The issue for now is LLM generation of code, not code auditing.

And no, I don't give a fuck whether some genius in theory could paint s new Mona Lisa with it. The issue us how it is used in practice, most of the time, today. At $WORK, I have a severely ai-pilled Senior Embedded Software Architect which hasnt managed in one and a half year to set up a working driver for a RS232-controlled stepper motor, from a port of previously working code. A thing that should take a week at most. I had to educate him that in C++ drivers, you need to use locks or mutexes to access variables that are concurrently changed and read from several threads. AI enables catastrophic levels of incompetence.

And FOSS projects need to protect themselves against that.

Have to think about this in an open source context. You have an open ended population ready to submit to your project if they think they can be useful

Now, thanks to GenAI, a bunch of people who aren't good at various things now thinks they are good at various things. Whether it's coding, making comics, making videos, what have you. Try to do nuance even if it strictly makes sense, and you are stuck with the slop problem if your project is sufficiently popular.

In terms of more directly on your points, if someone does GenAI to do a security analysis, ok, but I'd want them to do the tedium of trying to identify the false positives and then re-report it in their words of actual understanding. It can catch things, but along the way makes a haystack of sillyness to go through. Same for code review, legitimate issues, but lots of missing (I spent a non trivial amount of time yesterday because a GenAI code review insisted a variable would be unitialized when referenced, when I see an uncoditional assignment just a few lines above, trying to think if there was some catch I wasn't seeing). So indirectly using it and only subjecting the developer/maintainer to that which you know makes sense.

Problem being is that people have used Claude and have forwarded to me saying "I don't understand this well enough to judge, but forwarding to you just in case". I have the same tools doing the same things as you, I don't need meat proxies that just pass through the stuff without understanding.

As a retired senior programmer, I would have loved to use LLMs in the past for very specific things. I wouldn't use it every day, but like every couple of months I had to do a massive refactor that took weeks to complete. I usually ended up writing codemod and just painfully changing tens of thousands of lines of code. Would be cool to just say "hey LLM, see how I did this one? Do the same thing everywhere else you find it. If you encounter anything that's too different from my template just leave it for me to review"

For me it's the exact extreme opposite than your first point: The LLMs as death of copyright could be an actual food thing.

The issue im struggling with is the ecological and economic harm. It feels a bit as if the steam machine would've been invented but you'd throw in babies in addition to coal.

For the plus sides you're right (as in: I agree so it must be ;) )b- with one minor exception: the vibe coding part is not bad in itself. I actually used vibe coding as a very hard exercise: develop something and find ways to estimate its quality and performance but you are not allowed to look into the code! It's a fun brain teaser because it forces a pure outcome-perspective. The code itself is irrelevant for this, it's the mental training that's really interesting.

Oh except people who publish vibe coded stuff as a cool new project without disclaimer. Or as PRs. Or as ... Well anything where do see itself is actually important.

It can actually do everything you mention, and under a watchful eye, generate reasonable code to spec. If you give it the architecture and requirements, it will make it as you see fit and generally faster than a skilled human.

But even beyond the theft, the resources required to do this are insane. The power and hardware needs are off the chart, and we're still paying for all this with Monopoly venture bucks.