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Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by sublinear on Thursday November 12, 2026 @01:03AM (#50463600)
> If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?

Writing code shouldn't merely be about accomplishing a goal, but making deliberate and good decisions that lead to more good decisions with increasing ease and clarity. It's no different than any other type of planning, engineering, or architecting. FOSS demands this more than any other genre of software because it's made collaboratively.

I think AI is just too irresistible for the reckless and dumb developers who were, unfortunately, always the majority in our line of work. Now we don't have to guess at that fact anymore or be afraid of being judged as arrogant for saying it. Now we know. These developers don't bring anything to the table. The problem of rejecting garbage PRs is far from new.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by dkarl on Thursday November 12, 2026 @09:15AM (#50467529)
This sounds pointlessly elitist to me. Those "dumb" developers can do a fine job of solving a problem well enough for a limited context, which is what they're paid for. If we limited ourselves to software that emerged from "good decisions that lead to more good decisions with increasing ease and clarity," then we wouldn't have much software at all. Your doctor's office would still run on paper files.

But who knows, maybe AI will get good enough to meet your standards even though most humans don't.

Re:Emacs in the Age of Magic by sublinear on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:37PM (#50471071)
I'm not talking about paid work.

Not every project has to be "elitist", but if the goal is to do the best work to serve a particular use case you can call it whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that the best work has to be done.