> the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer
That's harsh. Consider English might not be the author's first language (I see Chinese on the screenshots). Just opening the site I get all the info I need from the text (local first, no account, no telemetry, that's great), install instructions are immediately visible, there are screenshots, even the config file format is one scroll away. This is a great landing page for an open source tool.
> Consider English might not be the author's first language
This is clearly LLM-written text, not something that the author asked an LLM to translate from a different language. Not sure how the author's first language is relevant.
The author may very well be working in Mandarin or something and asked it to create an english language explanation of the project. Then the LLM generated the text based on their request.
They could've written text in Mandarin and used an LLM (or any other translation tool) to translate it to English, which wouldn't have introduced the LLM writing style.
They didn't, so the reason isn't that English isn't their first language, it's that they didn't want to spend time writing text. In which case I don't understand how this is different from a native English speaker doing the same thing.
Who cares? Even if it’s LLM generated (which is not 100% sure, I’m pretty sure I could have written this description with bold keywords myself), the text is dense and easy to read. Rejecting LLM output without even thinking about the content doesn’t make any sense.
> the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer. It sticks out like sore thumb.
The comment is fair and accurate. The vacuous marketing speak is tedious, unpleasant and risks undermining the technology it makes a flailing attempt to describe.
Your non-native English speaker excuse is neither fair nor accurate since an AI translation of a human-written Mandarin language text does not introduce the style of writing being criticised.
Not every open source project requires a grandiose marketing site littered with manipulative, cloying language. Let the project speak for itself.
> The comment is fair and accurate. The vacuous marketing speak is tedious, unpleasant
I don’t agree at all. The text and illustrations are straight to the point. I just took the time to read the page fully and honestly every word is useful to me. I’m interested in this tool because Logi Options+ sucks, and it clears out every question I have for a replacement. I know what features it offers, what devices it’s compatible with, what it looks like, how to install it, even how it uses the network (update checker disabled by default is a nice touch)
I fail to see how this isn’t the perfect website for an open source productivity tool
Seems like we should be able to disagree, as you're doing here, without all the "that's harsh" (it wasn't) and "who cares?" (people, including you) comments.
Statistically, if it was LLM generated, is it actually more bug dense than human generated code was before this stuff all came out?
This weird take of “an LLM made it, it must be slop and buggy” ignores the reality of how almost all software written by humans was also quite shit before LLM’s came along
As an addenda, human written code is much more maintainable with respect to AI emitted blobs. At least a band of humans can forge that code to a much better shape.
Everything is fine for a standard low enough. This is the crux of the issue with LLM work, it is poor quality and shifts the burden of mental work to the consumer rather than the producer, while the producer attempts to extract credit for the work.
Only significant change I would make is have the top navbar not be transparent with body content underlaid beneath it, which makes things hard to read when the page is scrolled. And move some of the links at the very bottom of page like 'github' into the top navbar.
That would imply that the complainer has nothing useful to add to the discussion, whereas just saying that the website is probably ai generated and off putting to them is valuable info about the project.
As LLM generated template web GUI go it's relatively inoffensive, at least it's easy to navigate and doesn't waste time with sliders, animated effects, etc. It's just a navbar across the top and then content.
As far as the page body content goes it seems like LLMs have taken a little bit too enthusiastically to an Apple style presentation of product features.
It's not virtue signalling but it shows that if the author of said software (if there's one) didn't bother to spend time writing things on the website, there's a correlation that they wouldn't bother spending time writing code either.
And that's what I see first thing on the repo. Lots of LLM-style writing in the README, which makes me think if this is a vibecoded app, which looks like it.
I won't let them speak for me though. I think people who let AI speak for them in places other humans read probably couldn't speak for themselves pre-LLM. It's sad.
This is very subjective. You are willing to outsource one core competency (coding), but not another (documentation and other written comms) ?
I think the bigger personal challenge is to not outsource thinking, understanding and judgement as we leverage new tools, and to continue our personal learning journeys. After 20+ years as a software engineer, you can probably coast on past experience for a long time... but if you aren't learning and exercising (one way or another), your skills will stagnate. That would be sad.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. The author might just dislike (or lack experience) in dealing with frontend.
Especially if it’s free or open source. It’s generous to even pay for a domain, right?
They did bother to do the thing they loved doing - the thing of value - and didn’t bother doing the boring thing. Instead of finding it within yourself to offer some thanks or encouragement you find an unimportant “blemish” to pile on. If that ain’t virtue signalling I don’t know what is.
It’s also an emphatic reminder of the truism that you just can’t please some people.
The idea that every open source project has to be a product backed by garish marketing material is something that only comes from the entrepreneur-bro types. It's right to call it out.
If it were an overly elaborate human creation I'd agree that criticism was unnecessary and perhaps even insensitive.
The Chinese version of the website through Google Translate shows the same LLMisms, so while I don't know which version was authored first but neither was human-authored regardless of language proficiency.
I'll kindly disagree with you. Trying one's best and then running it through a proofreader is a viable option for the author as well. It allows the author to keep their voice while polishing their writing as well.
For me, the "finally local" call is disturbing, hinting that there are no other alternatives, ever. For Linux GP noted that there's Solaar, which supports all the features of this tool. I also use Solaar without any problems on my Linux systems.
Also notably, fwupdmgr provides updates for Logitech hardware natively, so there's nothing "finally local" about it. It's a new, polished tool written in Rust for more platforms, and kudos to them. However this doesn't vindicate their use of LLM for the site text.
See, English is not my first language either, however one can sharpen it with by using it.
This website still would have taken at least a week to make. It’s pretty nice for an open source project website.
Between no website and shiny but crappy LLM website, I’ll take the latter, and I wouldn’t wish another 2 weeks of unpaid copy writing on any open source dev.
You can be a seasoned engineer but making websites is still a major b**. The small tasks required to make it "presentable" site just compound, until you just don't even want to do it.
Thank you Lordy for LLMs because I am going to hurt myself if I ever have to design and wire another contact form.
One of the reasons why people just go "meh, whatever, good enough" and install wordpress, use some popular wordpress contact form. Have it give mail to a postfix daemon on same server that listens only on localhost and relays outbound via your own infra. Or similar. A base wordpress install is pretty hard to screw up if you don't start adding weird plugins to it, and it will auto-update itself by default. I can't even imagine taking the time now to do this by hand.
Okay, but how about a shiny LLM website but with human-written text that's actually nice to read and not some unedited AI output? That doesn't take a week.
It's just a bit of text for a website that describes what a product does, what features it has, and maybe an FAQ. It shouldn't take you long. For something like this you can even start with LLM text and then rewrite it in your own words and it will sound much better .
Having had to edit the documentation from native English speakers in the past, rewriting "in their own words" made it unclear, way too detailed about unnecessary options, and badly formed sentences.
The average person cannot write good documentation (or website copy). It's an actual skill to learn how to phrase things, ensure that the documentation delivers the right level of detail to the different reader types etc.
As English writers, software developers make great programmers, not authors.
Saying that the average person can't write good documentation or copy means nothing when the LLMs can't write good documentation or copy either. I'd rather have crappy human written docs than the LLM word salad. For example,
> A background watcher reads the foreground app's identifier once per second; when it changes, the overlay you authored for that app is layered on top of the device's global bindings, with per-app entries winning and any unlisted button falling through to the global map.
as is in the documentation right now could have just read
> Your device will automatically use app-specific keybinds when a given app is in focus.
So much of the documentation copy especially is typical of the ways LLMs leak implementation instructions into their written copy.
People manage to write 500 word essays in school in a few days just fine, but writing a website landing page suddenly takes two months?
According to wordcounter.net, this landing page has 850 words. Most of that is just LLM fluff that could easily be removed, but even if you want to keep the original size, to spend two months on this you have to be writing less than 15 words a day.
It’s different. You can’t measure it by word count.
I’ve thought “hey I’ll just throw together this 5 page website on Squarespace, it’ll take a week at most” and despite only having like 5000 words it can take over a month. When you see how slowly it’s coming together it really destroys your motivation as well.
The words depend on the layout. The layout depends on the words. It all depends on art, and call to action, and SEO, and mobile responsiveness, and…
You can spend like an hour tweaking one hero sentence. It’s a lot more complicated then what we did in school, ie “Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused in a racist town, knowing he will lose.”
If you had to write those 18 words on a website it’d probably take half a day to decide how you wanted to write them, and where you wanted to put them.
But the discussion is about AI-generated text, not the website. It's totally possible to AI generate a website design and then write the text on it yourself.
> People manage to write 500 word essays in school in a few days just fine, but writing a website landing page suddenly takes two months?
What the h... I mean, it's an opensource software to make Logitech's users life less miserable, and you are comparing that to the effort of a student writing an essay, where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?
> where their only or main job during those days is writing the essay?
Writing 850 words shouldn't take you two months even if you only have 10 minutes a day to spend on it. The discussion is about the short description on the product's website, not the product/code itself.
This isn't a class or an assignment. This is real life with stakes.
This is sales. And the right words means tens of thousands of more customers / users / contributors / stars / whatever over time. The wrong ones = dead and forgotten.
Easily yes. Developing an open source project is a free time activity. I can easily think of a year's worth of projects I'd rather do in my free time than write website copy.
A simple website that conveys all the information in this one would have taken less than an hour to make. There’s no need for all the bells and whistles for a project like this.
Except "website made by LLM" almost invariably means the software was "written" by an LLM too, and thus is likely full of security vulnerabilities, bugs, and so on. It may also mean that github issues are being reviewed by an AI, which opens the door up to the AI to malicious prompting.
I think I strongly disagree with your first sentence. Strongly. I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English to know that the two are not an uncommon combination. Last year, I worked with someone whose first language was something from China - no idea which flavour - and they would often pass their written comms through an LLM. I could tell when they had done so by the onset of sudden grammatical correctness. But I don't think they were doing this with the intention of deceiving, merely of communicating clearly and correctly.
Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
> I've worked with enough people with fine coding skills and terrible English
What about people with fine English and terrible coding skills?
What about people with both terrible English and terrible coding skills?
> Now, I often find Claude's idea of idiomatic prose to be a bit load-bearingly seam-hitting as it lands not this point, but THAT one, but it is probably better than something hacked out by a person who confuses tenses, cases, pronouns and when they can enverb a noun. So I tend towards giving people the benefit of the doubt on this.
Personally, I find AI writing as insufferable as anyone else (though Anthropic's is particularly bad, maybe just due to my familiarity with it), but I wouldn't judge individuals for using it to make communication more readable, rephrase what they mean etc. If anything, any difficulty in reading my prose would support that.
> Lastly, if you think LLM-written software is full of security vulnerabilities and bugs, I have terrible news for you about the state of human-written code. The fact that what we do is often better than nothing at all, is no big recommendation.
I guess a lot depends on how you use the LLMs (I bet horrible coding skills coincide with horribly lazy and problematic usage of LLMs for development too), but I wonder how humans actually stack up to the slop-machine when it comes to how good or bad the code they produce is on average, since I'm sure that SOTA model code by now tends towards the upper end of that.
In other words, if a person wants to limit themselves to avoiding LLM code over fears of it being bad, they would also have to avoid any any all code written by people that essentially produced the problematic training dataset, as well as any programmers with the same capabilities (or lack thereof). You'd basically have to avoid using a lot/most of the software out there if that's your quality standard.
Dumb question but its because I genuinely do not know better. What is the security risk of what is as far as i understand a mouse driver with config options?
For downloadable software there is the risk of a supply chain attack. The website is altered to provide a download with a malware-infected version of the software.
a mouse is an input device. most security challenges (passwords, etc.) are input via input devices. those are at a risk of being compromised. also clicks on an on-screen keyboard, etc. in fact, if u think about it, input device data (also know as telemetry - ironically, what we are trying to prevent in the first place by the logi app to do) security is a very serious potential attack vector.
Yeah even if the software is good there's just something sad about realizing you're reading AI generated text. Even if its proofread and factually correct it just comes across as cheap and low effort, moreso when the content gets duplicated in a pointless FAQ that just restates everything you just read
The FAQ technique is LLM/SEO crumbs because people usually search for questions, if you have the exact likely question text that maps to user's search you're more likely to rank. It's unfortunate but it works, like open mouth YouTube thumbnails.
It’s still hollow and cheap. I closed those sites immediately even before LLMs. You need to pay me to waste my time, not the other way around. Even if that’s using your then not-so-free app.
That’s not feedback, just a non-constructive opinion. As someone else wrote above, if you’re so precious about it then help out the devs of the project and submit design PRs.
Here is a constructive one then: delete it. It’s better for everyone. If I want to read AI slop about your open source code, I can ask LLMs directly. It’s cheaper for you, and everybody.
This is absurd. No one has an obligation to help anyone nor do they owe you any standard of help. Opinion on quality of output is constructive to the wise and an opportunity to scream "If you can do better than do it" for the small minded.
This is a pathetic take.
1) Life is short and shortcuts and avoiding work are not inherently the wrong path to take.
2) Is the code you've almost certainly had an LLM write for you in the past a sign that you have low moral character and let yourself down by taking shortcuts and avoiding work too?
I'm not an AI advocate but in this case I honestly didn't see anything but a clean and informative website. I did have the thought that "this software is probably coded with AI agents" but that's just because there has been an explosion in new software lately.
But the website itself seemed perfectly normal to me, actually very clean and informative.
If you read and generate enough vibecoded readmes and front pages you can spot one right away. Structuring, no overarching idea, sentence patterns, neo-...isms like "lives" and "lands", etc. It's pretty clear that it's either curated generation (that's why it looks clean and readable to you) or written by a human and sloppified by a model. The website is clearly vibecoded with all these diagrams, it reads exactly like something written by Claude, and you have to be Claude to write exactly like Claude. It's not normal marketing speak/LinkedIn broetry, nor does it need marketing.
FWIW I don't really care in this case, just explaining how people can see it's generated. I only care about it working properly and being less bloated than Logitech's stuff. Pretty good that something like this is possible now.
It's the little "punchy" things a Karen would say (no harm meant to real Karens btw): you write a sentence and end with "No account, no telemetry." (and then later on three no's).
Humans usually don't write like that: we form sentences, not "punchy taglines for ads". Especially not with a negative form using "no" everywhere: you may see, say, on ads for a BMW: "400 bhp, pure driving pleasure" but you typically won't see "No automated gearbox, no assisted steering".
Then the typical "It's X, not Y": "Everything Options+ does, without the account."
Funnily enough it's totally trivial to un-LLMish this type of prose but we don't notice it when it's been unkarenified for we then simply don't detect it's been written by an AI.
Nothing wrong with the AI website but it suggests the code is AI too.
Nothing wrong with AI code either but it suggests the project may have been built in 2 weeks, has no community and low likelihood of ongoing maintenance.
So now overall instead of a flashy website I think the best signal of quality is a boring GitHub README and several months of commit activity, lots of merged PRs.
How much ongoing maintenance and community do you need around a mouse configuration utility? If it works for your current mouse, cool. If, down the road, it breaks on a windows update, you get a new mouse, etc; stop using it and you’ll get a full refund for what you paid.
Yeah i agree, the main problema with ai building (wether back end or front end) is that it leaves a lot of holes behind, that at some point really need to be fixex
That's exactly what I am saying. I don't care if it's AI, I care if it's good. But unfortunately because AI makes creating software very cheap, the old signals to tell you if software is good, no longer work.
A "nice site" was a proxy metric for "thoughtful competence". It was always flawed, but LLMs put the final nail in that particular coffin.
bellard.org style text-only, get-to-the-point-please content will the way forwards. "browsers" can then style and rewrite it till the cows come home - with fancy slideshows, LLMisms, carrousels, the works - or not and nobody will be worse off.
The way we structure content these days is insane. Separate content from presentation, please.
> Quit Logi Options+ before launching: the two fight over HID++ access, and only one app can own a receiver at a time. On Linux, the same applies to Solaar.
This support Windows and macOS in addition to Linux. I'm not in a hurry to disrupt things on my Linux machine, but I might just have to try this on the other platforms.
While it does look extremely likely that AI is used for the copy writing, and probably for some of the code maintenance, I'm not convinced that this is being vibe coded.
You gotta get over it. Generative AI is here to stay. People will use computers differently now.
Were houses crafted better before dimensional lumber and power tools? Maybe - they were also more expensive. So the same with programs and website via AI.
But on another note, the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer. It sticks out like sore thumb.