While i am a KDE plasma stan the #1 feature request i have been getting from users is phosh support, and today i can finally deliver!

Most of the work is DE agnostic, the only things really were the integration with imsd and fingerprintd, both were relativity easy and now live.

My CI is also now building phosh images for the people that want them.

Suspend

One thing that plagues linux phones is higher battery usage, and the lack of true suspend is one of the major rises why. it is disabled on fp6-img currently but im working to fixing it, wanted to include it in this post but its going to take a bit more work so something for next time.

imsd fixes

Please keep the bug reports coming! It is sometimes a bit hard for me to keep up but im doing my best to fix everyone’s issues in time.

With every carrier specific bug report i can fix that is another carrier that now works where people can just flash and calls works out of the box, the list keeps growing!

Even as im writing this at 04:33 another fix has just gone live!

sxmo

A developer of sxmo reached out to me, with posh working maybe sxmo next??? please comment if there is demand for this.

A very long discussion about AI

context: https://ani.social/post/37216830/18809885

I have spoken with many people about AI, some agree, some disagree, but i think in all cases it was respectful both ways, but this message prompted me to talk about it, this is going to be a very scattered, long text, feel free to skip if you want.

The man behind the cat

This is going to sound arrogant and i apologize but i want to give some context about my background, so people don’t think i am some guy who has never written a line of code and just uses AI without understanding.

Please judge my code, my magnum opus is Crafter.Graphics and i have linked to the time before any AI was used on it. I’m not saying the version i linked is perfect, there was still alot of improving to do, but i believe it shows my credentials.

Heyo! I am Jorijn van der Graaf, 22 year old software developer, I dropped out of public school at 15 because that was the biggest time waste in the world for me, i entered private school and did some odd jobs during it before landing my first real software job while in school at 16, after graduation i started working full time there for a few years before switching to a different job, which turned out to be a big mistake, my main language was C# at that time, i had accepted a C# position. Guess what my actual work turned out to be? maintaining C++ code that was older then me in a windows XP VM using Embarcadero studio… One doesn’t realize how good we have it now until you have to use the tools they had back then. But that is neither here nor there. I now have a good job, although its by far not my preferred stack it has good working conditions and good pay, so i should be happy right?

This is going to sound very entitled since many people have it far worse then me, and i also don’t want this to be a sob story or people to feel bad for me, judge me by my product not my person, this is just context.

But no i’m not happy, cause i feel my work is completely pointless. Posting under your real name is a bit difficult but lets say i don’t fully agree with capitalism and working each day to make shareholders richer is not my definition of a fulfilling life.

Until i found something that i thought would contribute to society.

Enter the FP6

My mom’s phone broke so while i was looking for a new one for her i found the FP6, and i ordered two, one is now her daily driver on e/OS and the other one is my pmos devphone.

and then it started 3 months ago with my first post here:

https://ani.social/post/33469765

Enter the AI.

I was both early and late to AI. When first chatgpt released i thought it was great.

I really struggled and although to a lesser degree still do with writing, my posts here all fully handwritten and my own thoughts, but for official things i found/find it very hard, chatgpt was a great tool for this, i could give it my draft and it would polish it up to a nice email.

But for coding? they absolutely sucked, outside of asking for small snippets it produced the worst code known to man when on a project scale.

Then the company i work at went full AI mode for productivity, it started with lovable when it first came out and issues that first took a week now took a day, any product owner is going to choose that no matter what.

I mostly work backend so i interacted with it relatively little and used it for the odd frontend task, there is nothing i despise more then writing frontend code so it was quite handy for me, and lovable is this no code platform so it didn’t matter if the code was shit and frankly nobody even cared if the code was shit because nobody was even looking at it anymore.

Enter claude, this was when AI started being used for backend tasks, and while my collegues were vibe coding entire applications i was the single holdout that still fully manually programmed the repos i owned, i once had to implement a feature in one of the other repos and that was so bad that seeing that made me never use AI in my own repos.

When programming manually you make this mental map, you know what each line does and why its there, AI completely shatters that.

But times change and deadlines tighten, i believe it was Opus 4.6 i first used for real coding tasks and i was impressed, it did better then i had expected. At a level where you could give it some tasks and it would execute them relatively well.

And the times continue to change, and now for my work i don’t write a single line of code anymore. Why would i? Why would i put my effort to write code manually when AI can do it way faster? The boss expects a timeline based on AI speed and my work gets significantly easier. If i would work myself to death to reach AI speed and write code manually the only person i would be doing it for is myself, and i gain nothing from it.

FP6 + AI

When i got my FP6 i immediately flashed pmos on it and tried testing the features, many things did not work.

And i got the idea, AI is best at menial work, what if i just give it ssh to the phone and tell it to investigate?

This was using opus 4.7 i believe.

And how the times have changed, because that was really rough back then compared to modern models but the root cause was eventually found with the libqmi and AFW.

Then the ball started rolling, My understanding of the kernel got better, my work process got better, and the models got better.

That brings us to the current day, where modern opus 5-5 and fable 5-1 are very capable, being able to execute tasks alot faster and i know what specific instructions to give.

Have there been mistakes resulting from AI overreliance? yes and i try to learn from each of them, and all of it is public so if you want to browse my mistakes its open for everyone to see.

I think hard banning AI is shortsighted, when done well it is the one of the greatest tools for open source.

Assume open source banned all AI, none of this could have been possible, even if you are a god programmer this is far too much work for a single person.

So the corporations who can spend billions on human labor continue to dominate, now a single person can do the same.

r/mobilelinux has completely exploded with an army of people working with AI to progress mobile linux, I’m not sure if this is caused by my posts but the timing does overlap, and 2027 could actually be the year of the linux phone.

Now looking at some of these posts the issue i mostly have is (outside that they are on reddit) is that they are closed source people mostly doing their own thing. i wonder if they will actually upstream it. I hope so but if they do i hope they do it properly.

The issue is when people start sending slop patches that take maintainer time, i have send one slop patch and i am still ashamed of it.

I am also helping nondescriptpointer with this who also uses AI, and its a tip i would give all starting kernel developers that use AI.

DON’T USE AI TO WRITE COMMIT MESSAGES AND COVER LETTERS.

If you can understand the code and use AI for it and have reviewed that code to be good then great, but AI written commit messages and cover letters are so horrendously bad that i would recommend writing it yourself completely atleast to begin with, and later if you are absolute sure switch to reviewing it, but make sure to really review it thoroughly.

AI and beginners

I have teached programming 2 years now at the school i graduated from and am about to go into a third year.

I have tried to ban or regulate AI but that is a pointless effort, i know students are using it as its painfully obvious, i put that on my evaluations. but its a condrum i haven’t been able to solve yet.

The conclusion i have reached is that a student is robbing themselves if they use AI, and i can live with that.

The ones that want to learn use AI to learn, the ones that don’t say “chatgpt make my assignment”. I suppose it does make it easier for me as i know who i put effort in and who i can let go. The one thing that is sad is that the students who put in no effort have better results then the ones that do.

My tip for beginning programmers, don’t use AI at all, zero, none.

Which leads me into my next section

AI is both a disease for programming and one of its greatest tools

Full programming with AI is neither fun nor you learn much. Programming is all about learning critical thinking, which you don’t learn if you only use AI.

But it can also be one of it greatest tools, the most boring parts of programming can easily be done by AI, but its a slippery slope if you keep taking the path of least resistance.

I suppose its somewhat similar to compilers in the sense, this has been debated alot but here is my take: i learned x86 many years ago and there is a lot of thinking that goes into the machine code which we now export to the compiler. But with that also a massive menial task got exported, making programming alot more fun.

If i am so negative about AI why do i keep using it.

Speed, and AI is undefeatable at that front.

I consider myself an expert at C++, better then AI, but AI is so much faster. I am extremely short on time unless something is absolutely critical and i need to do it by hand the decision isn’t AI or handwritten, its AI or it doesn’t exist at all.

I mentioned Crafter.Graphics earlier, it is one thing i consider myself an expert at, with a true deep understanding. It has taken around 5 years of building this and its predecessors to gain this understanding.

I am far less good at C or kernel development, not to say i can’t do C or kernel if i tried it manually, but there is a massive diffidence between ok, good, and expert.

The only thing i would call myself an expert on is C++ and Vulkan. And that is not me underselling myself, i can do alot more, but im not undervaluing the word expert here.

Being an expert at something takes alot of time to truly understand it, if i were to reach understanding of a single kernel subsystem equal to my C++ and vulkan level that is going take a long time, and im working across several of them.

Is this a good situation? No ofcourse not, i would rather learn it fully and understand it, but i made the decision that a fully working linux phone now with AI is better then one done manually over 5 years. I think that is a honest answer, and its up to the reader to decide if they agree.

And i apologize for the maintainer time i have taken up by doing this.

If a user reports an issue to me, ideally i want it fixed within a day, that is impossible without AI.

I am doing this next to my regular job, i am working deep into the night everyday to further this bringup, i am putting everything into this so people can use it for free, i try to fix issues people have fast, and just view the times my posts are made at, hell last post i worked trough the entire night until morning.

And that is my question for people that attack others for using AI, i don’t want you to agree with me, i want you to understand the reasoning.

Suppose i and others fully quit AI, will you make up for the lost time?

Unless the answer is yes i find that position hypocritical.

For these people, is it the burn-out that open source devs get making it that makes it special? and otherwise it is unacceptable to use?

I can respect most positions on AI, but attacking open source developers for using it i can’t. They do it completely for free, for the betterment of society, and then a tool comes that makes their jobs easier and they should be attacked for it? I understand if you don’t want to use a project that uses AI but don’t be an hypocrite that attacks AI use and then uses the projects anyway.

Android is getting worse by the day, and if i can use AI to make linux a viable alternative for people i see that as a good endeavor. The lesser evil.

Back to where it began

In the convo i linked at the start it was said that the code i submit is bad and that i have missed something with the hexagon processor without saying what and instead attacking me.

All i want is to improve it, if you know of an issue that i don’t let me know please so i can fix it.

And instead of attacking me here, put your money where your mouth is and call my patch trash on the list and i will happily respond there, and if the maintainers agree then great, we have done something productive and we have made mobile linux slightly better.

But continuing to attack me here gets us nowhere, if your goal is to improve mobile linux do so on the list. If your goal is to attack me then why is that your goal?

If you made it this far and are now mad at me

Fully acceptable, please downvote this post, if it gets downvoted to hell i will understand the message.

If you have donated to me and wish you never donated, send me the payment reference and i will return it no questions asked.

If you donated directly instead of via https://catcrafts.net/shop/donation please send me the account number instead, if you donated via mollie please send me the payment reference and account number, i will return it as fast as possible after you send me the information.

I fully understand if you do, i only ask that you understand my reason and then don’t continue to use my work if you don’t agree with how it was made. And if may request for people that refund donations, please send it to another open source or mental health organization.

For the people that have supported me and hopefully continue to do so

Thank you, your kind messages have kept me going.

I will continue my efforts, and if i am still welcome here post them!