Due to some disagreements—some recent; some tolerated for close to 2 decades—with how collaboration should work, we’ve decided that the best course of action was to fork the project

Okay, that was always allowed!

Programming is the weirdest place for kneejerk opposition to anything labeled AI, because we've been trying to automate our jobs for most of a century. Artists will juke from 'the quality is bad!' to 'the quality doesn't matter!' the moment their field becomes legitimately vulnerable. Most programmers would love if the robot did the thing we wanted. That's like 90% of what we're looking for in the first place. If writing 'is Linux in dark mode?' counted as code, we'd gladly use that, instead of doing some arcane low-level bullshit. I say this as someone who has recently read through IBM's CGA documentation to puzzle out low-level bullshit.

You have to check if it works. But if it works... what is anyone bitching about?

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

You have to check if it works. But if it works... what is anyone bitching about?

They're bitching about him pushing untested (by his own words) and broken code straight to main instead of going through the proper "PR, Review, Merge" loop like anyone else.
If you "have to check if it works" it should be in a PR for people to play with it, suggest improvements and make changes, not directly in the codebase.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 3 points 1 day ago

They'd already admitted they accidentally pushed to the wrong branch and cleaned it up.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 days ago

There's no way they actually checked that it works. It includes code for:

XDG
GNOME
"GNOME_old"
KDE

Verifying this would mean logging into several different desktop environments.

It's also extremely fragile code, running external commands and filtering through various files. There just is no good API on Linux for querying whether the desktop environment is using a dark theme, so it's doing absolutely inane shit that no sane developer would type out.

Because it's a maintenance nightmare. Because they almost certainly don't actually need to solve this. That's software development 101, to not write code that you don't actually need. But apparently some devs never got the memo that this is because of the maintenance cost, not because you weren't able to generate the code up until now.

[–] helix@feddit.org 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If it works it can still be worse code than if somebody had just read documentation.

Then again, dead internet theory means nobody watches what AI is "documenting" and in the future documentation will be worthless.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

"Just" read documentation, says someone assuming past documentation is accurate, comprehensible, and relevant.

I taught myself QBASIC from the help files. I still found Open Watcom's documentation frankly terrible, bordering useless. There's comments in the original Doom source code lamenting how shite the dead-tree books were.