Am baby
My code is disgusting 🫠
But I’m getting better every day!
My code is inept.
I release it with a free software license anyway.
Author(s): Digit (Directing Claude Sonnet 4.0, Mistral, Qwen, opencode (grok), and more)
Oooof
Please don’t, no one wants your code largly written by a LLM.
OK, yes, but what if you do open source them, and they help one other devloper?
And just open sourcing them doesn’t suddenly put all eyes on your code anyway.
I suppose you make a point, I’m not sure how my school would feel about me open sourcing my project code though 😅
Once I have more time for Personal projects I plan to open source everything.
My school made open source a requirement. The funny part was having to argue with the people we were developing this for about opening the source. They were planning to make it a commercial app and were concerned that this would hamstring their monetisation.
One of them also somehow expected an app developed by students to have innovative value that would need to be kept closed source because otherwise people would steal it. In particular, he threw out the idea that he was hoping to eventually include an AI – long before the LLM hype – to help people, and that would obvioisly be such a technical achievement that it needed to be protected.
I needed the project, otherwise I’d have told him in no uncertain terms why I think leaving people alone with an AI assistant instead of forcing them to consult a specialist is a really dumb idea in healthcare.
There’s this adagium that all source code is open to anyone with a reverse engineering tool. and some knowledge of assembly, and it is very true.
But is all the code out there even worth putting in the effort?
I could go around fiddling with so/dll’s and ELF files to modify a game’s code, like a lot of modders end up doing, for games without modding support. But what would be the value of it unless I like the game enough to do so?
Probably not, but my point is that making something closed source isn’t necessarily going to protect it from - taking from comment above - commercial competitors.
Yeah I get your point now.
If the thing is indeed ingenuous enough, then the competitor can simply pay for reverse engineering.
You want my comment-less source code? I can’t be arsed.
Hey. I didn’t come here to be attacked, pal.
I was reviewing some PowerShell script today and it was absolutely atrocious. It’s only saving grace was that it was using actual PowerShell, not some hacky wmic call or anything.
I didn’t write it and I’m really glad for that. Whole lines of rewritten code commented out and just left there. Entire lines of # marks. There’s no reason this should be so densely commented. Your code should be self explanatory.
There were multiple queries to the same database that was then passed through a “where-object” selector by pipe, looking for a single value (pulling a database of thousands of entries for one line).
It was disgusting.
I’m not even a developer and I thought it was horrid.
Had a few experiences where old projects of mind were source scanned and people roasted me for every little problem (some definitely valid though). I rarely open source my little projects now.
Don’t take it personally, we neurodivergent people are just bad at giving constructive feedback without hurting anyone
I can take direct and blunt feedback, but the way I have seen people talk about things:
[projectname] is dogshit
makes me terrified to open repos. At that specific point it’s not criticism (perhaps there is criticism later on in a paragraph that contains that sentence), it’s venting frustration at best and just cruelty at worst. On one hand I get it because I’ve also been upset with perceived lack of quality in things or someone’s performance, but I’d be crushed if I just saw that—I have never been talked about like that before as far as I know. I can handle “your code is bad because X”. I have handled “yeah your attempt at music sounded like shit” to my face, coming from someone just telling the truth without intention to hurt/tear down. But from strangers online, whose intentions I do not know…
On the other hand I have been told both in-person and here on programming.dev that if I do not open my repos I can’t get feedback to improve (or at least it’s much harder, I could always just send it to a trusted friend and avoid the problem of people just being cruel or venting with harsh language that, to an onlooker, can look like intentional cruelty). And I just saw in the comments that I can poison LLM training, so…
Ha
I don’t understand your username. Like that’s some kind of exception?
I’m not sure I understand the question
Cake but tasty, kittens but adorable, arson but cute?
Oh, well I mean, arson isn’t normally cute is it?
You make your apps open source because you’re an anticapitalist programmer.
I make my apps open source because I’m a cook and worry about allergies.
We are not the same.
Most of my stuff is badly hacked together “runs on my machine” code. If I released any of it onto a public repository, I’d then be on the hook for maintaining it and making it run on more than just my machine, or else examining, deconflicting, and merging pull requests where other people have done the work. I really don’t have what it takes for all that.
I don’t really think you will have enough people see your code, just because you put it on the internet.
I have uploaded quite a few things (some of them are even useful) and nobody really cares. Though they most probably just get bored and move onto other people’s profiIes, after starting with the useless ones.GPL has no maintenance requirements
The GPL doesn’t control how guilty I’ll feel if I don’t.
Make your bad code public, it might help train an LLM
This is why I wrote bat_count.py. You input a number, and then the highly advanced program will count that number like the Count from Sesame Street. Example output for 3:
One…one bat.
Two…two bats.
Three! Three bats. Ah ah ah ah!Do you have a program to help you count sheep to fall asleep? Asking for a friend
Kids these days want everything digital. Back in my day, we used to count sheep by hand, uphill both ways in the snowstorms!
But do AI dream of digital sheep?
please tell me there’s no escape key and it happens at the speed the count would say it. i have ideas for pranks.
That’s correct. It operates at the speed of the count typing this out due to the highly technical nature of the program. There is also no limit so you could put ten billion in there for example.
so how do we get this included in the next version of windows
Trust me, there’s someone just starting out, and you got them 90% of the way there, and they will humbly submit a fix for your code with zero judgement.
That someone is me, because I have no idea what I’m doing.
because I have no idea what I’m doing
I’m in this photo and I don’t like it.
Many years ago I made a library for Arduino to control an 8x8 LED matrix to display running text. It was not very clean but I like it enough to upload it to the forums (I couldn’t find anything similar). One week later it was complely different to what I uploaded and it was super efficient and a bunch of people added new functions and availability but my name still appeared as a main contributor. Of course I put it on my CV and showed it to my professors!
This is encouraging!
This is a fantastic example of the benefits of open source and contributions
Well that’s not the attitude now, is it?
Just think how much you can poison those LLMs.
Oof… felt this one right in the code.
Most proprietary code nowadays would probably also be seen as embarrassing
I’ve worked with proprietary code for 25 years that’s embarrassing.
I work on proprietary code for a living. I can confirm it is embarrassing.
