Cool, but I fail to see how it is relevant in the context of the article? You clearly have the knowledge, expertise and discipline to incorporate LLM in a workflow that, taking your word for it, delivers a very good result.

That makes you a) more unique than you realize b) not all that relevant in the context of the article.

a) Because a lot of people tend to lean towards use that absolutely leads to atrophying of skills and knowledge. b) well the article does explain the criteria it used fairly well and your project would not show up there. Well, also because your project isn't an android app.

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lrvick 4 days ago | parent [-]

An appliance Linux distribution without dependencies is way more complex than a typical android app and there is little prior art to train on.

Android apps on the other hand, LLMs have enough training data to rapidly generate whatever you can think of with much less time required for an experienced engineer to refine it into a quality result.

I am mostly pushing back on the notion of dismissing software as low quality just because the author used LLMs.

It is frankly amazing we can point an LLM at a proprietary ad-ridden app and get to an ad-free open source and privacy respecting clone in a weekend now.

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creesch 4 days ago | parent [-]

> I am mostly pushing back on the notion of dismissing software as low quality just because the author used LLMs.

Its not that hard to imagine that apps made with heavily LLM involvement suffer in quality. The article already goes into it a bit. I get the strong feeling that you are failing to approach this from anything else than your own perspective and how you use LLMs. Which, given the setup you are describing is already far from the norm.

Zooming out a bit further I think we can generally break up LLM usage in roughly two distinct ways of using LLMs. Or maybe more accurately there are two sides of a spectrum with a lot of area in between them:

1. Let LLMs do the majority of the heavy lifting and generate the output. Providing an LLM with some basic info, what you are looking for and let the LLM do most of the work for you. 2. Using LLMs as a tool external to the process where you are still doing most of the work.

The first way of using LLMs using agentic workflows, code harnesses, etc *can* produce good quality. As long as there is still a human in the mix who a) has the prerequisite knowledge to validate what the LLMs have generated b) takes their due diligence at key points in the process to actually make sure input is of high enough quality and validates the output.

You have decades of knowledge and experience you are now applying to rigidly structure how these LLMs work. Which, yes again, I believe gives you personally pretty good results, no doubt about that. But, many people do not have that experience to begin with. And even for those that do, using the first method comes with a risk that boils down to simple psychology, our minds are wired to take the easy approach wherever they can. Which turns the first way of using LLMS from a efficient way of using them to a lazy way of using them.

In my personal experience a lot of people who start using LLMs sort of drift to the lazy approach very easily. Because it is very convenient and easy to slowly hand over more thinking to an LLM. The latter I have seen happen all too often around me. An alarming increase of lazy non critical use of LLM tools by people who should know better. People who might have been a bit slower before but delivered excellent results now have started delivering trash. Code spanning dozens of line trying to solve something that should only take one line. Code that completely ignores and conventions or design paradigms put in place. Code that goes directly against security practices. Suddenly downgraded dependency versions (because the models training data doesn't include the latest version).

As I said, I see this as a spectrum and the more someone leans towards the first use case combined with "lazy usage" the more signs there will be in a repository that this is the case. The amount of commits, the release cadence and various other things. Which, again, the article also makes a case for and is again why your repository is irrelevant to the whole discussion. Why? Because your repository doesn't show these signs.

	▲	lrvick 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Fair and nuanced. Nothing I disagree with here. I think I mostly just dislike the default hate and assumptions on everyone that uses LLMs, including often me. Some of us are using these tools thoughtfully. LLMs help experienced engineers write quality code faster and it helps amateurs write shit code faster. Problem is there are simply way more of the latter. Even so I detest engineering being judged by the tools used, instead of the work itself being judged on its own merits because there are exceptions to every rule. I would like to teach people to use these tools responsibly, instead of sending a message that use of these tools is automatically thoughtless slop. Like, most people I know that use Vim write much higher quality code on average than the people that use VSCode as tool preferences often reflect experience, but not always! It would still be unfair to write off someone's code sight unseen because they used VSCode as there are always exceptions to the rule.
	▲	williamse 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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