According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflicts about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
Edit: The discord, website and github are all gone.
I agree with your take, and I think it’s why there can’t be a rational discussion about AI on the internet, because AI is a very nuanced topic and the internet does not comprehend the concept of nuance.
Like all hype technology, both polar opposite sides will probably be wrong. The best and worst case outcomes are only 2 of an infinite number of outcomes in between. We will probably end up with some form of AI that sits comfortably in the middle.
Thinking that way, for engineers, I think refusing to use it will only limit you. It’s akin to refusing to use an IDE, or css. It may not feel like that, but to companies you might as well say you only code on punchcards. I can personally attest that searching for senior engineering roles last yeardid not ask if I used AI. they asked how much AI I used, and I was required to use it during the interviews. This is not one company. Every company interviewed with. It’s here to stay. Refusing to use it comes off as stubbornness to hiring managers, not some grand fight.
You’re exactly right.
I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.
AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.
I dunno, if we were pushed off machine code onto non-deterministic compilers that ran on a machine thousands of miles away with no way to know when it was changed i think we’d have balked at that too, even if compilers themselves are entirely positive.