[headcanon]

One thing I have been doing is breaking out of my long-held default mode of spinning up a react/nextjs project whenever I need frontend, and generating barebones HTML/CSS/JS for basic web apps. A lot of the reason we went with the former was the easy access to packages and easy-to-understand state management, but now that a lot of the functionality packages used to provide can be just as easily generated, I can get a lot more functionality while keeping dependencies minimal.

I haven't tried C or ASM yet, but it has been working very well with a C++ project I've been working on, and I'm sure it would do reasonably well with bare-bones C as well.

I'd be willing to bet it would struggle more with a lower-level language initially, but give it a solid set of guardrails with a testing/eval infrastructure and it'll get its way to what you want.

[fud101]

Pretty interesting take this. I wonder if there is a minimal state management we could evolve which would be sufficient for LLMs to use while still making it possible for a human to reason about the abstraction. It won't be as bloated as the existing ones we came up with organically however.

[moron4hire]

I mean, you're basically LLM-washing other people's code, then. All those UI components that other people wrote and at least expected attribution may not be libraries anymore, sure. But you've basically just copied and maybe lightly modified that code into your project and then slapped a sticker on it saying "mine." If you did that manually with open source code, you'd be in violation of the attribution terms almost all the licenses have in common. But somehow it's okay if the computer does it for you?

[nurettin]

It is a gray area. What if you took Qt, removed macros, replaced anchoring with css for alignment, took all widget properties out into an entity component system and called it ET, could Trolltech complain? It is an entirely new design and nothing like they built. A ship of Theseus if you will.

[moron4hire]

The Ship of Theseus has nothing to do with the identity of the parts. That is not in question at all; they are explicitly different parts. The thought experiment is the question of the identity of the whole.

Qt in your example is a part. You're application is the whole. If you replaced Qt with WxWidgets, is your application still the same application?

But to answer your question, to replace Qt with you're own piecemeal code doesn't do anything more to Qt than replacing it with WxWidgets would: nothing. The Qt code is gone. The only way it would ship-of-theseus itself into "still being Qt, despite not being the original Qt" would be if Qt required all modifications to be copyright-assigned and upstreamed. That is absurd. I don't think I've ever seen a license that did anything like that.

Even though licenses like the GPL require reciprocal FOSS release in-kind, you still retain the rights to your code. If you were ever to remove the GPL'd library dependency, then you would no longer be required to reciprocate. Of course, that would be a new version of your software and the previous versions would still be available and still be FOSS. But neither are you required to continue to offer the original version to anyone new. You are only required to provide the source to people who have received your software. And technically, you only have to do it when they ask, but that's a different story.

[lelanthran]

We used higher level programming languages because "Developer time is more expensive than compute time", but if the AI techbros are right, we are approaching the point where that is not going to be true.

It's going to take the same amount of time creating a program in C as it does in Python.