According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone.
I share some of your same views. It would be good if devs using AI would state that on their github or codeberg, etc. However, the immediate, kneejerk, backlash probably snuffs that disclosure. Just look ar the reactions to AI here at Lemmy Selfhosted. AI is a tool. As much as I chafe against regulation, it’s a tool that needs some heavy governmental regulation imho, but a tool nonetheless. It’s not going away. I’d say there will come a day when we use AI without even knowing it. It will be seamless.
Unfortunately, right now we are stuck in the novelty phase of AI rice cookers and pretty pictures. I think with some regulation, and more fine tuning, it could become a great dev assistant, and has some very real world use cases. I can understand why people don’t want a 100% AI coded piece of software where the dev really has no idea what they are doing as far as security. I don’t either. That’s an obvious. You’ve got to understand and be able to interpret
andunderstandthe results of an AI query. However, if the dev is competent and uses AI as an assistant, I don’t see the conundrum.I also think there are young devs who are excited about contributing to opensource and the selfhosting community. They have the fire, just not the experience. Experience is something you don’t have until after you need it.
I agree with your take, and I think it’s why there can’t be a rational discussion about AI on the internet, because AI is a very nuanced topic and the internet does not comprehend the concept of nuance.
Like all hype technology, both polar opposite sides will probably be wrong. The best and worst case outcomes are only 2 of an infinite number of outcomes in between. We will probably end up with some form of AI that sits comfortably in the middle.
Thinking that way, for engineers, I think refusing to use it will only limit you. It’s akin to refusing to use an IDE, or css. It may not feel like that, but to companies you might as well say you only code on punchcards. I can personally attest that searching for senior engineering roles last yeardid not ask if I used AI. they asked how much AI I used, and I was required to use it during the interviews. This is not one company. Every company interviewed with. It’s here to stay. Refusing to use it comes off as stubbornness to hiring managers, not some grand fight.
You’re exactly right.
I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.
AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.
I dunno, if we were pushed off machine code onto non-deterministic compilers that ran on a machine thousands of miles away with no way to know when it was changed i think we’d have balked at that too, even if compilers themselves are entirely positive.
Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.
You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.