LLMs and xfwl4 – Brian Tarricone
2026-07-29 05:01 UTC
Replies (9)
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@ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2026-07-29 05:28
Wow. I’m also astonished, OP (though maybe I shouldn’t be?), that the dev gives such self-centered answers. Like how can they not know how bad that’ll come off? But here I am, with a Claude Max 5x subscription for the past year and a half. I’m not comfortable with it, but the utility is just too great for me to take a principled stance here. I like it, and I want it, so I’m using it. Maybe that’s morally questionable, or worse. But, as I said: here I am. All of his answers are complete cop-out sidesteps, but that line in particular, I mean… Fuck, dude. I was previously quite positive feelings about Xfce finally getting the last piece of the puzzle to switch to wayland, but uh, yeah. Not anymore. I’m curious if the Xfce developers that decided to hire Brian knew he’d be so heavily using LLM’s to develop it, if that would’ve given them pause or not. It would appear that he got the money first, then decided to disclose all of his LLM use. Xfce was always known as the stable, conservative, slow, reliable DE. I just can’t see its userbase being too happy about this announcement. I’m certainly not. I use it on a very weak laptop with Debian 13, but I think I may switch to a different lightweight DE when Debian 14 comes around, perhaps LXQt or a window manager.
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@hperrin@lemmy.ca 2026-07-29 05:40
It’s a tool, like any other. No. It’s not. It’s a tool unlike any other. It can inadvertently cause you to infringe people’s copyrights. Using it means you don’t get the copyrights to the things it produces. It will literally make you dumber and lazier by using it. It’s the world’s shittiest tool used by the world’s most unimpressive people.
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@fozid@feddit.uk 2026-07-29 08:33
I enjoyed your post and glad you have a balanced view of llm use. I totally agree llm’s are a useful tool and will inevitably be used in all and every field they can be However I feel like it will go down like a lead balloon in this community as there is a lot of hate for llm’s, and I even expect my comment to be slatted by “them”.
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@lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 2026-07-29 19:22
As I said in the also-shared: So yes, I use Claude quite a bit while developing xfwl4. I don’t vibe-code Those two sentences are mutually exclusive. I’m sad to hear that I might have to drop XFCE. Or, at least, stay in the X11 version of it.
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@loreng@beehaw.org 2026-07-29 20:22
But here I am, with a Claude Max 5x subscription for the past year and a half. I’m not comfortable with it, but the utility is just too great for me to take a principled stance here. I like it, and I want it, so I’m using it. Maybe that’s morally questionable, or worse. But, as I said: here I am. If you truly had principles and were uncomfortable with it, you wouldn’t fucking use it. It’s a tool, like any other. It is quite literally a tool unlike any other in many both measurably and unmeasurably bad ways.
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@catfeeder@piefed.blahaj.zone 2026-07-30 06:04
“Here’s the list of problems with genAI: unethical training, data centers are bad for environment, horrible corpos behind the thing, potential copyright issues. What is my position on LLMs, you might ask. I love it and I pay for subscription of one of the shit corpos!!!” One of the most braindead takes on LLMs I’ve heard in awhile.
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@whelk@retrolemmy.com 2026-07-30 14:45
LLMs, Rust, and Wayland all have been striking me as bizarrely cultish in the Linux development world, so I’m going to stay well away from this. They seem to be aggressively showing up everywhere so I don’t know how long I’ll be able to do that. Here’s hoping they don’t spread through XFCE as a whole. It was always my favorite of the mainline DEs
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@whoiswrongwithyou@lemmy.ml 2026-07-30 20:42
It’s not possible to avoid llm use in volunteer open source development if you prioritize software quality and security. Whether we want it or not, people looking for bugs are using llms. They are finding phenomenal numbers of bugs. Implementing the fixes has created a huge workload. Whether we want it or not, the Wayland people have decided that a new, piecemeal system for graphical desktops that relies on many disparate implementations of protocols is what we will use going forward. This has created a tremendous workload because there are now many different channels through which bugs and updates must be handled. In this situation a volunteer development community must rely on every work saving tool they can just to keep up. For the person in the trenches there is no alternative. If you prioritize quality as measured by the extent to which your software supports the various Wayland doohickies or security as measured by active exploitable bugs, you have to use llms. These conditions will eventually remove the structure of incentives for open source development. None of the above is a value judgement.
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@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 2026-07-30 21:09
I see that moving to KDE was a wise decision. This is going to tear the Xfce project apart.