I agree.

As someone who uses a number of LLMs often as a pair programmer / sounding board - they’re incredibly useful if you have a very clear idea of your goal and also a solid idea of the architectural patterns you’re going after because they’re so often flatly wrong or suggest solutions that are wildly inefficient/inappropriate for larger projects/applications.

The more context you can provide the better it does but it still falls over often - suggesting courses of action or solutions that are completely hallucinated.

The one thing that’s consistently true is that the better I can describe my goals the better the response tends to be.

The best part about using them is that, for the most challenging work, I find that forcing myself to clearly explain my problem and goals in writing often leads me to a solution without ever having to submit a request.

There’s something about trying to clearly explain the problem to someone who “doesn’t know the space” that’s been helpful to finding the solution.

It’s odd that I had to rediscover this in such a visceral way after a previous life as a tech product person.

As someone who hasn’t had a drink for 23 years one of the big issues with former addicts and alcoholics is the same “if it’s not good for me it’s not good for you” attitude we see everywhere else.

It’s yet more exceptionalism where we mistake the phenomenon of our perception and experience as a direct stand in for everyone else’s.

Even more problematic that it comes from someone with (and I’m willing to step out on a ledge here) a self-professed disease (alcoholics often refer to “their disease”.) That’s fine, but you don’t see diabetics recommending everyone constantly monitor their blood glucose and take insulin.

Like yes, I understand that when my wife has her first beer it doesn’t set off the trigger I have where I need all the beer (and liquor and whatever drugs you have on you) in the world until I don’t remember who I am.

Good enough? I mean it’s allowed. But it’s only good enough if a licensee decides your their goal is to make using the code they changed or added as hard as possible.

Usually, the code was obtained through a VCS like GitHub or Gitlab and could easily be re-contributed with comments and documentation in an easy-to-process manner (like a merge or pull request). I’d argue not completing the loop the same way the code was obtained is hostile. A code equivalent of taking the time (or not) to put their shopping carts in the designated spots.

Imagine the owner (original source code) making the source code available only via zip file, with no code comments or READMEs or developer documentation. When the tables are turned - very few would actually use the product or software.

It’s a spirit vs. letter of the law thing. Unfortunately we don’t exist in a social construct that rewards good faith actors over bad ones at the moment.

As someone who worked at a business that transitioned to AGPL from a more permissive license, this is exactly right. Our software was almost always used in a SaaS setting, and so GPL provided little to no protection.

To take it further, even under the AGPL, businesses can simply zip up their code and send it to the AGPL’ed software owner, so companies are free to be as hostile as possible (and some are) while staying within the legal framework of the license.