AI and programming.

liquibyte · 2026-08-16 20:50:03

What's everyone's thoughts about this post by golinux? Should AI be allowed to help programmers with research or tricky bits of code or should it strictly be verboten? I find that it's a great research tool but apparently some people are dead set against it.

golinux · 2026-08-16 21:52:39

If you know anything of human history, the pattern is to create new tools/toys which eventually come to bite us badly. That is because humans are fatally flawed in their judgment and motivations. What is needed is a transformation of the human mind from never-ending pursuits of froth and foam that keeps us running in place and repeating the same blunders over and over . . .

IOW . . . we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot!

Perhaps we are what we eat but we definitely become what we think. All the Sci-Fi I read in the 50s is now horrifyingly manifested in our daily life.

We need deep wisdom not a roller coaster of titillation with shiny new s**t to survive the future that is on our doorstep . . .

liquibyte · 2026-08-16 22:37:04

Bro, it's a tool. It's a really useful one too if you control it. I get the fear because for all of human history anything new and good has been used by those in power to control others. Did you say that very thing when the internet came about? Look what they've done to that. We could make amazing things with a computer program as powerful as that and release it to the masses for free for anyone and maybe even better than what exists in the walled gardens. Imagine Linux with a 90% share on the desktop. That's all I'm saying, it's a dead useful tool and if we don't do good with it bad and greedy people will control the world with it. I used it to figure out how to integrate Compton and WPEWebkit into my program and I'm rather pleased with how things worked out. Manually doing that research would have taken me another decade to work out. The code is mine but asking the right questions really steered me to faster results. Am I a bad person for asking for ideas and a little help with the integration path?

golinux · Yesterday 00:19:45

I am just attempting to make you aware that "sleeping with the enemy" is a dangerous gambit that could easily have catastrophic consequences for "freedom" and you, personally. Digital knowledge and skills are quickly lost if not used repeatedly. Imagine a future that due reliance on AI solutions, humans lose their ability to effectively control their digital devices? Game over.

Altoid · Yesterday 01:20:10

Hello:

liquibyye wrote:

... a tool. It's a really useful one too if you control it.

Yes, it is indeed a tool.
A badly thought out / designed one.
And yours is also a huge "if".

I'd say it is already running amok.
And as no one bothers to control anything, soon there will be no control possible.
So it will get worse.

golinux wrote:

... deep wisdom not a roller coaster of titillation with shiny new s**t to survive the future ...

+1

Best,

A.

greenjeans · Yesterday 01:28:26

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”
~Shakespeare

golinux · Yesterday 01:35:40

The mind is the source of all our woes . . .

greenjeans · Yesterday 01:39:09

The mind is the source of all our woes . . .

And the source of all our joys. I choose joy.

“We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.”

~His holiness the Dalai Lama the 14th in the Book of Joy

Last edited by greenjeans (Yesterday 01:55:46)

golinux · Yesterday 02:06:14

The Dali Lama is right. All of our "suffering" is self-inflicted. Being able to maintain emotional "neutrality" toward whatever comes your way is quite liberating!

IamThatIam · Yesterday 02:17:17

I fully disagree with golinux on this. I think that if you are using the AI as a tool and are acting as a software designer or architect and keeping a schematic with blueprints of your software, intelligent questions for the AI, and with a specific design, and also keeping records of what you are doing then there is nothing wrong with using AI to make coding more efficient. I think alot of people will come up with niche clique ideologies to be an elitist and will turn everything to its extreme and try to say if it is bad for AI to be in control of all of our sotware then AI must be bad in all situations and circumstances and for any purpose. I disagree. I think this is just being an extremist and truly a software fascist as well as an elitist. There is nobody stopping people from deciding not to use AI. It isn't being forced upon you necessarily. There is nobody saying that using AI means letting it do everything and not having an intelligent designer in control of the AI. I think when we start making everything into its extreme polarity like that then we fall victim to the ideologies of the brown shirts in Germany way back when. People need to think for themselves and use common sense, and stop letting other people tell you how to think. It does not take a rocket scientist to know that using AI makes coding more efficient and faster and it also does not take a rocket scientist to know that you cannot let AI be in control when coding nor can you use AI and code without being the intelligent designer who keeps records, backup copies, and uses a schematic with intelligent prompts and questions. Everything must be intelligently thought out first and put on paper before you start using AI to code otherwise it is going to do things you do not want it to do. Also I would not use cloud based AI if I could help it. Claude and Grok are not so bad but localized is always better because you can control it and tell it what to do. I would say Enoch is a good way to go. Be the programmer and the designer and not the one just using someone else's service.

greenjeans · Yesterday 02:36:38

Oh yeah!

blackhole · Yesterday 07:51:40

What many of you fail to realise is that it's all for profit. "AI" is just the last product from Big Tech, it is being heavily invested in, it's a bubble and it will burst at some point. It exists to make money for shareholders. But the immense amount of hype surrounding it, means that your boss is slowly becoming convinced that it can do your job. It probably can't - or maybe it can do aspects of your job well enough, that you can be laid off. You can then run along and babble about "AI" geing a great "tool", while the billionaires laugh at the real "tools" who bought into it all.

As Altoid said, it will run amok, because as with everything else, the risks are all acceptable, and the "running amok" is actually part of the plan - we're now at the stage where the big players want it regulated, so that they can maintain ownership, control and exclude competition. To be seen as viable "AI", and boost share value, LLMs are going to need be "headline news".

Altoid · Yesterday 11:05:36

Hello:

blackhole wrote:

... many of you fail to realise is that it's all for profit.
... exists to make money for shareholders.
... while the billionaires laugh at the real "tools" who bought into it all.

+1

Have a read:
https://www.theregister.com/columnists/ … ay/5288275

Best,

A.

Last edited by Altoid (Yesterday 11:11:13)

RedGreen925 · Yesterday 15:36:01

Yet again I see no one mention my biggest problem with the garbage AI. If you use it you are plainly and simply a thief. In the Free Software community we support copyright and those models were trained on stolen code from the entire internet. Now if a company trains an AI on its own self produced or licensed for that purpose code it is a different thing. Though they have lost any claim to copyright when doing so then using it as all code produced by a machine is not allowed that protection. As far as I am concerned all those AI companies should have their executives sitting in jail and all their money taken as that seems to be the solution when an individual does it and infringes copyright. As they claim that corporations are people for their purposes when it suits them and their justification of the parasite behaviour of their actions and its harms towards society.

sgage · Yesterday 15:58:21

The notion that a given technology is neutral, just a tool that can be used for good or ill, is not borne out by fact or history. Technologies have their own imperatives, their own tendencies, and 'unintended consequences'. This goes 100-fold for so-called 'AI'. Look at what it has already done...

Last edited by sgage (Yesterday 15:59:04)

blackhole · Yesterday 17:01:56

RedGreen925, I mentioned the plagiarism aspect in another recent post and in the past in other posts here and on other sites.

The likes of Microsoft, the owner of github, are well placed to use the "tools" they are promoting to "steal" code from the massive array of private and public github repositories it hosts. This is in fact a means for proprietary vendors to effectively circumvent GPL licensing.

SS · Yesterday 17:06:30

Fascinating topic. I hated the way Microsoft was getting too overwhelming with all the features, forced AI and updates etc on my laptops. Then windows 10 was no longer supported. I would have had to landfill 2 laptops (one with 4k screen and 16gm ram,). I am non technical and busy with my own commitments but curious about this thing called Linux. I asked AI and Gemini suggested Ubuntu , Linux Mint and for my very old 2008 laptop (4gb ram but SSD drive), Devuan. I had never heard of these. It explained Devuan is a fork of Debian created by VUAs. It will ruin flawlessly etc. I took the plunge, not knowing what system d was or anything really and realised Devuan needed a load of config . Using AI , forum help and perseverance I got the old 2008 laptop set up in a few days and now implementing on the 4k laptop. The topic of "init freedom" kept coming up. I had to figure out what that meant. At the end of it I realise that building one thing to do something properly and connect to next thing is brilliant, instead of building a complicated mess with no transparency. I apply that philosophy where I can in every day work now eg the way I will construct a spreadsheet or think about solutions. Without AI making me aware of Devuan's existence, and learning how to do/ not to do things, I wouldn't have got here. But then with AI it's easy to get lazy or degrade quality of output or principles. My wife played around on my laptop and found it so transparent, and thought it was so cool that devuan was founded on values that stand against corporate greed, and a reminder of human ability to be more conscious in choices instead of illusionary freedom, she is switching to Devuan on her laptop. Maybe I am not a desired user of Devuan (not sure), given my use of AI in the story, but the principles behind the distro are what makes me use Devuan as my only operating system of choice (plus it runs absolutely brilliantly. I haven't had a single crash, screen freeze or forced restart. Laptops are running blazing fast. Bluetooth is flawless. WiFi connection is instant and way better. Performance is amazing, wireless printer connects and locks in, no cut out. Nothing undesired, nothing forced on my laptop). The excellence should never be compromised.

Last edited by SS (Yesterday 18:01:04)

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#1 2026-08-16 20:50:03

AI and programming.

#2 2026-08-16 21:52:39

Re: AI and programming.

#3 2026-08-16 22:37:04

Re: AI and programming.

#4 Yesterday 00:19:45

Re: AI and programming.

#5 Yesterday 01:20:10

Re: AI and programming.

#6 Yesterday 01:28:26

Re: AI and programming.

#7 Yesterday 01:35:40

Re: AI and programming.

#8 Yesterday 01:39:09

Re: AI and programming.

#9 Yesterday 02:06:14

Re: AI and programming.

#10 Yesterday 02:17:17

Re: AI and programming.

#11 Yesterday 02:36:38

Re: AI and programming.

#12 Yesterday 07:51:40

Re: AI and programming.

#13 Yesterday 11:05:36

Re: AI and programming.

#14 Yesterday 15:36:01

Re: AI and programming.

#15 Yesterday 15:58:21

Re: AI and programming.

#16 Yesterday 17:01:56

Re: AI and programming.

#17 Yesterday 17:06:30

Re: AI and programming.

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