So when the news circulated recently that the Lutris developer was using Claude to help write the code (and the angry posts/articles appeared) I figured I’d reach out to Mathieu to hear the other side of things.
I chatted to him a little, asking for his side of the story. He goes into some depth on how he uses it as part of his work-flow, the transparency in open-source projects in general, licensing and ownership of code that A.I. writes, safety and so on. Plenty of answers from Lutris, if you’re curious on the topic. As ever, you can find the link here:
https://gardinerbryant.com/mathieu-comandon-explains-his-use-of-ai-in-lutris-development/
Nothing but softball questions, no pushback, waste of a read.
Thought you might be being a bit harsh but wow, no you’re right.
I thought the issue was he was no longer going to identify ai code more than it being used.
I want to hate on this guy, but at the same time this is just the reality of a lot of workflows these days. Most programmers I know professionally will do boilerplate work with Claude Code (like the chainsaw analogy he gave) and then do the more meaningful work themselves. Same for automating commit schedules.
Especially for small low-impact projects like Lutris (linux community loves it, but its just 3 people), if you’re going to maintain development speed, involving AI automation is probably going to be more of a positive to you than a negative. The real issue would be if the AI use snowballs and they unrealistically increase the scope of their project as that’s when most projects actually start to die.
No one cares, dude was a total dick when called out and remains a dick still. Heroic is much better just use that and forget this clown.
@PerfectDark I used to really like Lutris. Clean, simple, and very minimal (unlike, for example, Heroic.) But it has been kind of falling behind in a lot of ways lately. It still defaults to their ancient implementation of WINE instead of Proton (or did last I used it) and it seemed to be really hard even to get it to properly use a modern Proton/Wine-GE somehow. (I couldn’t say exactly why, but somehow it just doesn’t work as well.)
While they keep things small and mostly do the real work themselves it will be fine, but it seems people who push it like this ultimately go the “vibe coding” route. I hope not. I’d still like to see Lutris remain on the map, but if it reaches the point they start handing it off to Claude it will inevitably eventually become unsustainable. We’ll see.
