General Discussion • Re: Pale Moon's PR Problem

I don't know, seems to me I've seen people dropping in more frequently to share contributions and extensions in recent months than I've ever seen. I'm sure that the AI coding assistants are a huge help. I've been thinking of trying to code a couple of extensions myself, since I already have an expensive AI subscription I could tap into. And I know literally zero about coding for XUL, but I have no doubt whatsoever that I could do it with the help of a competent AI coding assistant.

Yeah, this is one reason why I was reluctant to reply to this guy above's post (I can't ever remember his username, but it sounds like garbagev or something) where he suggested we try to get on some kind of Codeberg list for people who reject AI. The problem is... our project is actually a position where AI could really help us out a lot, and you just highlighted a big reason why.

Most projects turn into AI slop because the developers used to carefully code new features themselves from scratch. In our case, we actually spend a lot of time trying to adapt half-busted code Mozilla wrote to our own architecture by hand, and that's where most of our experience lies... cleaning up bad or broken code that makes wrong assumptions and testing to make sure everything behaves as expected even if we didn't write every line ourselves. So guess what that means as far as us being prepared for what AI can offer?

From what I can tell, using AI generated code to accomplish something is a lot like using Mozilla's code... the output won't be perfect and you'll have to fix it up, but it will be "close enough" in a lot of cases that you can turn it into what you want with a little effort. Much less than starting from scratch.

I mean... we don't have a ton of developers. Something like AI could help our existing developers do more, and maybe even help tech-savvy people in the community make the jump to writing actual code. I do worry about us using it though, precisely because we have a lot of old-school users who would see AI as bad. My view is... using AI for code is very different from using it for art or writing. I can understand people's objections to it in those contexts, but I honestly feel like refusing to use AI would almost be like refusing to use an IDE that does code completion type stuff, or refusing to look up code snippets on Stack Overflow and copy/paste them and adapt them to what you need if they're "close enough," and in general would be like going Amish in the technology sense.