Report from a Slop Factory: LLMs and FOSS

Growing up I always had half disassembled old electronics littering my room and now I have half built software projects littering my github. LLMs have taken my already ADHD-fueled love of tinkering and poured petrol on it. I have “shipped” more software in the last six months than I think the rest of my life combined. It is super addicting to see an idea you had just a couple hours ago come into reality and then do that constantly every day. It doesn't help when U.S.-based mega-corpos are giving tokens away for free.

I plan on giving a lightning speed tour of all the projects I've worked on in the last three months and show their shortcomings and the fact that I'm not using them and no one else is and maybe some of the contributions that were a little bit more helpful. Maybe we can kind of collectively get a picture of how LLMs can help and hurt open source contribution. The fact is that it's really very early days, and we don't really know how this will turn out.

Here's some of the projects I want to show off in no particular order.

A homebrew Linux App Store GUI that I built after adding Linux support to a pre-existing Mac OS, homebrew App Store GUI.

Adding Linux support to a rewritten in rust clone of homebrew.

Putting rancher desktop into a flatpak to make installation on Linux much easier.

Putting a full VM hypervisor and GUI into a Podman container so you can do all of your virtual machines and testing in Podman containers.

Making a giant matrix of Linux images that ship all kinds of kernel distribution and desktop UI combinations. Still in progress

Backporting gnome 50 to the Enterprise Linux 10 desktop trying to fulfill my promise of bringing modern desktop features to a rock solid professional boring bottom-layer.

A TUI app for installing all kinds of pimp out your terminal stuff and also additional TUI apps and special fonts and themes and re-written im rust alternatives of pre-existing CLI applications. I made it cross-platform to work on Windows and MacOS in addition to Linux hoping it would be a gateway drug for people to switch over to Linux.

After my lightning tour I want to give a quick assessment of the fact that I hardly use any of this stuff. I spend all of my time on my phone just vibe coding new projects and I'm unsure anyone else will use it or is using it because they're busy solving their own problems using their own LLMs to build their own random, vibe coded software projects. So finally, going over my mixed emotions at the end of my time of spending hours a day tinkering on my computer, trying to solve problems through trial and error.

• LLMs are fun to use, also a little scary

• Its much easier to make a proof of concept than product people will use