[awesan]

It's nice that people are taking this up, and one of the main benefits of open source in the first place. I have my doubts that this will succeed if it's just one guy, but maybe it takes on new life this way and I would never discourage people from trying to add value to this world.

That said I increasingly have a very strong distaste of these AI generated articles. They are long and tedious to read and it really makes me doubt that what is written there is actually true at all. I much prefer a worse written but to the point article.

[Aurornis]

I agree completely. I know everyone is tired of AI accusations but this article has all of the telltale signs of LLM writing over and over again.

It’s not encouraging for the future of a project when the maintainer can’t even announce it without having AI do the work.

It would be great if this turns into a high effort, carefully maintained fork. At the moment I’m highly skeptical of new forks from maintainers who are keen on using a lot of AI.

[bugufu8f83]

>I agree completely. I know everyone is tired of AI accusations but this article has all of the telltale signs of LLM writing over and over again.

I mean, I'm more worried about the AI writing itself than people calling it out.

The AI articles on HN are an absolute disease. Just write your own damn articles if you're asking the rest of us to read them.

[doctorpangloss]

@dang what do you think? Is it a disease? People who make interesting conversation will tune out.

[bigiain]

I'm not Dang, but I agree AI articles are a disease - but with reservations.

In this case, a Chinese developer who's not a native English speaker - I feel is _adding_ to "interesting conversations" not detracting from them but using AI assistance to publish an article like this in readable/understandable English.

I know HN and Ycombinator is _hugely_ US focused and secondarily English-speaking focused. But there's more and more interest in non US based "intellectual curiosity" where the original source material is not in English. From YC's capitalism-driven focus, they largely don't care. From my personal hacker ethic curiosity, I'd hate to miss out on articles like this just because of a prejudice against non English speakers who use AI to provide me with understandable versions.

Having said that, AI hype in general certainly feels like a disease to me. I was noting recently how the percentage of homepage like/discussions I click has gone way down. I remember the days where I'd click and read 80 or 90% of the things that made it to the homepage. These days I eyeroll my way past probably 2/3rds of them because they look at first glance (and from recent experience>) to just be AI hype in one form or another. (I've actually considered building myself a tool that'd grab the first three or so pages and then filter out everything AI related - but the other option is just to visit less often...)

[bugufu8f83]

I'm all for people who aren't native English speakers publishing their thoughts and opinions. But I would much prefer they still wrote down their own thoughts in their own words in their native language and machine translated it. It would be much more authentic and much more interesting--and much more worth reading.

[mahkeiro]

I'm not sure, based on past experiences people are complaining a lot about automatically translated text...

[GCUMstlyHarmls]

I just get my agent to read them for me and present a few options for comments as derived from the vibes of any existing comments. If I time out, it posts a random option, then at the end of the week I get it to summarise all the content I (royal) read and distill it into a take-aways note in my (royal) journal. It's been a huge productivity boost. When ever I think I might want to think about something I just ask the agent to find a topic I (royal) read within some timeframe and have it synthesise a few new dot points in my (royal) journal. I'm hoping to reach 10,000 salient points by the end of the year.

[empath75]

An app that basically reimplements a well documented and tested api is the best possible use case for ai development.

[Aurornis]

I have nothing against a skilled maintainer with attention to detail using AI tools for assistance.

The important part is the human who will do more than just try to get the LLM to do the hard work for them, though. Once software matures the bugs and edge cases become more obscure and require more thoughtful input. AI is great at getting things to some high percentage of completeness, but it takes a skilled human to keep it all moving in the right direction.

I would cite this blog post as an example of lazy LLM use: It's over-dramatic, long, retains all of the poor LLM output styling that most human editors remove, and suggests that the maintainer isn't afraid to outsource everything to the LLM.

[re]

> it really makes me doubt that what is written there is actually true at all

Indeed, the whole "Ironically, switching from Apache 2.0 to AGPL irrevocably makes the project forkable" section seems misguided. Apache 2.0-licensed software is just as forkable.

[MrDarcy]

The point being we can simply tell our agents to start at the rug pull point and implement the same features and bug fixes on the Apache fork referring to the AGPL implementation.

[bigiain]

> I have my doubts that this will succeed if it's just one guy

Normally, I'd agree with you 100%.

But there are some interesting mitigating circumstances here.

1) It's "just one guy" who's running a fairly complex open source project already, one which uses minio.

2) The stated intention is that the software is considered "finished" with no plans to add any features, so the maintenance burden is arguably way lower than typical open source projects (or forks)

3) they're quite open about using AI to maintain it - and like it or hate it, this "finding and helping fix bugs in complex codebases" seems to be an area where current AI is pretty good.

I'm sure a lot of people will be put off by the forker being Chinese, but honestly, from outside the US right now, it's unclear if Chinese or American software is a more existential risk.

I'll admit I'd never heard of their Pigsty project before, but a quick peek at their github shows a project that's been around for 5 years already, and has pull requests from over a dozen contributors. That's no guarantee this isn't just a better prepared Jia Tan zx utils supply chain attack, but at least it's clearly not just something that's all been created by one person over 2 or 12 months.

[skybrian]

At this point the complaints about AI-written articles are worse than the articles. It's like nit-picking about bad kerning. Focus on the content.

[awesan]

I am sorry about that. What I am saying is that it's hard to trust the content given the context. And more so these articles are extremely verbose with a lot of BS in them, so it makes getting to the "content" a lot more work for me.

In any case I had one paragraph about the content and one side-note about the writing style. Every single reply except one focused on the side-note, including you.

[jonathrg]

I have no reason to trust that the fork itself is competently maintained when the author did not even bother to write the announcement.

[surgical_fire]

I'm generally fully in agreement that AI writing is bad.

But this is one of the few cases where it might be acceptable.

Author is not a native speaker; in an announcement that a known project is being forked for maintenance the occasional odd phrasing and possible errors in grammar could sound unprofessional.

I wonder if in such cases a better use of AI would be to try to write it yourself and just ask a LLM to revise instead? Maybe with some directive to "just point out errors in syntax and grammar, and factual mistakes. No suggestions on style"?

[bigiain]

The author is Chinese and not a native English speaker. I will happily give them a pass on using GenAI to "write the announcement".