Also agentic coding detractors: "How dare you use AI to help build a new open source project."
I'm joking and haven't read the comments you're referring to, but whether or not AI was involved is irrelevant per se. If anyone finds themselves having a gut reaction to "AI", just mentally replace it with "an intern" or "a guy from Fiverr". Either way, the buck stops with whomever is taking ownership of the project.
If the code/architecture is buggy or unsafe, call that out. If there's a specific reason to believe no one with sufficient expertise reviewed and signed off on the implementation, call that out. Otherwise, why complain that someone donated their time and expertise to give you something useful for free?
It’s not the guy from Fiverr anyone is annoyed with. It’s the tech CEOs who beat everyone over the head with:
- ”the future will be a-guy-from-Fiverr-native”
- ”we are mandating that 80% of our employees incorporate a-guy-from-Fiverr into their daily workflow by year end”
And everyone pretends this is serious.
Then there are people who are pulling off cool demo stunts that amount to duct taping fireworks to a lawn mower but they post about it on X doing their best Steve Jobs thought leader impersonation.
And again everyone pretends like this is serious.
The annoyance is like that friend you tell about this great new song, and they’re excited, but only because it’s something they can to tell other people and look cool. Not because they’re into music.
(Regarding mandates, of course they're a hamfisted solution, but it's not totally unreasonable that management would attempt to establish an incentive for its workforce to learn and put into practice a valuable new skill.)
Either way, that doesn't address the response to this project. Johan isn't Sam Altman. All Johan is guilty of here is building something useful and giving it to the rest of us for free.
This is how I've been treating AI, except instead of assuming your junior SWE is generally sane and has some understand of what you're doing, you have to make sure you double check everything.