Crossposted from https://fedia.io/m/updates@kbin.melroy.org/t/4475005
As you all might know it, Mbin is a rather small project with a small team. In fact the current size of the team is 1.5 developers (0.5 for the ones which only have partially time). While our active devs do what they can in their free time, this leads to slow feature and security updates, sometimes slow support and increasing stress for the remaining devs.
That’s why I ask everyone who likes this project, has time of their own to donate and knows how to program with PHP (or is willing to learn it) to consider helping this project move forward.
You can start with simpler features and submit them as PRs or even just help review existing PRs if full commitment to maintaining the codebase is currently too much. We are aware that parts of our codebase contains more spagett than some Italian restaurants, but we will help every newcomer to find their way through the sources.
Every bit of support helps, as it also shows that we have a passionate userbase which does not want Mbin to wither away.Well … as I’m not very good at writing motivational texts, just comment anything which comes to mind for this issue :D If you have ideas how to improve the chances that this post reach the right people, I would also love to hear it.
At the same time I want to bring up another topic, as transparency is important for any public project.
Some of our devs use AI assistants for generating code for PRs and also to assist with PR reviews. Simply because without it, they would not have time to continue contributing to Mbin (which would bring our devs down to 1, making it impossible to merge new PRs). On thing here is important to know: I will not call it slop nor vibe-coding, as they are a competent developer capable of understanding and managing the outputs of the agents. Still, I am very aware of the issues of AI and the general opinion on it in the Fediverse. That is why I would like to know your constructive opinions on this matter.
Also, I guarantee you that every PR is reviewed by at least one human pair of eyes.
I’m all for AI, personally. When using it as a programmer it’s a huge force multiplier, just pay attention to what it’s doing.
I was somewhat interested until I read the last part. I personally have no interest in contributing to projects that rely on AI and I feel like others feel the same way. It results in more code being shipped than necessary and thus requires a lot more time to understand and modify, I’d rather spend that time on projects that don’t rely on LLMs.
What do you mean it results in more code being shipped than necessary? If it’s producing too many changes then it’s up to the dev to refactor and PR reviewers to catch before it gets merged into master.
In theory, yes. But that’s usually not what happens in practice. I don’t know if that’s the case for Mbin but I have no interest in finding out. Most people that do LLM driven development submit code that looks right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is right. The same probably applies to reviewers when approving/merging changes, if they have way more code to review I wouldn’t be surprised if they get lazier with it, might even be subconsciously.
There are a lot more reasons why using LLMs is generally speaking not a good idea, but to keep it short I’ll just share some relevant articles/posts that go more in depth and explain it better than me:
AI is a tool. Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
The git repo:
It’s written in PHP, vibe coded, and it’s on Microsoft Github. A trifecta.
