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Comment by dncornholio | Hacker News Reader

Don't think it's fair to think any negative comment is from some anti-LLM-axe. I seriously gave you the benefit of the doubt, that was the whole reason I even looked further into your work.

It's no shame to be critical in todays world. Delivering proof is something that holds extra value and if I would create an article about the wonderful things I've created, I'd be extra sure to show it.

I looked at your clock project and when I saw that your updated version and improved version of your clock contained AI artifacts, I concluded that there's no proof of your work.

Sorry to have made that conclusion and I'm sorry if that hurt your feelings.

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Saying things like "there's no proof of your work" is the anti-LLM axe. Yes, it's all written by LLMs, and yes, it's all my work. Judge it on what it does and how well it works, not on whether the code looks like the code you would have written.

Is it your work? What did you bring to the table? Because if we're going to analyze design, then code is one function of that design.

For example, you talk about how the code is secure. How do you prove that it is secure?

The same way you prove your OSS code is secure.

People here see an LLM-assisted project and suddenly they've never written a bug in their life.

I cannot empirically prove that my OS is secure, because I haven't written it. I trust that the maintainers of my OS have done their due diligence in ensuring it is secure, because they take ownership over their work.

But when I write software, critical software that sits on a customer's device, I take ownership over the areas of code that I've written, because I can know what I've written. They may contain bugs or issues that I may need to fix, but at the time I can know that I tried to apply the best practices I was aware of.

So if I ask you the same thing, do you know if your software is secure? What architecture prevents someone from exfiltrating all of the account data from pine town? What best practices are applied here?

I didn't say OS, I said OSS. Open-source software.

Fair mistake on my end, I'm aware of what OSS means but my eyes will have a tendency to skip a letter or two. The same argument applies; because if I write something and release it to the OSS community there's going to be an expectation that A) I know how it works deeply and B) I know if it's reasonably secure when it's dealing with personal data. They can verify this by looking at the code, independently.

But if the code is unreadable and I can't make a valid argument for my software, what's left?

Are you saying you know your code has exactly zero bugs because you wrote it? That's obviously absurd, so what you're really saying is "I'm fairly familiar with all the edge cases and I'm sure that my code has very few issues", which is the same thing I say.

Regardless, though, this argument is a bit like tilting at windmills. Software development has changed, it's never going back, and no matter how many looms you smash, the question now is "how do we make LLM-generated code safer/better/faster/more maintainable", not "how do we put the genie back in the bottle?".

Also I will give myself credit for using three analogies in two sentences.

You're missing the point. I don't care who wrote it, I want to know if it works.

Also, you didn't address my remarks about your clock. Can you can show me a picture of it working in action?

But you didn't say anything about wanting to know how it works, your comment was:

> The article's content doesn't match his apps quality. They don't bring any value. His clock looks completely AI generated.

I don't understand your point about proof. After more than 120 open-source projects, you think I'm lying about the fact that my clock works? All the tens of projects I've written up on my site over decades, you latch on to the one I haven't published yet as some sort of proof that I'm lying? I really don't understand what your point is.

Here: https://immich.home.stavros.io/share/_k403I3s3cON-8oL5yP_QXY...

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