Daily reminder that Codeberg is always the good alternative to corporate bastards like this idiot
We will see corporate douche.
Contradictory to the title, this message is not to the developers, developers don’t care what github ceo thinks, and they should know it. This might be for the management of other companies to allow using ai or force ai usage.
Threatening remarks like that are why I learned PHPUnit and XDebug, and yeah it made me become a better developer, but often times these are just empty statements.
AI is just another tool in my toolbox, but it’s not everything.
CEOs, embrace torches and pitchforks.
Copilot is shit.
Copilot is shit.
Exactly, my company provides license for copilot and I use it, and while it has some highlights most of the time it actually is more a nuisance than help.
It especially annoys me because it hijacks autocomplete based on types with is own that frequently has subtle bugs, so now if I have it enabled I need to be on guard all the time. With the traditional autocomplete I could just trust it to be correct.
This is my experience. It saves a bit of typing sometimes but that’s probably cancelled out by the time spent correcting it, rewriting nonsense it produced, and reviewing my corworkers PRs that didn’t notice the nonsense.
Here’s where I’ll give it credit:
- It can spit out a beautiful readme.md file
- It will insert comments to explain the more nuanced aspects of my code for those viewing it for the first time
Doesn’t make up for the annoying-ass auto complete hijacking though. Stupid thing keeps making up non-existent functions and api’s and inserting them all over the place.
You have to put it in Ask mode so it doesn’t touch your code also ChatGPT models are free so if you want to ring up an AI bill use the Claude and Sonnet models.
You can turn off the copilot autocomplete in the ide and JUST use agent/edit/ask mode
i wonder if this the reason why its so bad on the phones, it autocomplete with words that arnt even close to what you are typing.
Turn off the autocomplete, it’s shit. Do use agent mode for targeted tasks that are easy but laborious. Don’t give open ended or subjective prompts. Don’t ask it to do anything creative or novel. It has its uses. Nowhere near what the snake oil salesmen would have you believe, and probably not worth the unsubsidized cost, but for now it has uses.
Copilot is shit
Yes and no. I find its terrible at solving more complex problems but its great at writing out tests for a function/view that covers every flow. My team went from having like 40% (shit) coverage to every PR having every case tested (inb4 they’re not good tests, they are good)
With that being said, fuck CEOs and fuck AI. At least you could (mostly) escape the blockchain hype
Bro you are literally not necessary, not even the best at what you do. See everyone on codeberg.
Codeberg is so nice.
But who else is going to micromanage and bully the employees and strut around self-importantly doing jack shit? /s
Replace CEOs with AI
I’m wondering about why they got fooled. Have they noticed that LLM can do a better job than them and they think that this will also translate to software engineering?
My understanding is CEOs are mostly good at schmoozing with other CEOs and investors. A lot of investors operate on vibes, so having a CEO that can vibe with other rich bros can open pathways to funding. That’s about it. Everything else they do is a liability or could be better handled by someone with relevant expertise.
Also, we probably shouldn’t be driving most of our productivity based on the vibe check of a few rich boys.
Your last sentence is spot on but it doesn’t capture the full weight of the impact rich people vibes have on the world. The perceived value of every stock, and by extension the economy as a whole, is almost exclusively a vibe check of rich guys. There is no objective information about a company that is more indicative of that company’s success than how rich people feel about it.
And since Rich people are just interested in having the biggest number, they only invest in lines that are going up every quarter.
Mutual funds are doing the same thing, and since they’ve convinced the rest of us to invest our retirements into stocks instead of pensions, we’re all fucked when it fails.
also convincing the board of directors to not get rid of them.
replace CEOs with people
What employees?
Codeberg rules
This part really stuck out for me:
This is the latest example of a strange marketing strategy by AI companies. Instead of selling products based on helpful features and letting users decide, executives often deploy scare tactics that essentially warn people they will become obsolete if they don’t get on the AI bandwagon.
If hype doesn’t work, try threats!
Which is how you know they have a good product that they have full faith in.
when they have to blackmail, threaten, coerce, and force people to accept their product.
“The Sky Is Falling! Buy My Magic Umbrella!” is a classic hypeman’s trick.
From Java beans™ to Magic Beans.
For some odd reason, this calls to mind an emotionally immature parent trying to get their toddler to eat vegetables… no reason at all…
Just that the vegetables in this case are actually fastfood and gummibears.
Threats work well for scams. People who couldn’t be bothered to move by promises of something new and better can be motivated by fear of losing what they already have.
It’s really unfortunate psychology is looked down upon and psychologists are viewed as some “soft” profession. Zuck is a psychology major. It’s been 2 decades, most of the radical changes in which were not radical in anything other than approach to human psychology.
BTW, I’ve learned recently that in their few initial years Khmer Rouge were not known as communist organization to even many of their members. Just an “organization”. Their rhetoric was agrarian (of course peasants are hard-working virtuous people, and from peasantry working the earth comes all the wisdom, and those corrupt and immoral people in the cities should be made work to eat), Buddhist (of course the monk-feudal system of obedience, work and ascese is the virtuous way to live, though of course we are having a rebirth now so we are even wiser), monarchist (they referred to Sihanouk’s authority almost to the end), anti-Vietnamese (that’s like Jewish for German Nazis, Vietnamese are the evil). And after them taking power for some time they still didn’t communicate anything communist. They didn’t even introduce their leadership. Nobody knew who makes the decisions in that “organization” or how it was structured. It didn’t have a face. They only officially made themselves visible as Democratic Kampuchea with communism and actual leaders when the Chinese pressured them. They didn’t need to, because they were obeyed via threat (and lots of fulfillment) of violence anyway.
This is important in the sense that when you have the power, you don’t need to officially tell the people over which you have it that you rule them.
So - in these 2 decades it has also came into fashion to deliberately stubbornly ignore the fact that psychology works over masses. And everybody acts as if when there’s no technical means to make people do something, then it’s not likely or possible.
You don’t have to influence a populace. Just purchase a subgroup willing to do violence on the populace.
Violence is influence too. You still need to calculate its effects.
The code reviews will continue until morale improves.
Move to Codeberg (esp. if you’re European) - but please don’t forget to donate something as well. If we don’t pay for actual freedom, we won’t be able to keep it.
Also note that it’s for open source projects only.
The underlying software forge Codeberg uses, Forgejo, is self-hostable. I’m sure some web hosting business will get around to providing a managed hosting offering eventually.
All projects should be.
I agree with you 100% but theres also a small strange humour in the wordage of paying for freedom.
Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck 0’five
It’s a play on “free as in beer …”. We’ve seen all too well that paying with our data isn’t the way to go.
Get out or what? GitHub?
I don’t understand this insistence that all developers must use AI.
If AI made a developer better, why insist, wouldn’t the vibe coders outcompete all others?
Wouldn’t they need non AI coders to train things?
Or is it because this snake oil pitch only works when everyone does it so no one notices it’s detrimental effects?
Studies show AI coding tools make the task slower. It only makes people feel they’re faster, but reality is different. So it’s the snake oil pitch. Nobody can know it doesn’t really work and they keep throwing money at it in an increasingly more desperate “fake it till you make it”. Because, if this thing implodes, it’ll take a large part of the market and economy with it to do a rerun of the 2008 financial crisis.
Can you name or link the studies? I’d love to read more abt this
I think you might’ve misunderstood what I’m asking for, you said that studies show that working with AI makes tasks slower and I would like to know which studies show this
Oops, wrong thread.
https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
It’s because we’re expensive. That’s the long and short of it.
10 developers in Silicon Valley can run you $1-$2m in salary alone (it’s more expensive with benefits added).
The industry constantly conspires to keep the salary of software engineers down. It does it cyclically too. In 2008 I was told I would have no problem getting a 6 figure job when I graduated by 2013. Of course the economy had other ideas. Same thing with the dot Com bubble.
I currently make double what I did 10 years ago. It doesn’t actually matter much as inflation and a divorce has had my costs balloon just as much, but it’s still loads more than any other job out there.
They’ll get what they want, one way or another. Then when none of their shit works they inevitably come back begging us and we request better pay and benefits again, because we know they do this. They don’t learn, much like those reliant on AI.
10 engineers in the Bay Area would easily be 2-3 million without additional benefits or support personnel
Yeah, you’re probably right. If they had my level of experience they’re easily pulling in twice what I do as a rule of thumb
Already done. I moved everything to Codeberg a year or two ago. I strongly recommend it to anyone looking for safe, non-corporate, community-oriented version control. It’s also German and non-profit.
i urge people do do this but also donate to them too <3
Some CEO: gasp GUYS I found a new blacklisted word! Quick add non-profit to the Ai-Moderation. How dare they not pay me infinitely!
I don’t get it. AI is a tool. My CEO didn’t care about what tools I use, as long as I got the job done. Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done? They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Because like AI, your CEO is a tool.
Because unlike with the other tools you use the CEO of your company is investing millions of dollars into AI and they want a big return on their investment.
Return? No, there is no return on investment from AI. If there really was a return to be had from Devs, you wouldn’t have to force them to use it.
This is a saving face and covering their asses exercise. Option 1 is “We spent the money, nobody’s using it, the bubbles gonna burst”, the other choice is “if we can ramp up the usage numbers before the earnings call, we can get some of that sweet investor money to buy us out of being mauled by our shareholders”.
It’s shitty management, making shitty decisions to cover up their previous shitty decisions
That’s the point though. These CEOs don’t know that there is not going to be an “AI revolution”. They all think they are getting in on the ground floor of the next Google or Facebook. They genuinely believe that these “AI’s” are going to revolutionize the Internet.
That’s exactly why Elmo went from “AI is too dangerous and development on it must be stopped” to “I’m gonna built the best AI ever and I’ll call it Grok cause I want everyone to think I’m a relatable sci-fi nerd.”
At this stage,I can’t believe that they are stupid enough to believe the shit that comes out of their mouths. Hence I say that it’s not about the return from AI, but riding the bubble before it pops, and justifying their stupidity to others by force feeding the crap they spent their money on down our throats in the hope that we don’t just throw it up on them
I don’t think these CEOs have quite figured out that LLM developers are creating something that can more easily replace a CEO than a developer.
I think part of it is because they think they can train models off developers, then replace them with models. The other is that the company is heavily invested in coding LLMs and the tooling for them, so they are trying to hype them up.
GitHub is owned by Microsoft, and Microsoft is forcing AI on all the employees
They all need to be sued for unethical “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish” practices again
best I can do is rusty dull guillotine
nah rusty and a blade that is serrated… make way more mess. As an aside the guillotine was designed for theatre, the mechanism actually makes that loud noise on purpose! Pointless to kill someone without a bit of theatre don’t ya think
Honestly I’ve been recommending setting up a personal git store and cloning any project you like, I imagine the next phase of this is Microsoft making a claim that if Copilot ‘assisted’ all these projects, Microsoft is a part owner of all these projects - in a gambit to swallow and own open source.
loads of self hosted alternatives if you so require it
I am surprised they aren’t embracing it… I would. You immediately get some vague non person to blame all your failures on.
Employers aren’t loyal enough for the average person to care about their companies well being.
I agree, let them generate massive tech debt cause right now the majority of my current clients have hired me to clean up their AI slop.
is it bad for their users? oh hell yes it is. Is it great for me an other consultants/freelancers? hell yes it is. Best thing that’s ever happened to my wallet recently are vibe coders. I love those dumb prompt monkeys.
Why do they suddenly think they have to force us to use a certain tool to get the job done?
Not just that… why do they have to threat and push for people to use a tool that allegedly is fantastic and makes everything better and faster?.. the answer is that it does not work but they need to pump the numbers to keep the bubble going
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
Accurate description of most managers i’ve encountered.
It’s not about individual contributors using the right tools to get the job done. It’s about needing fewer individual contributors in the first place.
If AI actually accomplishes what it’s being sold as, a company can maintain or even increase its productivity with a fraction of its current spending on labor. Labor is one of the largest chunks of spending a company has so, if not the largest, so reducing that greatly reduces spending which means for same or higher company income, the net profit goes up and as always, the line must go up.
tl;dr Modern Capitalism is why they care
Alternatively, following their logic, keep the number of people and achieve massively higher productivity. But they don’t want that, they want to reduce the number of people having opinions and diluting the share pool, because its not about productivity, its about exerting control.
Because they make money selling you the AI. It’s that simple.
They are clueless, yet they think they know what we need.
AI make money line go up. It’s not clueless, he’s trying to sell a kind of snake oil (ok, not “snake oil”, I don’t think AI is entirely bad).
Snake oil is also not entirely bad. The placebo effect actually works.
snake oil made me sssssssick (yes the dad jokes are weak today)
No, snake oil is extremely bad. It’s a highly exploitative practice that preys on the desperation of sick people.
That’s what “snake oil” refers to. Exploiting someone by playing their emotions.
The placebo effect actually works.
The placebo effect sometimes works. But only in very specific circumstances. A placebo will not cure cancer or heart disease.
It can help with things related to pain, as mental and emotional state can directly affect the severity of pain. And a placebo can sometimes marginally improve symptoms by reducing stress levels. But that’s why placebos are used during drug trials. If a drug produces the same results as a placebo, then it doesn’t work. And that says a lot about what the placebo effect actually is. It’s just a mental state change that gets expressed as reduced physiological stress.
GitHub is being pushy? Fucking GitHub?
Should we tell him git doesn’t actually need GitHub? That it existed just fine before it and will continue to exist after it?
Ima tell him…
At some previous jobs, the newer devs would sometimes confuse the two. Its a real thing.
Me I lived through svn, mercerial, and file vault. So glad we ended up with git as the protocol.
Hell you can set up a git + file server and just use it without any Hub (Hob/lab/berg) if your bare metal enough. It works.
You can literally run a single command to setup a remote git repository on a server that has ssh.
Yep! And some emulators only do dev work that way now. N*ntendo made sure of that.
Like, really? God I feel stupid if it’s that easy
Yup
git init --bare test_repo.gitIf you can ssh into it, you should be able to add that just like any other remote to your local git.
You can clone local repos from your filesystem as well. There’s really not a lot of magic to it which is what makes it so cool.
sorry if I’m extra stupid with these questions, but how you add that as a remote then?
git remote add origin ssh://<<username>>@<<host>>/path/to/test_repo.gitArticle talking about it https://mikelev.in/futureproof/git-without-server-local-filesystem/
The Linux kernel still works off emailing patches. If such a large project doesn’t need a central repo, you don’t either.
I use self-hosted Forgejo because it’s convenient, that’s it.
It does technically have a central repo, but not the “forge” tooling around it.
I do think I’m going to move my personal shit to self-hosted Forgejo too though. One project of mine is going to be closed source (don’t boo me, there’s literally no demand for “free” in that market, the target market generally isn’t interested in programming or hosting) and I don’t want the business logic side of it to magically end up in their AI models despite me refusing to allow them. Couldn’t care less about any of the other stuff, I’m not doing anything super high tech or special.
Yeah, there’s git.kernel.org, but work happens on the mailing list, not there. If you just want a copy, you can get it there, but that’d about all there is too it.
I mean I would’ve preferred Hg.
But to the point, I think GitHub has been instrumental in the success of Git.
Sadly a lot of us are stuck with GitHub. Enterprise loves it because it has “Metrics”, and most companies aren’t about to jump ship over something like AI — especially when so many of them are already doubling down on AI in other areas.
While I don’t wish for this future, I do look forward to being one of the few that truly understands the ‘old way’ of computing like many here on Lemmy. All that knowledge I spent my youth acquiring may very well become insanely valuable in the next few decades because so many people will treat it as irrelevant.
I’ll feel a lot like this:
The future is now. The future is also ten, twenty and thirty years ago! According to GitHub’s Chief Executive Idiot himself:
the skills that will matter most include system design, AI fluency, delegation, and quality assurance
Except for “AI fluency”, this has been true for fucking ever. No serious work environment evaluates their developers on how quickly they can vomit code (or so I hope): the job is indeed about design, quality and working as a team in general.
Which means a tool that does not help with any of these is already not a revolution. When the tool actively makes quality worse and collaboration more complicated, I get the impression it is actually detrimental.Mind you, I might be dead wrong. I am personally not impressed so far. It seems to be a better autocomplete, but I don’t want to throw a glass of water out the window every time I press tab.
Funny thing to say after using their code to train the shitty-ass AI. Developers don’t need AI, but AI certainly needs developers.
AI also needs a lot of other shit to run even at a basic level. Networks, and systems… A dedicated nuclear power facility on three Mile Island.
AI can’t run without so many people plugging in the servers, and power, and installing the operating systems… The list of supporting characters is long.
What if we… Just… Stopped supporting the companies that were pushing AI?
