I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an AI buff. I use it (unpaid) mostly for a search aid or assistance with setting up services in my homeserver (new to homelabbing) when I get stuck, as I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to devote to it due to life obligations.
My question is: Do you feel it is ethical and/or moral to use AI to develop FOSS?
I’m genuinely torn on this issue. Part of me feels it’s counterintuitive, yet the another part of me knows the probability of it going away are slim to none and using it to develop FOSS is a way to “use it against itself”, for lack of a better term.
This is my first post on Lemmy. I’m asking to please keep it cordial. I’m not looking for an elitist lecture. I genuinely want to know the community’s thoughts.
P.S. I’ve toyed with local models, but I don’t have the hardware to make them remotely useful. I’m still learning and tweaking to see what can be achieved on limited hardware.
I use massive amounts of AI for home lab dev and operations. It’s an incredible tech that unlocks so much for homelab devs. I never would have the time or patience to build out an entire system like I have now.
It has allowed me to de-google my life completely now. I run SSO with a mail server, file server, gitea, arr stack, immich for photos, and dozens more things. The whole stack monitors and acts on alerts by itself. Quite wild.
I use a couple DGX Spark boxes for inference. Currently running Deepseek v4 Flash 0731.
I have zero reliance on big tech now (aside from the annoying Google sso; that will take time to migrate away from).
So yes, I use AI just a tad. It would be foolish not to.
Some background: I’ve been a professional software dev/arch for 35 years.
Why not V4.1 Flash? I know it's hard to keep up with these releases.
But yeah, for personal projects it's pretty great, but I honestly don't want to become "stuck" with it, where I am not able to fix my setup without relying on AI.
I’m basically there. I don’t have the time to fix if something goes wrong. If AI were suddenly unavailable, and everything started going haywire with my cluster, I’d shut it down and go back to using other peoples computers (cloud).
But that can’t and won’t happen.
I have not tried v4.1. I typically wait until there’s a “recipe” someone else makes that makes it easy to load on my devices. Haven’t looked yet but those lag for a week or more.