In-The-Box menu site and fully realize that managers/executives don't give a damn if the stuff works well... 48MB of built JS?!? My daughter expressed how badly the site was working on her phone, and I got curious.

What's funny, is some will say, "use the app" instead for things like this... why should I trust someone to build a safe/secure app, who cannot build a reasonably functional website?

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ranger_danger 4 days ago | parent [-]

To be fair, the app may be developed by a completely different team.

If your argument is still that you don't want to trust a company that can't make both functional, well... maybe you shouldn't be going to Jack-In-The-Box in the first place.

	▲	tracker1 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My point is that I'm not going to give app-level access to my phone to a company that doesn't care enough to have a functional website. That said, I'm unlikely to install an app for anything on my device. I don't actually install that many apps, and generally not retail apps anyway.
	▲	GoblinSlayer 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I looked inside an average proprietary authenticator mobile app with 2 button interface and can confirm it's dumpster fire with 26mb of compiled code.

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int_19h 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The irony is that it is precisely because we all, collectively as software engineers, allowed the bar to be that low for so long, that AI coding is viable at all right now.

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worldsavior 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He doesn't have interest in the project anymore. He didn't have a long time, and now that he stopped with software development and gone into the academia- he certainly doesn't have interest. Is that hard to get?

He explained the reasons he went into the academia, which is because of the AI, and AI is not the reason he stopped with development.

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insane_dreamer 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It hasn't always been the case to the degree that it now is, or with the "tools" to enable it.

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sunshine-o 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe you need to separate two things:

- The author enjoyed writing quality open source code

- The author needs to make strategic decisions for his own career and livelihood and he doesn't have enough bandwidth for both

I don't feel he is happy about the decision he needs to make and he is pointing to something dark happening to software development and open source.

Now this is not new, and didn't start with LLM. I am sure if we ask the OpenBSD devs what they think about the modern mainstream open source ecosystem, docker, full stack development, etc. they see it like we might look at LLM generated code. This is just a question how much of a purist you are.

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karteum 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I was thinking exactly the same : I also don't get it (even though I totally get that someone may lose motivation to work on a project, and certainly has no obligation to continue. But this justification sounds a bit weird to me).

Could this mean that he has been approached by some "men in black" asking to insert some backdoor in the code or to stop working on it, together with a gag order ? (actually I also wondered the same a long time ago with Truecrypt, even though to my knowledge no backdoor has ever been found in further audits...)

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000ooo000 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Did you not read the comment he wrote? It's straightforward