Yeah screw this. When this change goes live, I'm gonna stop contributing to Reddit at all. I already refuse to login on mobile, and if I can't even access the site there, there's no reason to help them on desktop either.
I genuinely hope an alternative becomes popular soon, ideally a federated or decentralised one that doesn't have any of these risks associated with it.
Feels like the obvious reason is that you don't have the mental map usually created by figuring out and writing the code yourself. So, not only is it annoying to debug AI generated code, but you're left trusting that the system didn't sneak something in that you don't know about.
You can definitely help limit this issue by having clear instructions for how the AI should work, but there's just a feeling you're telling someone else what to write, while being left on the hook for it if anything goes wrong.
That and a lot of developers like programming, and vastly prefer to it to the alternative process of "acting like a virtual manager".
Not a fan of it requiring a certain number of members/level of activity/server status. My experience is that many of the communities hit hardest by Discord's login requirements aren't all that large, like speedrun communities for niche games, modding and ROM hacking communities for certain games, etc.
I feel like it should be opt in/out regardless of the size of the server and amount of activity it has.
This is tied to the "community server" feature, which was always a way to force some rules they couldn't change for existing servers, so you have to accept them before you can enable fatures like this.
I think one look at video games throughout history should probably shoot down the idea that software is uniquely bad nowadays compared to how it was in the past. The Atari era had enough poorly made games that the industry basically crashed in North America, and its revival in the 8-bit era didn't really change as much as expected. The fact the internet is full of YouTube reviewers akin to the Angry Video Game Nerd should be evidence that incredibly bad, often blatantly non functional software was a common occurrence throughout history.
There were games released in a pre-alpha state (Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing), games that were basically released in a normal alpha state (Superman 64, Action52, etc) and there were games which literally didn't work because of major programming issues (SQIJ! had a player character which couldn't move due to the game only looking for lower case inputs while leaving the caps lock on).
And that's only the most extreme examples. Plenty of games had broken features and mechanics, or were outright impossible to complete due to poor level design and a lack of proper testing. Fan games, mods, ROM hacks and indie game scenes from the earlier days were just as notorious for works that were barely functional.
Generally games are at least now functional nowadays, with even the worst tending not to outright crash to a black screen or leave you with a player character that's completely unable to move. In many ways, the baseline level of competence arguably seems to be getting higher, with the march of AI meaning the worst is probably better than it might have been previously been.
Outside of games, it's worth noting how deeply insecure and flawed many older websites and programs were. There was a time where storing passwords in plain text was more of a norm, where input validation and sanitisation was often forgotten about, and where sites getting hacked was just as common an occurrence as today. Many Perl devs probably recoil in horror after hearing the term "Matt's Script Archive".
Are some things worse? Sure, performance seems to have become increasingly ignored in recent years, with web page sizes getting incredibly bloated and latency going through the roof. In some places there's more bad software overall, since the ability to vibe code it means non-programmers are building software more than ever. And some big companies that used to be respectable have let standards slip a lot (see Epic Games, Microsoft, etc).
Sturgeon's Law/Revelation held back then, and still holds today: 90% of everything is crap.
Nice! Digital Ocean was definitely not a great owner for the site, and it clearly wasn't treated as much of a priority under their ownership. Hopefully Geoff will give it the attention it deserves, especially given he's already the most active contributor there.
I mean it's not like it's a different group of people now. Out of the development team for the original game, only one person definitely doesn't work at Nintendo anymore (Hiroshi Yamauchi, Nintendo CEO that retired in 2002 and died in 2013), and possibly I. Marui (who doesn't have much info online in general). And Eiji Aonuma has been producer since Ocarina of Time in 1998.
So, while it's questionable how much involvement some of the team may have had with this timeline, it's entirely feasible they could have gotten input from the same people that wrote the games from the very beginning.
I have to question if things are less creative, or whether we're just getting more 'uncreative' projects released on a regular basis. There's a flood of software being released now that AI models have become 'good' enough to build basic stuff without any prior technical knowledge, and since most software is being built by folks looking for a quick buck, it's probably not going to be all that original.
Original software is still being made, it's just buried under a flood of AI generated slop.
The average person or company's idea for a piece of software is an unoriginal spin on a likely already overdone concept.
Add this to the more technically original projects perhaps not being posted on Hacker News as often (many folks here would say the site's experienced its Eternal September moment, and a fair few of them have almost stopped using it altogether), and well, you're just seeing what moderately technical people are making with the tools of the moment.
Wouldn't you still be able to learn from the resources you created with LLMs? I've not found it that difficult to figure out how an LLM coded a program or website when requested, or to manually make changes based on its output.
If I use an LLM to create something in a programming language I'm not an expert in, I still have a reference point for later use. And that reference should drastically speed up the process of learning how to use said language myself later.
you can "learn", but it is the same and when you start to learn coding, or do homework, you read the solution and "aaah, I get it", but next time you still won't be able to do it unless you've done without reading the answer before.
reading code is not the same as writing code, the second one is much harder.
I mean this is true of most communities really. People dislike blatant self promotion, no matter the medium. If you're not already a valuable contributor to a community, advertising your work there will get you seen as deeply suspicious at best.
It's just that most marketers seem to be incredibly short sighted, and wrongly assume that doing nothing but marketing their own product/service is somehow the way forward.
Also any forum or subreddit dedicated to self promotion isn't really worth bothering with. Your audience won't be there, just other marketers trying to promote their own stuff.
I genuinely hope an alternative becomes popular soon, ideally a federated or decentralised one that doesn't have any of these risks associated with it.
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