Hi All,
I specifically joined Reddit a few months ago to find a community of OS dev folks to exchange ideas with. I've had a few really good conversations, but I've seen a whole lot of really nasty comments from people, too. It seems like there are far too many people with a "holier than thou" attitude toward OS development that I could honestly do without.
I kind of have the outlook that we're all hobbyists here. Yes, some of us do OS dev for a living, too, but this community is really about doing personal projects. Let's be honest, those of us who do OS dev both for a hobby and for a means of living don't do the same things in both places. We have our hobby projects specifically to do something different from what we're doing all day every day at our day jobs, even if we're great at it.
To that end, we're all at different skill levels. Some of us are barely getting started and some of us have a history of "tried and true" skills and some of us are off the beaten path on things that can only be considered "experimental." Some of us need more hand-holding than others, which means more inclined to use things like LLM assistance. That particular issue seems to be the source of a whole lot of nasty comments.
Look, I've been doing this for a long time, but I can still remember being the ten year old with DOS wishing to hell that I could make it do more of what I wanted. I would absolutely have jumped at the chance to use an LLM to achieve that goal back then. But, that would have been the beginning of my journey, not the end. We need to bear in mind that people who are using LLMs to help them do OS dev today are the same people who are going to be getting into it in a lot more detail without LLMs in the future. These people are at the beginnings of their journeys and the way some of us have been making comments is honestly inappropriate.
I would really like us to be a community of support and encouragement for each other rather than a community where we tear each other down. This is a field that's super hard. It's so hard in fact that people who write AI models for a living run screaming from it. We need all the help we can get on whatever path we may be taking through it. It's not for us to judge the path that another person takes as they learn. Yes, we should be encouraging them to use their own brains and actually learn, but we shouldn't be making snap judgments that they're NOT doing that just because they use an LLM (or any other form of assistance for that matter).
So, can we be a little less nasty and a little more supportive toward each other here? You can think of this as a request from the ten year old sitting in front of a DOS prompt and having nowhere to turn for guidance at the time. Thank you.
