@linmob Seeing all the progress from TheMightyCat kind of pisses me off. They Vibe-mainline everything with AI and don't do it correctly. I've only looked at sensors but there they use bit-banged i2c to talk to the sensors directly instead of using the SLPI coprocessor which is made for this and already has mainline infrastructure.
PostmarketOS has a AI policy that explicitly forbids it so these changes won't be merged and it just kinda sucks seeing someone build a vibe-coded project ontop.
Well, when someone else’s progress makes you sad, I think it’s time to look inward and address the problem.
As for the main camera: ironically, it uses C-PHY patches I coded about two years ago. The patchset didn’t work. For a year, postmarketOS shipped my broken patchset. Then, when I got back to working on it, I asked ChatGPT for a quick review. There was a mistake in a one-line patch. Not rocket science. Just a wrong bit shift. Fixing it made the whole patchset work.
2. It’s better to run mainline with a few ugly hacks than a completely deprecated downstream with n-times more weirdness.
3. Most importantly ‒ some people who vibecode are willing to take the extra steps to upstream, improve, and learn. This may or may not happen without LLMs.
The way out I see is guiding people toward best practices. Win-win.
@knievelcat Thanks for the insight. I did (and do, ... no time in life with between dayjob and baby) not have the time to look into how TheMighty Cat does things, as - IIRC - they do not openly admit to vibe-coding (unlike the guy that vibe-ports the Pixel 9a). Is it just the way they do things, or is there other evidence for vibe-coding?
Edit: my original comment was in no way intended as criticism of you or you featuring those changes on the weekly mobile Linux news. I love the work you are doing and it's a great way to catch up with what's been happening
@knievelcat@linmob that is sad to see. I guess it's like generating technical debt at speed ? In any case, not the kind of approach compatible with a project centred on sustainability and reusing discarded hardware
@linmob@knievelcat Recent update: they themselves admitted they "don’t write a single line of code anymore." if there was any doubt that they're just making slop that would never be accepted into pmOS (and should probably be excluded from these updates for that, it's not helping GNU-like mobile Linux if it'll never make it to pmOS) it's definitely been cleared by now.
pmOS has no jurisdiction over other projects. so if themightycat is contributing hw to the linux kernel, it can be included if everything that they contribute to pmaports is handwritten (afaik)
