@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
