I just came to the realization that in the last months I really haven’t come across an app or piece of software that doesn’t have claude code in it. Literally zero promotion posts where it’s not written with AI. People using AI to write one paragraph.

I kinda knew half jokingly that the devs were going to be the first ones to be replaced. They like to say it’s just a tool… cope?

  • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
    18·
    1 day ago

    I’m just tired at this point. Years ago, contributing to open source projects felt good - you helped out the developer and in turn, any other human who used the software. There was a sense of accomplishment and pride in doing something great for someone else.

    But in 2026, Github is just filled with AI-generated projects. The people running these projects often don’t have any idea what they’re doing and they don’t take ownership of their code. The LLM blasts something out, they ship it and then they forget about it. That’s not a good baseline for building something.

    I have set up a PlayStation 2 to run Homebrew last week and that development scene is one of the best examples for how AI ruins a whole community.

    There is a project for running games on the PS2, called OPL (Open PS2 Loader). Over the course of the last year, the main developers of OPL all left and the only active fork that gets any new features is RiptOPL. RiptOPL uses this banner on their Github:

    Yeeeah, I’m not gonna contribute to that kind of cringeslop. I tested it out and it’s got stupid features (pressing a button aggressively vibrates the controller) and the same (if not even more) bugs than the main OPL. Because the developer didn’t fix anything! He just took pending pull requests from the main project, added some cringe banners and useless slop and let the AI do the work.

    There’s also a file manager, called wLaunchELF. You can browse the filesystem of your console and launch applications from memory cards, USB sticks and harddrives. You can also spin up an FTP server and transfer files over Ethernet.

    The most active fork that gets new features is wLE R3Z, whose developer used AI to build the thing and had to turn off all Ethernet features - because the LLM couldn’t figure it out and he didn’t have any clue either. We are actively losing features and the homebrew projects get worse at this point. Capable developers either leave or decide to not contribute at all and that ruins the PS2 homebrew scene.

    I am also active on vogons, a retro-computing forum and the amount of LLM-driven hobby projects in there has skyrocketed as well. I don’t know…someone’s LLM figured out how to control notebook brightness on DOS because it had crawled an internal Intel datasheet. It’s useful, I guess…but if no one did the work, there is no one to admire for doing it. All of this feels hollow and useless, I didn’t get into the hobby of retro computing to have a computer do the hard stuff for me, doing it by myself is the whole point of it.

    I do write my own software without LLM support and I am currently learning Sveltekit and having a ton of fun. I am not putting anything up on the web to get crawled by bots, though.

    Fun fact: A lot of devs know what they’re doing is shit and try to hide it. I have seen so many people putting CLAUDE.md into their .gitignore so it’s not added to the projects. Motherfucker, if you don’t want people see you using AI, then just don’t use AI.