Open Source, Communities and LLMs

Jeff Atwood shared, on his blog, this letter from a StackOverflow user about how the sense of community on the platform helped him and is something that’s disappearing now.

So when I watch communities hollow out, replaced by something that gives answers but doesn’t give me a single thought… I get depressed. Because we’re losing something that was always there but I didn’t notice. It’s like losing gravity.

This post by Glyph on “Who is Open Source About” also touched on some adjacent topics, talking about Open Source and communities in the age of agentic programming.

As trying as it can be sometimes, we maintainers all do get something out of open source, and it is good to be honest with your users — and with yourself — exactly what you want to get out of it. In order to know whether the juice is worth the squeeze, we must know both what the juice is, and what the squeeze is.

I do wonder how to do Open Source these days. Is Open Sourcing any of my tiny utilities of use any more? Is it for other people or just for AI to be trained on, for writing home-grown utilities for others?

Enjoying programming / work

I found this Haskell discourse post on “How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs” illuminating. Some of the suggestions about how to setup a workflow so you feel confident about the changes you make are stuff I’ve made note of, and plan to try.

It’s hard to build up trust in something that pretends to be much cleverer than yourself. At the end, you’re responsible for the code you produce. Not your machine. Blaming someone else for your code is something that bad managers and colleagues do with their employees and coworkers, it’s ridiculous to do with a machine. So use LLMs in a way that you can take responsibility for the results. This only works if you make yourself an integral part of the process.

On one morning, while I was practicing my cleans, I looked at a couple of the in-house trainers in our gym and had this epiphany – isn’t programming in the agentic world turning into something like their job?

Most “trainers” in the local gyms here aren’t doing much; most people coming to train know what they want to do, and how. There could be a handful of people who either take their help with specific exercises/weights, or even hire them to create “personalised” training plans and help them with it. In between this, they seem to be just doing their thing, watching from a distance what folks around are doing and probably not even registering much of it.

Workouts and Fitness

3 more days of doing drills for cleans and high-pulls and a penny seems to be dropping somewhere, on how the cleans should feel, while doing them.

I also got in a weekend session of 3 hours of opens Ultimate, which was fun.

Claude-coding an art CMS

I’ve been nudging Claude into building a content management system for Saa’s art work. There’s enough art work coming from the reMarkable, scans, etc that keeping track of it and making sure we have exports of it for specific sized prints, etc., is quite messy. Now that the website is sort of up and running, it made sense to have a way to keep track of art and to make it easy to upload/publish web quality copies to the website.

It’s still a WIP, but already seems useful. I’ve been able to push an updated site with all the displayed images tracked in this tool.

Grounding groundwater: Spatialities of dispossession in the Kaveri Delta, India

Read this paper by a friend, her first single-author paper, and Creative Commons Licensed too! It wasn’t hard to follow and I particularly enjoyed the use of diary entries to emphasize certain points like the importance we give to surface water vs ground water, and the use of every inch of land available for irrigation.

Birthdays

It was a birthday weekend! We celebrated Shreya turning one, along with her mom’s birthday which people almost seemed to forget. And Shreya is now a one-year old who can eat all kinds of things, it looks like. She was relishing the taste of french fries and got really mad once their supply stopped. xD