I know a lot of us are obviously on the Fedi, so I’m inviting you to vote in a poll about AI use in software development.
I’m conflicted, because right now I’m struggling to even keep the lights on with Subjam, let alone boost development cycles. I’m a career network & systems administrator. Along with building and owning the hardware and service infrastructure for Subjam myself, my ‘elite’ bash skills are about as far as I go regarding actual “programming”. I’ve historically contracted development of the mobile apps & backend/API with self-funding, and it’s been a very slow process over the past 5 years.
My plan has always been to pay F/OSS devs to help me move things forward, get it properly open-sourced and even on the Fediverse. But, I think we all know here funding for is hard to come by these days. I envy you full-stack types greatly
This is obviously a hot topic with strong opinions on both sides, many that have already been discussed here. I’m hoping to get a consensus from as many Fediverse people as possible so boosts there are much appreciated too.
I mean no disrespect to anyone currently using/not using AI for coding, by the way. My personal opinion is to keep AI out of the creative space, which includes coding (“Code is art”). I do see the arguments on both sides, though. I want Subjam to be a beacon for ALL creatives, musicians and hackers, who wish to opt-out of the AI space as much as possible.
Here’s my current thinking on this. I get the temptation, but one thing to keep in mind is that a choice to use auto-generated code would roughly halve the number of people who would help you develop your code. Maybe if you published it under a free license, that would allow you to attract some volunteer human contributors, whose code would be far more robust than auto-generated slop, and far less likely to be verbatim code copied from a proprietary or copyleft repo.
Another point to consider is that there’s a lot of grant funding becoming available for Free Code stacks that might help people escape the DataFarmers. Particular in the EU, who are leaning hard into ‘open everything’ right now. Using auto-generated code might halve the amount of that you’d qualify for too. Food for thoughts.
BTW I really appreciate you thinking in public like this. It requires making yourself vulnerable, and that takes courage.
Appreciate your feedback, @strypey - and thanks for the tips on funding. I’m in the U.S. so unfortunately that may be a bit more difficult to achieve, especially since Subjam isn’t technically a non-profit (It’s a “Social Purpose Corporation” which is sort of in-between a traditional corp and a non-profit, but operates as a corp with social purposes baked into our charter).
I’m motivated to lean into the F/OSS world for volunteer development help. One of the foundational cornerstones of the platform is promoting open content, for example all live user broadcasts are hosted under CC licenses, using only open-source media codecs, using F/OSS for all services, even self-hosting down to the bare-metal.
I feel the code may need to be cleaned up to even be presentable in a public fashion first. I really don’t know. I’ve heard it’s pretty clean but I need someone(s) I can trust.
This may or not matter, depending on the particular funder. Certainly something to spell out in your funding.json file. But Snikket, who are under the UK’s equivalent of a social enterprise company (last I checked), have received a number of Free Code development grants from funders like Open Technology Fund and NlNet. FWIW Snikket also started as a one-man-band, not sure if Matt has scaled up beyond that as I haven’t checked in for a while (I did a smattering of paid consultation for them).
