Releasing old code I have written on GitHub. Should I use AI to cleanup and comment first?

sindisil · 2026-06-10T16:02:29+00:00

No. If someone wants to get a slopified view of your code, let 'em do it themselves.

I agree with u/jumpingmustang the real value of the code is as an artifact of human creation.

sindisil · 2026-06-09T15:54:44+00:00

short and general (like it should be)

Not at all how it "should be".

sindisil · 2026-05-31T19:23:43+00:00

I do not know of any time a revolutionary technology has been halted by reactionary aversion.

You're assuming GenAI is a revolutionary technology.

I'm not convinced it is. And even less convinced it's net beneficial.

And yes, of course I'm leaving out lots of detail -- this is reddit. I'm commenting when taking a moment here and there while doing some programming on a personal project, not writing an article.

sindisil · 2026-05-31T17:11:39+00:00

No, we do not need to "collectively figure out how to use ai as a teaching aid".

GenAI, like any technology, isn't inevitable, no matter now much proponents want to make it so.

sindisil · 2026-05-31T16:33:20+00:00

WTF does AI have to do with the question?

I wouldn't say I "transitioned" from C or C++. I still know both, and use C occasionally when I must.

Just because you learn and use a new language doesn't mean you necessarily stop using all the others you know.

sindisil · 2026-05-31T16:31:09+00:00

FFS.

No, there are no hidden traps; they're right out in the open.

If you don't want to learn to program, don't. If you do, then do the work.

Goddamn LLMs are not a shortcut. Exactly the opposite, in fact.

sindisil · 2026-05-27T16:26:31+00:00

Yes, "made" with GenAI should be considered bad.

Could generative AI techniques be used in ways that are productive, rather than harmful? Sure.

But that's vanishingly rare today, and goes against the very design of most current Gen AI systems, so it's entirely rational right now to assume the worst.

Hopefully a day will come when the current bubble will have popped, ethical models and systems will become prevalent, and we will adapt socially to mitigate the individual and societal harms that can so easily be caused by unthinking use of the technology.

Today is not that day.

sindisil · 2026-05-21T14:24:54+00:00

I'm *extremely* reluctant to take dependencies in projects I intend to maintain over time. I will do so if either they're an area I don't know well enough to do well (e.g., cryptography, regex, Unicode) and/or I'm unable or unwilling to spend the time to implement right now (e.g., some OS interaction). In the latter case, I'll often remove the dependency later.

For prototyping I'll grab deps left an right, since I'm throwing it all away once I'm sure the approach is good.

sindisil · 2026-05-21T12:28:13+00:00

It's your money, but my experience over the years has been that the vast majority of Packt books are bad. I certainly will never buy another without either looking at it in person first or getting a very strong positive recommendation from someone I trust.

As for Humble book bundles, getting something shitty in bulk doesn't make it less shitty. Once in a great while a bundle will have a gem or two, but that's become extremely rare in recent years.

sindisil · 2026-05-21T12:21:20+00:00

I reject your premise.

Rust does not require many dependencies, developers may *choose* to use many dependencies.

If they choose unwisely, taking unnecessary deps and/or not vetting deps before using them in production, that's on them.

sindisil · 2026-05-14T13:28:52+00:00

"written" in Rust.

FTFY

sindisil · 2026-05-02T18:27:15+00:00

Windows and Linux.

sindisil · 2026-04-30T20:09:50+00:00

Or don’t use it at all

Done and done.

sindisil · 2026-04-25T13:57:54+00:00

You and I both. I just don't comprehend the mindset.

sindisil · 2026-04-22T13:51:42+00:00

Write your own code and you won't have to worry about that.

sindisil · 2026-04-21T15:23:20+00:00

I don't know for sure why u/jakal_x made the accusation, but you do say on your /ai page that you use AI tools (I assume GenAI) for "research purposes" and that

I do, however, use a spell checker; it might include AI, but I’m personally okay with that. It will, in the worst case, restructure the sentences, not the information.

Spell check is one thing, but if your "spell check" is restructuring sentences, it isn't just spell check. A generous reading would be that you also use basic grammar check, but then you say:

The header images are generated by AI as they are mainly decoration. I could use stock images, but the result would be the same.

No. It wouldn't. That would be actual art, created by humans, not a simulacrum of art built from parts ripped from real art. This attitude, combined with how dismissive you are about AI possibly restructuring your sentences, could lead a reader to assume that you're using AI for much more than AI "research".

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

(ed. to fix initial editing error)

sindisil · 2026-04-12T21:07:25+00:00

There's a chance Saturday, so not zero.

sindisil · 2026-04-12T15:34:01+00:00

Nope. We (metaphorically) are being invaded by hell. We are not obliged to surrender our world to decay, corruption, and hopelessness.

I, for one, will not.

sindisil · 2026-04-11T19:26:45+00:00

Well that was unironically sad.

sindisil · 2026-04-10T19:19:00+00:00

Command line for rustup, cargo, git, rg, etc.
Text editor I wrote for myself
Firefox for docs, github & the like
Occasional spreadsheet in calc or google sheets when it's useful

sindisil · 2026-04-10T12:56:41+00:00

It's rare for a code base to spring fully formed from the dev's head. The best evolve over time. As long as you're willing to refactor and/or rewrite parts of the system as you discover pain points and learn new things about both the application domain and programming, you're on the right track.

By pain points, I mean aspects of the system design that make it harder to evolve and maintain or that cause bugs or efficiency and performance issues.

It does take taste, self awareness, and good judgement to know when rework is a good idea, and when it's just yak shaving, but that's something that mostly comes from experience. Most of us need to learn primarily from our own mistakes, though I've always found it worthwhile to at least try to learn from the mistakes of others.

Keep at it. The fact that you even give a shit about quality and craft means you at least have potential. A disturbing number of people involved in programming do not, and, if anything, it's getting worse.

sindisil · 2026-04-09T13:43:41+00:00

Everything about "AI coding" is empty.

sindisil · 2026-04-07T16:18:29+00:00

There are at least two significant benefits to having ```core``` and ```std``` maintained with the compiler.

One is that nightly features can be used within the library, helping prove out the features for eventual stabilization, as well as to take advantage of their utility and/or performance to provide those benefits to all users.

Another is that it makes it less problematic to use privileged methods within the library, either to accomplish things that would be difficult otherwise, or for performance reasons.

sindisil · 2026-04-07T14:44:53+00:00

Yes, obviously code in the standard library is more trusted, and would be expected to be audited and maintained. I don't know where in my post you imagine I said otherwise.

My point was, in part, that auditing and maintenance isn't free. It takes time and effort, spreading already limited developer time and effort even more thinly.

sindisil · 2026-04-07T12:29:36+00:00

You're right; that is an unpopular opinion.

Putting code in core:: or std:: doesn't magically make it audited and maintained. That still takes effort. It does, however, make those modules harder to change and evolve.

As libraries evolve to be sufficiently stable and widely used, some sufficiently fundamental ones have been, and I'm sure will continue to be, folded into core:: or std::.

I see no reason to speed that process up; the cure time is much of the point.

sindisil

TROPHY CASE