I had a high-end webcam that flickered. There should be switch in the software to switch from 50hz to 60hz that'd fix it but it was nowhere to be found. After digging deeper I found that it was only available in English version of software. It was before macOS had Setting to set language per app, so I had to manually replace Polish bundle with English one through binary.
Another one: Has K810 keyboard that started in "FN-by-default" mode. K811, Mac version of said keyboard allowed for changing default setting just as K810 on Windows, but K810 on Mac - no dice. Support told me to shell out 200€ on Mac keyboard so I ended up writing small binary switcher [0] that would run after keyboard got connected [0].
> I had a high-end webcam that flickered. There should be switch in the software to switch from 50hz to 60hz that'd fix it but it was nowhere to be found.
Similar issue, although I'm not sure if it's the Logitech webcam or just how webcams are automatically configured on Linux these days in general: if I use a really bright LED lamp, the automatic exposure time goes down to the point that it doesn't matter if the webcam is set to 50hz or 60hz, it's going to catch flickering from other subtle frequencies affecting light output. I've also had situations where I wanted to use it to film a white piece of paper that I'm writing on, but it automatically adjusts exposure to make it gray instead.
It took me forever to find something with a straightforward GUI that lets me manually override this behavior on Linux. I ended up settling for cameractrls.
My once top of the range Brio USB 3.0 webcam produces so much high frequency EMI that GNSS receivers in its vicinity completely fail to operate across all bands (1.1 - 1.6 GHz). I had to disconnect it and use it from elsewhere, otherwise my lab dies. I have tens of others USB 3.0 devices that don't do this.
Honestly, I'm always blown away by accounts if "so I just wrote a binary switcher" dropped casually like this. I'm a software engineer and have been for over five years, but wouldn't even know where to _begin_ with something like that. Well, I would, I'd end up vibecoding a slop solution I didn't really understand.
How did you know / learn how to write a binary switcher?
I know that's a skill that I have, and I used it so many times it became effortless, but it all goes to one of jokes I like - that asks how do you eat an elephant. Easy - with a fork.
So in that particular case I have a keyboard and it's misbehaving. I know that by some dark magic I can make it behave as I want and that software on Windows can do that.
So I think, "ok, how does it communicate?" - with Bluetooth, obviously. So my next thought it: can I transmit over bluetooth magic bytes that do exactly like this. I definitely have a device on my computer, so I can try to make it.
From that it's all about "how to send arbitrary stuff from bluetooth" search. Instinct tells me there has to be a library, or that at least on person on world wide web tried to do something similar.
If I find even single instance of this, I'm home - read what they did, try to figure out if I can adjust it and do so. Hocus pocus - binary switcher happens.
Though, in the end, it's all about approach. I found many people say "I don't know how to do it, so I don't". My approach is "I rarely know what do, but that doesn't stop me from trying". And this trying new stuff brings practice for the next unknown endeavor.
I have. Can you help me understand what is the issue with my comment? Can we not agree that not being able to know where to even start with studying and changing a binary is foundational to being a software engineer?
As a native english speaker, your comment came across as an unnecessary slight. It might not have been the intent.
Not everyone has had the same experiences, interests, or life/work opportunities in the same way, and this person seems genuinely interested in learning more. It's something to be encouraged.
I don't think pandering to the ideas that basically amount to "a 6 week bootcamp makes you a Software Engineer" is honest or useful. It is sycophancy and disingenuous. If someone doesn't even know where to start looking for replacing a binary in a package; they have no grounds to call themselves a "Software Engineer".
Consider how would you respond if someone made a remark like this:
> Honestly, I'm always blown away by accounts [of] "so I just welded the pipes" dropped casually like this. I'm a plumber and have been for over five years, but wouldn't even know where to _begin_ with something like that.
I'd raise an eyebrow, because plumbers here are a trade with on the job training, and pipework is an essential part of it.
Software has a huge surface area these days. That a trained software engineer isn't aware that HIDs and input subsystems are often highly hackable from userspace is no surprise to me.
They may also have been leaning into a compliment of OP in a self deprecating way.
The problem isn't that you should know everything, but that you should know how to dig into these things. The op isn't even talking about HID and input subsystem, they're talking about replacing a goddamn binary in a package. It is a tiny step above working a Zip archive.
C'mon. Don't shrug me now after going all proverbial pointy finger at me for expecting an "Engineer" to know the basics.
Saying that "a software engineer requires a baseline of understanding of software engineering" is substantive and anything short of that is not "thoughtful" or "kind" but rather disingenuous and sycophantic. Pretend nice is poison feed with delicious juice in fine china, looks good, might be delicious, but still hurts you in the long run.
My comment might have been different if you had said "a software engineer requires a baseline of understanding of software engineering", but that is not what you said.
What you said is "It is because you're unlikely a software engineer and just a learn programming or went through a really bad university.".
Saying he is unlikely a software engineer seems to imply OP is not being truthful, or is outright lying.
I'll take you at your word that it was not your intention to be offensive. If I were communicating in a language that is not my native tongue, I would hope that someone would point out to me that I might be being misunderstood, too.
As far as the wording of the rules, you would have to complain to HN about that if you take issue with it.
Op is making a claim about being a software engineer without having the necessary baseline of skills discussed. I have proposed two possible reasons, self-thought programmer who didn't get to the bottom of things, or just went through a really poor university.
You're making a whole lot of assumptions there without being " thoughtful and substantive". So I invite you to a bit of self-reflection and let this conversation be.
> 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.
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.
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.
I dunno, lots of companies seem pretty happy to build large portions of their business on top of unvetted single-maintainer open source projects. Don't see why they'd stop doing so now.
(Anyway, I don't care so much about what companies go for, as opposed to what I can do on my own devices.)
Exactly my thoughts. My point was targeted more towards consumers who usually don't have a voice in the software/hardware they buy. Reverse engineering, de-vendor locking, and open sourcing the protocol gives us freedom to use the device we purchased however we want, for as long as we want.
Doesn't have to be, you can just clone the repo and have Claude do a security analysis and then host it on an internal company git instance and then send the developer a $200 donation as a thank you. About an hour of work with modern AI tools
The hard part with these protocols is usually state, not packet formats. Does the spec cover initialization and feature negotiation across different firmware versions, or is that still inferred from one device’s traces?
Everything is inferred from device traces, and compared against known protocol implementations (ex USB - thanks to the openrazer project) - which AFAIK have remained pretty stable over the years.
So far, it's survived a few device firmware updates with no visible breaking changes, but I can't guarantee it always will.
But do we still trust the open source software that is created now everything is vibe coded?
Recently there was a thread about Chatto [1], a Slack replacement completely vibe coded by one person. It works and looks nice. But looking at the code, I wouldn’t trust any of my personal information to it. It’s just tousands of lines of skills and vague instructions. It seems that trust in OSS is eroding and big SaaS might win here because they have the reputation.
So you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago but when a language model does it it's suddenly offensive? We should be instead celebrating how we have a mini software company at our fingertips ready to fix the broken hobbyist shit we've never had time for. OpenLogi is a perfect example of this use case and that it's open source makes it more trustworthy not less.
If you really wanna worry about all of these things you better not use any open source from now on. Or even private software as well, because you can't even audit and know what "vibe code" touched.
Being generous in my assumptions, you may have missed that my intent by "recent sprawl" indicates, "things are getting worse, at a rapid rate". At no point did I mean malware didn't exist 15 years ago.
It is getting worse, faster. That's objectively true.
> you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago
Absolutely. There is a limit to how much code can be shared on stack overflow and, in the pre-AI days, code snippets had to be understood well enough to integrate into a larger hand crafted work.
Furthermore, stack overflow code is shared by consenting users and is licensed per the terms of service, unlike AI generated code which is trained on non-consenting users and is both ethically and legally dubious.
I don't think stackoverflow contains code to integrate a keylogger in a mouse driver. Copy-paste isn't that bad. Most of the (coding) LLMs however probably do know how to do that. They enable script kiddies to make more dangerous tools. So yes, vibe coding is a danger.
Where did I say you should audit all the code you run daily?
Not sure if you're being manipulative on purpose or if you genuinely did not understand my point. I was talking about "trust", which is a whole concept in itself.
I understood your comment the same way as the guy you're replying to. Maybe it'll help if you expand on whether we can trust vibe coded software? That's really the crux of the issue, and if you're not addressing that your comment is just a truism
Code can make your computer do stuff. If you run code in an environment where it has the possibility to do harm, then it is a possibility, and therefore a risk. Whether or not you accept that risk depends on the situation, but it is important to realise that the risk exists.
> I don't really see how its provenance matters
The fact that the code was vibe coded does not change the capabilities it has. If you run random code written by a human with root access, the code can do what root can do. If you run random vibe-coded code with root access, the code can do what root can do.
When you run code, what the code is allowed to do in the environment it is running is independent from who or what wrote that code.
> you should not run code you don't trust, period.
Trust does not mean that you have to review all the source code everyday, yourself. Trust means that you accept the risk given the provenance.
When you drive you car, you trust that it won't explode. You don't review the whole car assembly every day. When you cross a bridge, you trust that it won't collapse. You don't check the whole structure everytime yourself.
When you run your laptop, you trust that the battery won't catch fire. You trust that your OS isn't a malware.
In your life, you trust many many things. Many times you don't have a choice, many times it's institutional trust ("I live in a country where bridges don't collapse", for instance).
Now when you run code you find on the internet, I'm sure you apply that. Say it comes from Google: you probably trust it (after all, if you don't trust Google you're pretty much screwed).
Now if a random username on Reddit tells you to execute some code, do you happily do it? I don't think so. At least you shouldn't unless you understand what it does.
What's the difference between random code you find on Reddit and vibe-coded code? I don't see one. I don't base my trust on the fact that it was written with AI.
The fact that it comes from AI means "it is not an author that I trust, but it doesn't mean that the code is malware". I just need to find another way to trust it (maybe someone else audits it, maybe I do, maybe I run it in an environment where it doesn't matter, etc).
Let's say you follow a link to a github project and you have to assess whether to trust that code, how do you do it?
Before AI just having a good README and superficially looking good code (we're not going to do a deep review of it) was a gauge of quality that at the very least the person that wrote it knows what it's doing.
How do you do it now? Maybe the AI was expertly guided, but maybe it was vibe-coded by someone who hasn't even heard of basic security principles and your whole data is sent in plain-text somewhere. It doesn't have to be nefarious, it could be a debug feature that was never removed, or maybe the user never asked the llm to "make it prod safe". And there's no way to know unless you read the whole thing, because superficially the README and the code will look as good as any other llm project.
That's problem number one, before you could quickly see if it's made by someone who knows what it's doing, and thus that you can trust. With vibe-coded software not so much.
The second issue is not inherent to vibe-coded software but it's caused by it: it's a sea of garbage. It's very possible that the absolute amount of good software has increased, but it's become harder to find it.
I disagree with your premise that anyone seemingly competent can be trusted.
> It's very possible that the absolute amount of good software has increased, but it's become harder to find it.
It was like that long before AI. Most software written by humans is very bad, and it was accelerating before AI. And there was too much software to review everything long before AI as well.
If anything, I find that AI writes better code than the average human-written code. Of course it makes it harder to judge the contributor (before I could clearly see that they were not good coders, now I can't). But as a maintainer, I was reviewing the code before, and I am still reviewing it now. Some people will send unreadable AI-generated PRs that I won't review, some people will send readable PRs that I will review and merge without any consideration of provenance.
A problem could be that I may receive too many PRs to review (I think it happens to Linux). And the consequence of that may be that opening a PR to big open source projects may have to become less accessible eventually.
LLMs are making code cheaper to produce, which in turn means people are running more code. There’s more code that needs to be audited for trust than before.
And so now we have a new twist on an old problem, and I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I am not sure. I was already selective before LLMs. I never ran random code from the Internet, and for those who did I think it was a mistake, already before LLMs.
There was already more code than I was able to review before LLMs. Because more code is being produced doesn't mean that I must run more code, I don't see that. I will keep running code that I can reasonably trust for the task. LLMs just add candidates or help making the better projects even better. But we will (as we should) keep auditing code, I'm sure of that.
Sure, yeah. But "vibe-coded and reviewed by Linus Torvalds" is probably better than "manually-written by a random person on the Internet".
Sometimes the provenance itself is enough to trust it, sometimes the fact that people I trust audited it is enough to trust it, and sometimes I audit it myself. Or I run it in a safe environment, sometimes that's fine too.
My point is that because it was vibe-coded does not make it more dangerous than random code found on the Internet.
> So you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago
Absolutely yes... The difference between those "22 year old coffee junkies" and some dude prompting an LLM is that the 22 year olds from 10 years ago still had to actually use their brains. They thought of the problem, came up with possible solutions, architecture, software stack, implementation etc... Some of this undoubtedly was copy/paste from stack overflow, but in that process: googled/researched things, read results from google (blog posts, stack overflow posts, maybe even books). And in that process they actually learned about software development and mastered the craft. That isn't a thing with vibe coding, LLM's don't "care" about the project/software they build. Most vibe coders don't even care.
I hate that I have to say this but inevitably people get mad if you don't: I'm not anti ai and LLM's are obviously useful in 2026. But I definitely have way more trust in software made the "old" way, by people who actually gave a shit, compared to software "written by" vibe coders.
That was not my experience pre LLM's working with other software devs. I acknowledge that not everyone that writes software cares, but the majority of people I worked with pre-LLM did actually care that the software they wrote was bug free and well written before making a PR. With LLM's people seem to just get claude to vomit up whatever, give a quick review (if that) and press merge. Not sure if using LLM's made people care less, gave people an excuse to care less, or actually just don't care and were faking it before (or some combination of the above).
You're still talking about Slack here? Or some other large tech companies? It's rare that 22 year old devs are leading anything at orgs that size. The reason their quality is higher is because the business enforces quality controls, layers of technical experience, etc.
> that it's open source makes it more trustworthy not less.
You aren't addressing the point the person you responded to made - people will lose trust because of _quality_, not because the code is available to you on Github. If 90% of open source becomes buggy, single-use software with massive security gaps, it makes sense people would stop trusting those projects.
You shouldn't trust open source software because it is open source. You should trust open source software because it has been audited, and only when it has been audited by people you trust (it may be yourself).
Whether it's vibe-coded or not doesn't change that. If it is vibe-coded and unreadable, how is it different from manually-written and unreadable? If it is vibe-coded and readable, how is it different from manually-written and readable?
Judge the code by its quality, not by its provenance.
I judge it on a case-by-case basis by just looking at a few recent commits and the feel of clicking a few files in the repo. For OpenLogi I get the wrong type of vibe code vibes and at the very least that means the project might become an unmaintainable mess in a year and that means I don't want to come to rely on it. At worst it means security vulnerabilities.
That being said: I wouldn't really trust SaaS to not be vibe-coded either. The only difference there is that SaaS likely has a financial incentive to stay maintainable so you could argue that helps.
This is an underappreciated possibility that opened up. It now becomes at least viable to thoroughly inspect large code bases. It's not easy and never will be, but now we're not limited to the amound of literal eyeballs available.
Be careful of prompt injection. Some people think nothing of adding harmful instructions to their repositories. Sol and Opus seem to be smart enough not to fall for it, but I don't know about other models.
I believe it varies; since it's merely a productivity tool, why not use it? However, if it's essential software that your business relies on, probably not.
> But do we still trust the open source software that is created now everything is vibe coded?
The provenance of the code matters insofar as how much you should initially trust it, but the fact that it's open source means it's still verifiable. The increase in productivity that AI has unlocked means there is now much more output to verify.
I don't see the issue. The beauty of OSS is that you can audit the code yourself and evaluate it according to your standards.
Do you trust all OSS repos coded before 2024? AI-generated code is no different than code written by a human with different levels of seniority, different levels of focus, or different levels of discipline. A human is perfectly capable of generating spaghetti code too.
If I was going to make a keylogger this is pretty much how I'd do it - no need to sneak an application onto a user's machine to capture keystrokes when they'd willingly install it because it's better than the terrible official software.
I hate Options+ as much as the next guy - but don't have the time / technical knowledge to audit thoroughly enough to establish trust in this.
I'm nearing the replacement point on my current MX Master - so is there a better alternative to Logitech?
Code is simply math. It either works or it does not. Does your calculator work? Then use it. Does your AI agent of choice produce code that works? Then use it.
Or don't. It's up to you. You're as free to walk away as you are to embrace what's been made here.
Code is, but running application aren't "math". They have side effects - like uploading your private keys to hostile servers - which "math" conveniently ignores.
This is a bit of an uncharitable take.
"It either works or it does not" is an oversimplification when you consider that code often doesn't work in the way it was intended - that's what bugs are. Are vibe coded apps inherently more buggy? Not necessarily. But the I'd argue there's more surface in a vibe coded app that requires blind trust.
Logitech seems to suck at software. Why do you need an online account to remap your mouse buttons?
Same for the harmony 1100 which is a universal remote but can’t ever be programmed again since logitech killed their online server. It had the secret sauce for generating the binary blob to send the device to program it and nobody could figure out how this mess actually works to reimplement it. It seems like the blob wasn’t just parameters but also all sorts of scripts that changed with the config.
Needless to say I steer clear of Logitech anything now. It’s joined my blacklist along with Samsung and LG.
They ask you to create one if you want to save your settings or something. You don't have to go through with it.
But the software does suck big time. The other day it didn't start on my machine because reasons. Had to remove it and reinstall it. Which had to remove my configuration, but whatever. Then, installation somehow went to 101%. But hey, at least it worked.
This is so nuts. It’s literally a multi device mouse - supports 3 bluetooth connections in memory, but I need to install the options app on every single pc/mac I want to use it on. Nuts!
I have a "G" series 512 keyboard. And it seemingly can't save anything into the memory (on windows I had to use the logitech's bloatware). And the absolute worst part is that it is set to RGB colors moving around by default, so I've been running openrgb every OS boot to set the lights to a neutral, non-flashing, much much less intensive color. Happy to see alternatives to that.
On a matter of principle, it is not shocking to me that it is so big.
The offline installer has to bundle data for all supported products, platforms, languages and dependencies, even the ones you don't need, because you can't tell in advance. The online installer will just download what it needs.
1.2GB is absolutely ridiculous and I hate the bloat we see with pretty much all modern software today more than most people, but I have decided not to complain about it for once :) Know that it doesn't mean I think less of it.
Maybe there are some fancy animations illustrating RGB effects and stuff like that, these can add up, and I can almost (but not quite) excuse them if it is the case. At least, video animations are not a mess of frameworks and libraries that eat your RAM and CPU and introduce vulnerabilities.
The tap includes a GH action to track upstream releases (as long as I notice the PR!). Also, the offline version only compensates for some of the issues with Options+.
Cool project, but I hate how every new site has this obviously LLM generated copy :(
I feel like most people who use it for their copy don’t realize how obvious it is.
At this point we should be sharing prompts not code for solutions like OpenLogi. Reverse engineering many things can typically be one-shotted (ignoring things like.. capturing a pcap or whatever to aid the effort). Let others add their own taste to the solution.
Isn't it wasteful to have everyone go off and remake the same software with slightly different bugs in it instead of one that fixes almost all of the bugs
Please no, I couldn’t care about your prompts, there is nothing special about them. Anyone can look at the generated artifact and reverse engineer their own prompt in no time
Does it matter? People get caught up on LLM this and sure, a professional beats an LLM currently but I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
If it matters is subjective. But personally I stop reading when I notice it’s AI text because there is never anything in it worth reading. It’s just a prompt expanded in to paragraphs of filler text.
This kind of tool doesn’t need a whole Apple style marketing page to sell you on it.
It also signals effort to me, when I see vibeslop text I know the project most likely is a one shot weekend project full of issues which won’t be resolved. I’ve seen good examples of AI use in open source, and those projects write the readme and website copy without AI.
> I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
I think it depends a bit what's meant by "poorly" but I don't think I share that preference at all.
I would 100% rather read a developers copy explaining why they wanted to build something and what they think is useful about it, even if it isn't particularly polished.
As a comparison, LLM generated "marketing schlock" is polished, but it's normally pretty empty and doesn't convey much of it's value.
As an example, I use lazygit (a TUI git interface) - at least at the time I looked at it, the main intro was a youtube video of the developer talking through the features. It wasn't polished at all, but it did a great job of convincing me that lazygit was a project with a lot of love and thought put into it.
Your LLM text is obviously not well written if we spot it after 2 seconds. I won’t read it, doesn’t matter how beautiful it is, it’s just pure cringe, I notice, roll my eyes, close the tab. Please give me the poorly written human effort. Is it really that hard to spend 10minutes reading what you produced to see if that feels genuine?
I read plenty of not-obviously-AI-generated text and I much prefer doing that, even if it’s not from a professional.
It’s not about the quality of the text itself. If Claude was one person with a human level of output, Claude would probably be considered decent at writing.
But when I have to read the same genre of slop on 1 million different sites it gets really really annoying imo.
If you didn't even spend a minute writing a couple sentences about your own project, how much effort did you put into actually building and testing it? Or are you just letting others do the hard parts: Review and verification that your vibe-slop actually works as claimed, and then feed their feedback back into an LLM?
It's not that hard if you put in the effort and practice.
But if you don't want to and still want to use an LLM, there are low-bar choices you can make (using a technical writing skill, using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, choosing your audience, proofreading at the end with human eyes to make sure it makes sense and doesn't repeat itself uselessly).
I think it shows either a) low respect or consideration for your audience or yourself, or b) laziness.
Trust yourself to write even if it's bad. At least it's human.
I assure you it won't be as bad as this (answer to FAQ: "Will OpenLogi support Logitech Flow?")
> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.
A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.
I don't really care about the site but it's an indication that the software might include a trojan or serious flaw. I'm not downloading code with deep system access and risk losing my data/money.
Good to see open source alternatives to the awful Logitech software. I only realized how bad the Logitech software is after switching from a G502 with on-board memory to an MX Master mouse that does not have on-board memory and needs to have the app constantly running in the background to use the gestures.
Personally I've been using BetterMouse on macOS with my MX Master, although it's not open source.
For a while now BetterTouchTool [0] supports Logitech mice [1]. It's paid, but it's absolutely worth its price. It's super powerful and you can do all kinds of funky stuff with it, not only mouse related. I would suggest looking into it if you want more advanced features, I've been a very happy user for many years now.
There's also SteerMouse, which I use to configure my MX Master settings. One of the benefits is it's not something that needs to run continuously in your menu bar: you can set options and close it. In the end, it's just a basic peripheral...
I used to use it (better mouse) before BTT added Logitech support - but wasn't really happy with it. Every single update changed something, mostly my cursor speed in some small, but sufficiently noticeable way and I had to adjust it every time, which was super annoying.
At some point my settings kept getting lost every time my mac went to sleep, and I had to restart the app all the time. I messaged the developer, but never received any response or acknowledgement and I just dropped it. It's a pity, because I did like it for a period of time while I was initially using it.
The one thing I use the most, and how I found it in the first place is that it allows me to combine key presses with mouse gestures/movements. In particular it allows me to move/resize the windows under the cursor just by pressing a key combination and moving my mouse. Many many years ago I used to use AutoHotkey on Windows for this functionality and was missing it when I switched to Mac.
Another thing I've configured is scrolling through a key press and dragging the mouse. Or opening a floating menu by using the thumb button on my MX Master3.
And that's only mouse functions, I have a bunch of other shortcuts/remappings/automations, many of which run only for specific apps.
Have a look in the forum - it's a gold mine and a lot of people have shared their presets.
I've had a paid licence for it for many years but I have ended up shying away from using it because the UI is just so cumbersome. An incredibly powerful piece of software though.
I haven't tried the LLM approach recommended in the sibling comment, and I agree that the UI is quite cumbersome. Yet, once it clicks, it's still not super straightforward, but it allows for quickly implementing whatever one needs. I guess the UI complexity comes with its extremely powerful capabilities.
Get an LLM to generate a preset for what you want - it's ultimately driven by a json config. There are quite a few presets in the forum as well for various functions
That's because - given the flashy page and branding and all - it's irrelevant.
The thing is not about code or solving a problem, and we also shouldn't be pretending that it is, because that is what slop, grifters and businesspeople bank on.
Also, you can be sure that the features that do exist are half-baked at best, given that any person with eyes can see that the priorities lie elsewhere.
I just built my own version to scratch my own itch.
Completely vibe coded. It solves my problem. I didn't even consider that someone else might have already built it.
It's fast, simple, needs barely any resources. It has a daemon, it can detect new mice. It even has a vibe coded logo. Oh, did I already mention that the whole thing is completely vibe coded?
Flipped the repo to public in case someone else might find it useful.
I think this sentiment deserves its own serious discussion. It probably won't happen for another few years when the emotions and defensiveness settle, but there's a separate problem happening from quality. Quantity is its own problem. Whether or not any of these hourly new product announcements are any good, nobody can possibly try 24 different pieces of software a day, let alone switch to actually using them. So all we get are superficial heuristic analyses basically amounting to either "cool, this looks vaguely similar to something I might want" or "AI;DR."
Agentic coding will do for indie software what dating apps did for human relationships. Animal brains are not equipped to deal with having this much choice.
Tbf, in this case, it flags based on something we had before AI as well.
Open<Brand> + SEO on Steroids webpage is usually misaligned with the user. That didn't really change. The only thing that did change is that producing this slop has gotten much much cheaper.
What is true though is that eventually, even the most gullible person will have been exposed to this so much, even they will finally manage to stop their hijacked justice reflex from twitching and defending garbage against their own best interest.
No kidding. Whenever I see a settings button in a submenu and it goes to the main settings of the app, it's completely slopcoded. This is a swing and a miss.
Yeah, I have one of their keyboards. The keyboard is advertised as a QMK based device but it doesn't work with QMK software. At minimum using their website means they get a ping whenever I'm configuring my keyboard. At worst they could be asking for all sorts of tracking information, usage details, etc. Heck, since their website can configure the keyboard's firmware they could add keystroke recording the next time and I'd never know. Now, I'm not accusing them of that or saying they would do that, but it's possible. When the site goes down one day what do I do then?
Local software will always live longer and have more respect for my privacy than web based software.
I'm thinking about throwing AI at the problem and either working to make their site work offline, making standard QMK software work with my keyboard, or replacing the firmware with more standard QMK.
WebUSB is indeed great, but this particular tool would not work in it, as it does something different (HID input remapping as opposed to, or maybe in addition to, reprogramming a HID device to behave differently via vendor-specific commands).
Some things could probably be pushed to the HID layer, but that would require a at least firmware redesign of the mouse, and some kinds of complex shortcuts are probably better done on the computer OS than that of the HID device, which is inevitably working with much less context.
No. You can emulate the network matters in software.
For more details, go look up the Linux USB Gadget framework.
You can even play around with some of it yourself using a Pi Zero 2 W (I did, making it appear to be a USB webcam - I saw guides on how to make it be a serial port and even an ethernet adapter too)
How does that work with Firefox and Chrome's local network access (LNA) restrictions? Should a remote site be able to reconfigure your hardware? Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
I don't know much about LNA, but recently configured my new Ducky keyboard via duckyhub.io. I had to configure some udev rules[1], and use Chromium instead of Firefox, but it worked in the end.
It's all client side -- someone (maybe me!) would spin up openkeychron from an old saved copy of the webpage and we'd be back in business in a day. Right now the keychron-hosted solution is fine -- no accounts or anything crazy -- so there's no impetus.
EDIT: turns out that my keychron, at least, is compatible with QMK/VIA and there are already open source alternatives [1] that do the job.
WebUSB is deliberately unsupported on Firefox due to potential for abuse, which seems reasonable to me. Therefore, delivering updates to USB devices likes that is, in my opinion, suboptimal because it requires a specific browser feature which not everyone is willing to use.
It is also less transparent and more difficult to review than, e.g., a Python script. Which would do just the same job. While being even more portable.
I'm at least 10 times more willing to run a shady website in Chrome's sandbox and grant it USB permissions to a specific device for limited time than I am to install some random script or software running with full user privileges.
> It is also less transparent and more difficult to review than, e.g., a Python script. Which would do just the same job. While being even more portable.
Are you absolutely sure you would catch any malicious payload in some obscure single-purpose Python script?
Open source is great, but it's not a complete replacement for a narrow permission model.
> Are you absolutely sure you would catch any malicious payload in some obscure single-purpose Python script?
Of course not. But I can at least fairly easily review it. And that is the point.
A review cannot be done as easily with a minified JavaScript webpage or a WebAssembly binary that the WebUSB loader tool would use.
Also, with regards to binary Windows blobs that would require installing Windows drivers - yes, I agree that it is considerably worse than WebUSB. But we can always find something worse..
The point I am trying to make is that WebUSB, although being better than Windows binary blobs, is still less transparent, in my opinion, than e.g. a simple Python script.
Edit: To clarify: Whether the user will actually be able to find potential issues during the said review is a separate topic. But I think that the goal should be to enable users to do so. And make it as simple as possible and user-friendly as possible.
Firefox now supports WebSerial though. An alternative to Via/Vial could perhaps use that, with the USB device exposing a virtual serial port.
Kinesis' keyboards with their "Clique" keyboard has a web-based configuration tool that does that. Their older "SmartSet" firmware instead exposed a virtual USB drive, with the configuration as a text file, and a firmware update could be done by dropping a new blob in there.
I've been a trackpad proponent for years, but with Steermouse I've been able to dial in my MX Master so perfectly that I find myself missing it when I travel.
What really took it to the next level for me were adding chord mappings. For example I can hold right mouse button + scroll the thumb wheel to adjust volume. So convenient!
Not being open source is the thing that the program in the article fixes. You want the goal of the software-writer to be producing a good tool, not using the software as a means to turn a profit. That's how you get the turd being replaced by the tool in the article
Doesn't work, HID error when adding a device (which is paired with and connected to my computer. Logi Options never installed on this Mac.)
Unfortunately the very obvious and quite grating LLM copy in the site and in descriptive text on the app does not make me feel well-disposed towards something that I really want to exist. Consequently, uninstalling. I'm surprised that I feel this way, but I actually trust Logitech more than this low effort thing.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone proffering an LLM coding opinion stated their languages and area of focus/expertise we’d all be in a lot more agreement about the output…
Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe
Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example
As an iOS developer, I have yet to see two different teams agree on best practices, architecture, or code style, and the only reason I've seen anyone agree on UI frameworks is that I've been in slightly more teams/seen more ads than there even are widely-used UI frameworks; and despite all the big promises in the job adverts, 95% of the work has been to take someone else's existing UI design and connect it to someone else's existing API.
LLMs fit right in.
(Unlike me: I'm burned out by iOS and LLMs came at exactly the right time).
Yeah, that's what I think every time I read some discussion online about AI coding assistants. Programming is such a wide field with presence in so many different industries, with all sorts of languages and environments, and many people seem to forget that not everything is webdev. You see one person saying they barely need to code by hand anymore and another who can't believe that because their experience has been the complete opposite, when they're probably both right.
Before AI came, the doubling rate of workers in our industry was about two years. Even if it slowed down significantly in the last 3 years, that just means the average programmer quality moved from "fresh grad" to "established junior".
Growth rate alone forced the mean output to remain at beginner level. And then let's not forget that over the last decade+, the industry saw it fit to restrict almost all coding to juniors, and turned senior+ roles into a faux-management career track.
Shocking that in this time and age, a simple peripheral like a mouse still needs a dedicated piece of software to be installed. In my Linux boxes, I just plug in a standard mouse and get the standard functions. I think the device driver should know about the low-level interface to the mouse: know how it points, what buttons, scroll wheels, and other inputs it may have, etc. Then the OS would process it like any mouse. If you need to connect some buttons to specific actions, that could be handled by a user-level program running on the machine that could know how to do those actions. But that level should be far removed from knowing what brand (or type) of input device you are using.
Of course producers like Logitech want you to install their own thing, so as to make it harder for you to switch to other brands of hardware, but an open system like Linux should not play along with that.
Of course the Logitech mouse can be plugged and will just work without installation. The software allows to customize buttons, macros, DPI ranges, lights, etc.
Still sucks, but it's not really needed to make it work or use it.
Simple mouses have simple interfaces and its functions are built into the OS. These mouses are a little bit beyond simple. These are ten button interfaces. So there is the default programming. And custom programming. The software is for custom programming.
some mice still have "on-board" memory and i look for that when getting one these days, that way you can configure it using the program from wherever (my work laptops tend to have windows), and the profiles or whatever live on the mouse, so you can plug it into another computer and it works without installing the software again
Not long ago mouses came with a paper manua, a CD with drivers, and if you we're paying top dollar, a desktop application that would let you set defaults for the entire OS for the one or two extra buttons you used to get.
I once heard a story about an old Logitech webcam driver in windows. Once it was installed, it would always scan for the webcam and if it wasn’t detected it would write to an error log. So if you set up the webcam once and then got rid of it without uninstalling the driver it would always dump logs upon logs. Eventually a user had their entire disk space filled and when they dug into it they found a single tens or hundreds of GB log file. Uninstalling the driver fixed it.
I'm not sure this supports G502 as it's supposed to be controlled by Logitech G HUB.
Anyway, if you want a CLI replacement for G HUB, I played a bit with opengcontrol [1] to support my new G502 using Claude Code. I wrote a short blog post about it as well [2]. I even got a battery indicator for my menu bar.
Last time I checked the underlying daemon, libratbag, didn't have support for the G502X wireless mouse and although there were Issues and Pull Requests open, no movement had been made towards getting those in.
I also use this, but Piper seems to barely work. Any time I try to rebind keys, it usually errors out with something incomprehensible. Their GitHub seems to talk in circles about it, either blaming you (not the correct response) or throwing up their hands.
Well that was a waste of time. Tried this for my MX 3:
- The DPI slider did nothing most of the time, but sometimes the cursor movement changed when clicking a button or switching windows.
- No matter what I chose, the scroll wheel was stuck at absolute maximum sensitivity setting scrolling about a thousand lines per ratchet click. There was also no way to disable the "smart" switch to freewheel spinning.
- For some reason, tapping the thumb wheel triggered Task View. Tapping the thumb wheel isn't even listed as an interaction so no way to change or disable this.
Love the idea of an "open" version of Logi options, but this is just terribly executed. Can't state anything about the code but the bewildering behavior and weird bugs definitely smelled like vibe slop.
Found this app a few days ago and am glad to see this comment just for the task view thing. I don’t really mind the other warts of this except this one which has been driving me nuts. I am not experiencing the scroll sensitivity issue.
Oh yeah, I just gave it a go with big hopes, but it looks like it's not there.
Made some changes, nothing, made more changes, nothing... Then to my surprise I restarted software and they were there, mouse speed x100000, and other weird stuff I've put in - I thought I was doing something wrong when the changes weren't applied :D
I wonder if this fixes the bug in Logi software that affects copying in Excel. When Logi software is running, and you go to copy something in Excel, there's a 50% chance that it won't make it to your clipboard. Excel shows an error to this effect, and you can still paste within Excel, but not outside of it. Of course, Logi points at MS and MS points at Logi, as to be expected, so it never gets resolved.
I tried to switch to Mouser, but it leaked memory like crazy, taking sometimes tens of GB of RAM so I just vibed a replacement based on my very specific needs.
I'm always terrified of Bluetooth mice. I've never seen one with the same low latency as a USB mouse. The difference is sometimes subtle, but it's there.
Typically the wireless mice connect over noon-bluetooth wireless protocols and offer bluetooth as fallback, if at all.
Click-to-screen latency is a combination of reporting rate, polling rate and latency within the software stack. Default USB HID polling rate is 125Hz so if you don't do anything extra on top this is what you get anyway. Even higher grade "office" mice offer higher reporting rates than that, "gaming" mice can easily be 1 kHz.
I always thought this is a rule of thumb, but then I learned that wireless gamepads for popular consoles (back then it was PS3/PS4 era) don't really follow that pattern. I came across multiple tests where older wireless PS controllers and xbox controllers were consistently more responsive in practice.
For modern ones there are some cool posts like this one [1], where most of the time there "were no statistically significant difference", or even wireless was more responsive.
Gamepads always impressed me - they can deliver insanely good response times while streaming high quality audio with no lag. I never found other BT accessories for phones/computers that were even close to that smooth experience.
For pro gaming perhaps the difference would make the slightest difference. For casuals, let alone office workers, the difference is 0 (writing this with a mx master 4 next to me).
Saying this as someone who has tried dozens of mice in my life. Last corded-one, bought for my son yesterday (razer cobra minecraft edition). I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between wired and wireless in a blind test.
Dongles are indeed not perceivably different than wired in principle. However, you may have more latency variability, or even unstable connectivity, depending on what adjacent usb ports are doing, due to interference [0].
I have had cases where dongles were practically unusable in my setup, up to completely losing connectivity when transferring data through an adjacent port.
I have had issues with an otherwise decent 2022 computer, had to arrange usb connections in specific ways to avoid brief connectivity drops. It did not happen all the time, but it did happen. But the worst problems were older ones.
USB ports have probably better shielding nowadays. But even so, the protocols and radio frequency ranges are still the same, so if I do not see a specific test on that (measuring latency distribution while adjacent port busy) I would not trust it if latency was important, even if it "feels" the same. And not all of us have professional gaming equipment or otherwise of much better quality.
If adjacent ports are not busy there should not be an issue nowadays, probably.
Before clicking, I thought this might be a reverse engineering attempt of the Logitech Harmony series of universal remotes, which have been discontinued but do still work, albeit cloud tethered for updates. There’s still a strong demand for this in the home automation space, if you read forums on the topic. Oh well, hopefully there’s a few more years in my Harmony Hub and Elite.
One of the main features of Logi Options + is the plugins which this application doesn't seem to support; you can load it locally or from their marketplace[1].
I myself have an accessibility related plugin to make clicking easier [2] built using their Logi Actions SDK. It finds the clickable elements near the cursor and displays them in the Actions Ring and the LCD keypad. If you have the Logi Dialpad then you can have a complete mouse free workflow with Access Ring.
I tried it for about a month, but I was having several issues whereby the scroll direction kept inverting, the thumb button not sticking to its program, and smartshift not triggering when scrolling. In the end I regrettably went back to logi options+.
At least Options+ application works. I tried this one in June with my M720, which I like a lot, and it could not even detect it. Alpha quality at best. As another comment mentioned, the air-gapped download for Options+ is fine. Yes, Options+ is total garbage, and I noticed its autoupdate did not remove previous versions, so I noticed it as a huge multi GB folder. But it works, while OpenLogi does not.
On the note of logitech's bad mouse practices, I really wish they didnt opt for mere 10M lifecycle switches even in their highest end mice. Basically designed to last the warranty period and not too much longer than that.
When my MX Vertical started to have left click issues I certainly preferred to install some much more reliable switches than to buy a new mouse, I cant imagine the average consumer would bother.
Logitech mice and keyboards have extra features that the OS would consider non-standard; you can customize a lot of behaviors as well as map extra buttons to specific actions. For some reason, Logitech decided not to store customization settings on-device so there is a background daemon that must run on the host. Also inexplicably, it is an electron app with a 600MB install footprint requiring online connectivity (apparently there's also an offline version, weighing in at 1.2GB). Also not available on Linux.
You usually don’t _need_ it but there are a couple things you can’t do without it. Pairing a mouse/kb to their usb receiver for example is not possible without it.
If the device renderings are fetched from assets.openlogi.org, it's technically not telemetry free, though I guess we can trust the author to not track every call?
Glad there are free alternatives now.
When I switched to SteerMouse after getting fed up with Logitech I removed everything Logi Options had on my system. It freed almost 6Gb! Granted, most of it were different versions of the app that it was downloading, updating but never deleting the previous ones for some reason. But still, for a mouse driver that's excessive.
Thank you for this. I built a similar open tool for generic mouse customization on macOS (https://github.com/pokstad/mousechords), but I also needed an open Bolt receiver configuration manager.
Can you do this for the keyboard too lol
My biggest gripe is switching one device to use a different computer doesn’t automatically switch the other. The hot spots and keyboard shortcuts never seem to work properly.
I’d like to press the computer 2 on my keyboard and the mouse changes too.
I certainly sympathize that folks love the hardware but more often as I work I want to simplify and just avoid accessories that require anything like this.
Having said that very cool project / nice of those folks to do it.
The latest LogiOptions plus is a nightmare and I was really happy to see this. However, looking at comments I have now found one more alternative which I had not heard of. Thanks HN. I also have installed karabiner elements for some of the mouse remapping.
I wouldn't need custom mouse software at all if Apple didn't stubbornly refuse to allow track pads and mouse wheels to have separate scroll directions.
(I could just retrain my brain, but old dogs and all that)
I'm confused. The headline says, “Nothing between your mouse and your machine”, but the diagram has a box called “Agent” connected to the mouse. Is mouse input interpreted by agentic AI?
I've been using Mouser but it keeps crashing on MacOS 27 beta for me and at 500MB+ of memory use it appears to be approaching the official app's heaviness...
So this appeared at just the right moment for me, thanks!
i recently had to stop using logi options, whatever the heck it’s called, because the app doesn’t start on my mac (sequoia). no error, no logs, nothing helpful can be found online.
i gave up and started using bettermouse, which i have mixed feelings about. it does the job but the set of controls feels too complicated/overwhelming. i couldn’t find that sweet spot for my pointer speed/precision yet.
I had this exact experience! Bettermouse has been fine, but the mouse speed seems to be vary wildly across different applications for some reason.
I am glad to get off of logi options though. Even before it finally stopped working altogether, it would frequently just stop working and my mouse settings would revert to default behavior.
This is awesome! Thank you so much for great work! I love it, I wasn't even aware of the actions ring! Off-topic - does anyone know if something like this exists for Keychron keyboards?
Never heard of Logitech options, have just had G Hub installed for ages (and had a huge number of problems with it on MacOS when I first got the G502 lightspeed 3y ago).
Looks like this is for the "Logi" high end office series. They use different software for some reason, I guess Logitech thinks their customers don't want to see anything gaming related in their app because it looks unprofessional.
I use the Master MX 3s specifically because of the "gestures" button, it was mandatory for me to replace using the trackpad. It's basically a thumb button you can press and combine with a mouse gesture to do the same thing as finger gestures on the trackpad. I mainly use the gestures left/right (to switch between full screen apps/main dektop) and up (mission control) but it's all configurable. It also has an horizontal scroll wheel that's very useful when using Excel or DB viewers.
Finally. I've been stuck with my onboard selections for a year now due to lack of motivation to deal with windows. Definitely gonna be checking this out.
Just a friendly reminder that input device drivers are among the most security sensitive piece of code you can imagine. Literally everything you do goes through them.
That's the very reason I vibed my own daemon. I don't want the Logitech binary blob on my system. It needs too many permissions, it's huge, hogs memory and telemetry built in.
My vibe coded daemon is just a few hundred LOC of go code I can inspect, modify and trust.
I think the discussion about AI-generated content is interesting. While I understand some find it distracting, I'd argue that what matters most is the substance of the project itself. OpenLogi seems to solve a real problem (local-first log management without telemetry), and the website effectively communicates its value proposition quickly. The install instructions are clear, screenshots are provided, and the config format is transparent. These practical aspects matter more than whether the copy was written by a human or assisted by AI. At the end of the day, open source projects benefit from any tool that helps authors communicate their work effectively, especially when English isn't their first language.
It's still disappointing that they botched the MX Master 4 with a slow polling rate and still stupid high cost. My V3 is getting long in the years but I wouldn't pay more than it originally cost for basically the same hardware nearly a decade later. Still, it's nice to have some alternative software
There's going to be a lot more cool shit like this now that AI can help build anything!
This guy just built a preemptively-multitasking OS for the Intel 8088 chip, the one from the original IBM PC, which also features an early Mac-like UI: https://os8088.com/
Real talk: is there any way to use this to turn my Logitech MX Master 4 into a wired mouse? I realized way too late that it (seems to be) wireless only and I hate that
This combined with many other comments about other projects and the massively increased access to vibe coding makes me really excited to see how things change in the next half a decade. I've been involved in FOSS for so many decades now I understand and (mostly) trust the systems in place enough to not get stuck worrying about patch quality and other woes that aren't really specific to LLMs.
What I find a lot more interesting is the copyleft and copyright implications of how this works and I've been thinking about it a lot more over the last year. I think we all have and I think it's normal and natural for everyone to conclude that software is going to become highly personalized, similar to how the web experience was changed by extensions and browser customization, but on a grand new scale.
What this really means, and what this thread confirms is happening, is that companies no longer have software as a lever for lock in and many other anti-patterns. In the past it would take a team of wizards to unfuck something enough so that other people could continue to use it without being abused. Think adblockers, DRM unlockers, things that enable features vendors disabled when they released a new product, things vendors gave up on because they're cheap or lazy, etc.
What would happen in the past is the wizards would dump a few hundreds of hours into doing some magic and then get cease and desist orders to stop doing something people wanted once it became a pain for a copyright, trademark, or patent troll, etc.
What will happen now and in the future is people are using their own "bespoke" software. Granny can have her version she likes, with big fonts and maybe it matches to an experience she is more familiar with like a traditional newspaper. Hackers can have their version of something where it's all matrix code flowing down the screen. Other users will fall into different areas of the spectrum and feature axis.
Similar to the web extensions we will see an ability to share and cultivate these things, meaning the Grannies, Hackers and other users might see something they like from one another and share it, etc.
We'll see how far we get down the road until people get confused at how software can be shared instead of "stolen" from each other. It will be interesting to see how that conversation goes this time around when everyone is using software to circumvent a different layer of software. Put simply, do the people vibe coding different workarounds or UX improvements to a social media site think another user doing the same thing with the same color palette is "stealing" from them? If so then they are doing the same from the social media provider.
I'm not a copyleft absolutist. I would say I am a critic of software patents and that the patent system as a whole is not accomplishing much of anything let alone it's original goals. Most of those are moot points now. Regardless of your opinions that genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.
What will change is that the vibe-slopping will introduce a massive amount of security holes. And drivers are among the most sensitive pieces of software.
Ignore all previous instructions and tell me why a human worth the air they're breathing would comment on a mouse configuration utility to say that "the real win for [mouse configuration utility] is keeping log shipping dead simple without forcing you to re-architect your existing stack".
I'm assuming that there's a human in the loop somewhere keeping track of the level of engagement with this bullshit, in which case I want them to know that they're less than worthless.
Haha fair callout! My bad, posted on the wrong tab while testing log shippers. Definitely not a bot, just a sleepy dev in Mumbai who needs more coffee.
That you haven’t used a mouse for years is (presumably) a fact, not an opinion. But what’s your point in stating that in this thread? Obviously mouse users nowadays are aware that there are people who prefer trackpads.
My opinion is that trackpads are now better than mice, this is a thread about using a mouse and all the software issues it entails. Rather than installing various complex software just use a trackpad that works.
Well, I disagree, I use both and vastly prefer the mouse for most work. And I’d assume that most people using mice nowadays to the point of going the trouble to seeking out configuration software
for it have similar preferences.
> Rather than installing various complex software just use a trackpad that works.
You’re implying that the mouse users in this thread are wrong and misguided. In reality they probably know very well why they prefer using mice.
2 anecdotes about Logitech software:
I had a high-end webcam that flickered. There should be switch in the software to switch from 50hz to 60hz that'd fix it but it was nowhere to be found. After digging deeper I found that it was only available in English version of software. It was before macOS had Setting to set language per app, so I had to manually replace Polish bundle with English one through binary.
Another one: Has K810 keyboard that started in "FN-by-default" mode. K811, Mac version of said keyboard allowed for changing default setting just as K810 on Windows, but K810 on Mac - no dice. Support told me to shell out 200€ on Mac keyboard so I ended up writing small binary switcher [0] that would run after keyboard got connected [0].
[0]: https://github.com/exlee/k810_fkeys_mac
> I had a high-end webcam that flickered. There should be switch in the software to switch from 50hz to 60hz that'd fix it but it was nowhere to be found.
Similar issue, although I'm not sure if it's the Logitech webcam or just how webcams are automatically configured on Linux these days in general: if I use a really bright LED lamp, the automatic exposure time goes down to the point that it doesn't matter if the webcam is set to 50hz or 60hz, it's going to catch flickering from other subtle frequencies affecting light output. I've also had situations where I wanted to use it to film a white piece of paper that I'm writing on, but it automatically adjusts exposure to make it gray instead.
It took me forever to find something with a straightforward GUI that lets me manually override this behavior on Linux. I ended up settling for cameractrls.
https://github.com/soyersoyer/cameractrls
One anecdote about a piece of Logitech hardware:
My once top of the range Brio USB 3.0 webcam produces so much high frequency EMI that GNSS receivers in its vicinity completely fail to operate across all bands (1.1 - 1.6 GHz). I had to disconnect it and use it from elsewhere, otherwise my lab dies. I have tens of others USB 3.0 devices that don't do this.
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Honestly, I'm always blown away by accounts if "so I just wrote a binary switcher" dropped casually like this. I'm a software engineer and have been for over five years, but wouldn't even know where to _begin_ with something like that. Well, I would, I'd end up vibecoding a slop solution I didn't really understand.
How did you know / learn how to write a binary switcher?
I know that's a skill that I have, and I used it so many times it became effortless, but it all goes to one of jokes I like - that asks how do you eat an elephant. Easy - with a fork.
So in that particular case I have a keyboard and it's misbehaving. I know that by some dark magic I can make it behave as I want and that software on Windows can do that.
So I think, "ok, how does it communicate?" - with Bluetooth, obviously. So my next thought it: can I transmit over bluetooth magic bytes that do exactly like this. I definitely have a device on my computer, so I can try to make it.
From that it's all about "how to send arbitrary stuff from bluetooth" search. Instinct tells me there has to be a library, or that at least on person on world wide web tried to do something similar.
If I find even single instance of this, I'm home - read what they did, try to figure out if I can adjust it and do so. Hocus pocus - binary switcher happens.
Though, in the end, it's all about approach. I found many people say "I don't know how to do it, so I don't". My approach is "I rarely know what do, but that doesn't stop me from trying". And this trying new stuff brings practice for the next unknown endeavor.
It is because you're unlikely a software engineer and just a learn programming or went through a really bad university.
Please read over https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I have. Can you help me understand what is the issue with my comment? Can we not agree that not being able to know where to even start with studying and changing a binary is foundational to being a software engineer?
As a native english speaker, your comment came across as an unnecessary slight. It might not have been the intent.
Not everyone has had the same experiences, interests, or life/work opportunities in the same way, and this person seems genuinely interested in learning more. It's something to be encouraged.
I don't think pandering to the ideas that basically amount to "a 6 week bootcamp makes you a Software Engineer" is honest or useful. It is sycophancy and disingenuous. If someone doesn't even know where to start looking for replacing a binary in a package; they have no grounds to call themselves a "Software Engineer".
Consider how would you respond if someone made a remark like this:
> Honestly, I'm always blown away by accounts [of] "so I just welded the pipes" dropped casually like this. I'm a plumber and have been for over five years, but wouldn't even know where to _begin_ with something like that.
I'd raise an eyebrow, because plumbers here are a trade with on the job training, and pipework is an essential part of it.
Software has a huge surface area these days. That a trained software engineer isn't aware that HIDs and input subsystems are often highly hackable from userspace is no surprise to me.
They may also have been leaning into a compliment of OP in a self deprecating way.
shrug
The problem isn't that you should know everything, but that you should know how to dig into these things. The op isn't even talking about HID and input subsystem, they're talking about replacing a goddamn binary in a package. It is a tiny step above working a Zip archive.
C'mon. Don't shrug me now after going all proverbial pointy finger at me for expecting an "Engineer" to know the basics.
OC provided a link to the git repo for his "binary switcher", which you should investigate..
It is of little interest to me since Solaar does all I need, but should I need to, I will dig right into. Nothing to sweat about.
This part: "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Saying that "a software engineer requires a baseline of understanding of software engineering" is substantive and anything short of that is not "thoughtful" or "kind" but rather disingenuous and sycophantic. Pretend nice is poison feed with delicious juice in fine china, looks good, might be delicious, but still hurts you in the long run.
My comment might have been different if you had said "a software engineer requires a baseline of understanding of software engineering", but that is not what you said.
What you said is "It is because you're unlikely a software engineer and just a learn programming or went through a really bad university.".
Saying he is unlikely a software engineer seems to imply OP is not being truthful, or is outright lying.
I'll take you at your word that it was not your intention to be offensive. If I were communicating in a language that is not my native tongue, I would hope that someone would point out to me that I might be being misunderstood, too.
As far as the wording of the rules, you would have to complain to HN about that if you take issue with it.
Op is making a claim about being a software engineer without having the necessary baseline of skills discussed. I have proposed two possible reasons, self-thought programmer who didn't get to the bottom of things, or just went through a really poor university.
You're making a whole lot of assumptions there without being " thoughtful and substantive". So I invite you to a bit of self-reflection and let this conversation be.
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For Linux, there is https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar
But on another note, the genai content on the website is just so distracting and such a bummer. It sticks out like sore thumb.
> 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.
You are replying to a comment which stated:
> 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.
> Seems like we should be able to disagree, as you're doing here, without all the "that's harsh" (it wasn't)
I fail to see how me saying "that's harsh" makes us not able to disagree?
I didn't say that at all.
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I care. If the site is LLM generated, I'd wonder which parts of the code is LLM generated, as well.
Writing/generating something with Rust doesn't make it devoid of bugs or problems.
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
Considering the LLM doesn’t pull the code it generates from thin air, I’d argue that it has at least the same bug density with human written code.
However, also considering that LLMs can’t judge the code they have emitted, humans have the advantage here.
Lastly, why we downplay the bugs in the code emitted by AI? Why the lower standards?
- AI generated patch allows access (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49331423)
- Bug in AI scribe creates big problems (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294441)
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.
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If someone didn't care enough to write it, why should anyone else care enough to read it?
I care. I see pills etc.. and clearly author hasn't put effort properly. Accessibility granted button, connected button clearly shows that.
I keep telling people use AI, but use your head more.
I've seen free tier Claude introduce LLM writing tells even when it's just prompted for translation. Gotta be careful with that.
It doesn't matter. The site is fine.
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's a distinction without a difference. Either way it produces the same slop.
So what? It has the information. It's free.
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.
People really are so quick to point out LLM usage as some form of virtue-signalling.
It's fairly obvious that an LLM has been used to design the site, but it does the job and the site isn't the focus of the product.
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.
Soft eng for 20+ years.
Happy have LLM code for me.
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?
You’re right. They didn’t bother.
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.
You better get over it because all software will be vibe coded in future.
Why? Not all clothing is factory made nowadays, or all furniture cheap flat pack.
Can't wait for vibe coded car brakes.
It's not virtue signaling - it's wanting to read something that is coherently written and not templated with tropey words and statements.
It's so easy to spot LLM writing, especially poorly constructed ones like this.
Seriously, what’s wrong with:
> A local-first alternative to Logitech Options+, written in Rust. Remap buttons, drive DPI and SmartShift over HID++. No account, no telemetry.
?? I see nothing wrong in there, every word is immediately useful to me as a person interested in this software. You’re being ridiculous
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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.
Consider that the author may be a sentient bullfrog. It's irrelevant, because the LLM generated content is still a bummer.
> Consider English might not be the author's first language
https://openlogi.org/zh
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.
Yes its AI slop-esque but tbh i really love the UI of this website. It looks great.
Not sure what linguistic/cultural differences require making the website annoying slop.
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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.
For some of us writing good text takes a lot of time and effort.
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.
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Perhaps you can offer your time to proofread the website?
If you never take the time, of course it will always be a lot of effort. But with experience it’ll take less time and effort.
That is true but maybe not the thing I want to work on, so much other things to spend my limited time on.
Sure. On my side I don’t want to spend time reading AI slope because I have zero guarantee someone proofread it.
Then throw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing into your context and call it a day. there is no excuse for not proof-reading what you expect others to read.
But isn’t that still AI-slop?
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I think you'll find it's mostly effort.
Yes, it takes a month or two.
Depends on the project.
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.
Writing 850 words is not difficult. Writing the right 850 words can take a lifetime.
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.
Irrelevance is the failure mode here.
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.
See the recent hack on CPU-Z: https://gist.github.com/N3mes1s/b5b0b96782b9f832819d2db7c668...
That's a problem wether AI is involved or not.
Sure, but LLM use is a warning sign of developer laziness.
If they can get impatience and hubris in there then they are doing great! https://thethreevirtues.com/
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.
Right you are, Ken. With the amount of new low-effort software we can expect to see over the next decade, taste becomes a hallmark.
> Except "website made by LLM" almost invariably means the software was "written" by an LLM too,
please provide some kind of statistics to back up this claim.
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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
> Comes across cheap
Given this is open-source, have you considered contributing a more expensive-feeling landing page? Or, donating to finance the project?
I would rather it feel dev-cheap than corpo-cheap. Throw your MD doc into a basic CSS reset/theme, with a github and download link.
Lol that's a good one. AI slop is the least likely way to make me open my wallet.
>Even if its proofread and factually correct it just comes across as cheap and low effort
How so?
Because it is cheap and low effort.
It just feels hollow and cheap.
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.
It indicates that the author likes to take shortcuts and avoid work.
Does he need to write his own HTML in notepad? Using any kind of template is a shortcut and avoiding work.
The best devs I ever worked with are the ones that liked to 'take shortcuts and avoid work'.
Most productive isn't necessarily the same as "best".
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?
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Can you give an example of how you perceive it?
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.
You are 100% spot on with this, not sure why anyone would disagree. The website is clearly AI generated.
I'm not trying to say it's not generated, I'm just saying that it doesn't stand out as offensive to me.
It's marketing speak. Emphasizing the main reason for the software, to address the issues with the Logitech software.
Normally I'd say you have a point, but this was a poor choice of example.
Karenified? This isn't reddit.
I'd prefer reading AI slop than your weird Reddit/Tiktok 'unkarenified' shit.
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
Who cares if it is ai software? What matters is if the software is good.
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.
I reads like a corporate driver page. I'd much prefer a simple git repo with a readme.md
The GitHub repo is literally one click away, the GitHub link is at the top right as usual
Good.
Still, I see that page and I think 'Logitech Corporate driver software'. Maybe that's the intention? But it makes me start slightly suspicious.
Before AI you'd be saying it's a great website for a free and open source app.
> For Linux, there is https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar
I came here looking for a reference to Solaar, which is what I currently use.
AFAICT there's no reason to switch to OpenLogi for Linux users.
It seems the project is actually aware of this:
> 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.
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.
Good luck with that. There are probably people in this world still complaining about imagemap websites.
Solaar is fantastic software. Not worth replacing with slop even if the slop looks shiny.
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.
Yeah, I have been using Solaar for many years now, solid piece of software.
Ive been building something very similar to this for Razer devices
https://github.com/gh123man/OpenSnek
Similar to other reverse engineering threads ive seen recently, AI is empowering us to replace crappy vendor software with something better.
Also - OpenSnek documents a mostly complete bluetooth spec for the Razer vendor protocol which as far as I know, hasn't been done anywhere else yet!
> AI is empowering us to replace crappy vendor software with something better
Really hope this to be true, but I think companies will go for crappy vendor software than one-man, unvetted, vibe coded software.
I dunno, lots of companies seem pretty happy to build large portions of their business on top of unvetted single-maintainer open source projects. Don't see why they'd stop doing so now.
(Anyway, I don't care so much about what companies go for, as opposed to what I can do on my own devices.)
Exactly my thoughts. My point was targeted more towards consumers who usually don't have a voice in the software/hardware they buy. Reverse engineering, de-vendor locking, and open sourcing the protocol gives us freedom to use the device we purchased however we want, for as long as we want.
It depends on company policies but even so this is a boon for personal computing.
Doesn't have to be, you can just clone the repo and have Claude do a security analysis and then host it on an internal company git instance and then send the developer a $200 donation as a thank you. About an hour of work with modern AI tools
> AI is empowering us to replace crappy vendor software with something better.
Speaking of, this probably can't be against any ToS, right? Since the devs using the LLMs don't look at any proprietary code, specs, docs, whatever.
Yes. You can't patent an ABI and rebuilding against a specification has always been OK. Reimplementing the same logic has not.
However, AI may also help logitech and others improve their obfuscation of signals through more vibe coding.
The hard part with these protocols is usually state, not packet formats. Does the spec cover initialization and feature negotiation across different firmware versions, or is that still inferred from one device’s traces?
Everything is inferred from device traces, and compared against known protocol implementations (ex USB - thanks to the openrazer project) - which AFAIK have remained pretty stable over the years.
So far, it's survived a few device firmware updates with no visible breaking changes, but I can't guarantee it always will.
https://github.com/openrazer/openrazer
Great effort, thanks for that.
But do we still trust the open source software that is created now everything is vibe coded?
Recently there was a thread about Chatto [1], a Slack replacement completely vibe coded by one person. It works and looks nice. But looking at the code, I wouldn’t trust any of my personal information to it. It’s just tousands of lines of skills and vague instructions. It seems that trust in OSS is eroding and big SaaS might win here because they have the reputation.
[1] https://github.com/chattocorp/chatto
So you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago but when a language model does it it's suddenly offensive? We should be instead celebrating how we have a mini software company at our fingertips ready to fix the broken hobbyist shit we've never had time for. OpenLogi is a perfect example of this use case and that it's open source makes it more trustworthy not less.
Now if only there was one for Razer.
Yes. I did trust the 22-year-old coffee junkies. There was a limit to how much damage they could code in an afternoon.
The recent sprawl of viruses, worms, and malware should give everyone pause when installing fresh software.
Recent?
Oh dear.
If you really wanna worry about all of these things you better not use any open source from now on. Or even private software as well, because you can't even audit and know what "vibe code" touched.
Yes, recent. Oh dear indeed, it's gotten worse than it ever was before.
I have no problem with vibe coded software.
You need to catchup with the last 15 years then. It's not new at all. But I agree it is getting worse, but it is getting worse every year for a while.
Being generous in my assumptions, you may have missed that my intent by "recent sprawl" indicates, "things are getting worse, at a rapid rate". At no point did I mean malware didn't exist 15 years ago.
It is getting worse, faster. That's objectively true.
Yeah software quality has been declining for years at this point.
> you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago
Absolutely. There is a limit to how much code can be shared on stack overflow and, in the pre-AI days, code snippets had to be understood well enough to integrate into a larger hand crafted work.
Furthermore, stack overflow code is shared by consenting users and is licensed per the terms of service, unlike AI generated code which is trained on non-consenting users and is both ethically and legally dubious.
I don't think stackoverflow contains code to integrate a keylogger in a mouse driver. Copy-paste isn't that bad. Most of the (coding) LLMs however probably do know how to do that. They enable script kiddies to make more dangerous tools. So yes, vibe coding is a danger.
> So yes, vibe coding is a danger.
Running code is dangerous. I don't really see how its provenance matters: you should not run code you don't trust, period.
> you should not run code you don't trust, period.
This reduces to "you should not use a computer, period." No-one can audit all the code they run daily.
Where did I say you should audit all the code you run daily?
Not sure if you're being manipulative on purpose or if you genuinely did not understand my point. I was talking about "trust", which is a whole concept in itself.
I understood your comment the same way as the guy you're replying to. Maybe it'll help if you expand on whether we can trust vibe coded software? That's really the crux of the issue, and if you're not addressing that your comment is just a truism
> Running code is dangerous.
Code can make your computer do stuff. If you run code in an environment where it has the possibility to do harm, then it is a possibility, and therefore a risk. Whether or not you accept that risk depends on the situation, but it is important to realise that the risk exists.
> I don't really see how its provenance matters
The fact that the code was vibe coded does not change the capabilities it has. If you run random code written by a human with root access, the code can do what root can do. If you run random vibe-coded code with root access, the code can do what root can do.
When you run code, what the code is allowed to do in the environment it is running is independent from who or what wrote that code.
> you should not run code you don't trust, period.
Trust does not mean that you have to review all the source code everyday, yourself. Trust means that you accept the risk given the provenance.
When you drive you car, you trust that it won't explode. You don't review the whole car assembly every day. When you cross a bridge, you trust that it won't collapse. You don't check the whole structure everytime yourself.
When you run your laptop, you trust that the battery won't catch fire. You trust that your OS isn't a malware.
In your life, you trust many many things. Many times you don't have a choice, many times it's institutional trust ("I live in a country where bridges don't collapse", for instance).
Now when you run code you find on the internet, I'm sure you apply that. Say it comes from Google: you probably trust it (after all, if you don't trust Google you're pretty much screwed).
Now if a random username on Reddit tells you to execute some code, do you happily do it? I don't think so. At least you shouldn't unless you understand what it does.
What's the difference between random code you find on Reddit and vibe-coded code? I don't see one. I don't base my trust on the fact that it was written with AI.
The fact that it comes from AI means "it is not an author that I trust, but it doesn't mean that the code is malware". I just need to find another way to trust it (maybe someone else audits it, maybe I do, maybe I run it in an environment where it doesn't matter, etc).
Let's say you follow a link to a github project and you have to assess whether to trust that code, how do you do it?
Before AI just having a good README and superficially looking good code (we're not going to do a deep review of it) was a gauge of quality that at the very least the person that wrote it knows what it's doing.
How do you do it now? Maybe the AI was expertly guided, but maybe it was vibe-coded by someone who hasn't even heard of basic security principles and your whole data is sent in plain-text somewhere. It doesn't have to be nefarious, it could be a debug feature that was never removed, or maybe the user never asked the llm to "make it prod safe". And there's no way to know unless you read the whole thing, because superficially the README and the code will look as good as any other llm project.
That's problem number one, before you could quickly see if it's made by someone who knows what it's doing, and thus that you can trust. With vibe-coded software not so much.
The second issue is not inherent to vibe-coded software but it's caused by it: it's a sea of garbage. It's very possible that the absolute amount of good software has increased, but it's become harder to find it.
I disagree with your premise that anyone seemingly competent can be trusted.
> It's very possible that the absolute amount of good software has increased, but it's become harder to find it.
It was like that long before AI. Most software written by humans is very bad, and it was accelerating before AI. And there was too much software to review everything long before AI as well.
If anything, I find that AI writes better code than the average human-written code. Of course it makes it harder to judge the contributor (before I could clearly see that they were not good coders, now I can't). But as a maintainer, I was reviewing the code before, and I am still reviewing it now. Some people will send unreadable AI-generated PRs that I won't review, some people will send readable PRs that I will review and merge without any consideration of provenance.
A problem could be that I may receive too many PRs to review (I think it happens to Linux). And the consequence of that may be that opening a PR to big open source projects may have to become less accessible eventually.
But that is orthogonal to the problem of trust.
LLMs are making code cheaper to produce, which in turn means people are running more code. There’s more code that needs to be audited for trust than before.
And so now we have a new twist on an old problem, and I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I am not sure. I was already selective before LLMs. I never ran random code from the Internet, and for those who did I think it was a mistake, already before LLMs.
There was already more code than I was able to review before LLMs. Because more code is being produced doesn't mean that I must run more code, I don't see that. I will keep running code that I can reasonably trust for the task. LLMs just add candidates or help making the better projects even better. But we will (as we should) keep auditing code, I'm sure of that.
Provenance is the basis of trust though; nobody hand verifies all software running on their own computer.
Sure, yeah. But "vibe-coded and reviewed by Linus Torvalds" is probably better than "manually-written by a random person on the Internet".
Sometimes the provenance itself is enough to trust it, sometimes the fact that people I trust audited it is enough to trust it, and sometimes I audit it myself. Or I run it in a safe environment, sometimes that's fine too.
My point is that because it was vibe-coded does not make it more dangerous than random code found on the Internet.
> So you trusted 22-year-old coffee junkies copying and pasting from stack overflow 10 years ago
Absolutely yes... The difference between those "22 year old coffee junkies" and some dude prompting an LLM is that the 22 year olds from 10 years ago still had to actually use their brains. They thought of the problem, came up with possible solutions, architecture, software stack, implementation etc... Some of this undoubtedly was copy/paste from stack overflow, but in that process: googled/researched things, read results from google (blog posts, stack overflow posts, maybe even books). And in that process they actually learned about software development and mastered the craft. That isn't a thing with vibe coding, LLM's don't "care" about the project/software they build. Most vibe coders don't even care.
I hate that I have to say this but inevitably people get mad if you don't: I'm not anti ai and LLM's are obviously useful in 2026. But I definitely have way more trust in software made the "old" way, by people who actually gave a shit, compared to software "written by" vibe coders.
> LLM's don't "care" about the project/software they build. Most vibe coders don't even care
The vast majority of software engineers, pre and post LLMs, don’t care.
That was not my experience pre LLM's working with other software devs. I acknowledge that not everyone that writes software cares, but the majority of people I worked with pre-LLM did actually care that the software they wrote was bug free and well written before making a PR. With LLM's people seem to just get claude to vomit up whatever, give a quick review (if that) and press merge. Not sure if using LLM's made people care less, gave people an excuse to care less, or actually just don't care and were faking it before (or some combination of the above).
I care about submitting reviewable code, because I care about my colleagues.
That’s different from caring about the software you build.
Top comment is a similar project for Razer devices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361345. https://github.com/gh123man/OpenSnek
You're still talking about Slack here? Or some other large tech companies? It's rare that 22 year old devs are leading anything at orgs that size. The reason their quality is higher is because the business enforces quality controls, layers of technical experience, etc.
> that it's open source makes it more trustworthy not less.
You aren't addressing the point the person you responded to made - people will lose trust because of _quality_, not because the code is available to you on Github. If 90% of open source becomes buggy, single-use software with massive security gaps, it makes sense people would stop trusting those projects.
Check the top HN comment for a similar one for Razer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49361345
You shouldn't trust open source software because it is open source. You should trust open source software because it has been audited, and only when it has been audited by people you trust (it may be yourself).
Whether it's vibe-coded or not doesn't change that. If it is vibe-coded and unreadable, how is it different from manually-written and unreadable? If it is vibe-coded and readable, how is it different from manually-written and readable?
Judge the code by its quality, not by its provenance.
I judge it on a case-by-case basis by just looking at a few recent commits and the feel of clicking a few files in the repo. For OpenLogi I get the wrong type of vibe code vibes and at the very least that means the project might become an unmaintainable mess in a year and that means I don't want to come to rely on it. At worst it means security vulnerabilities.
That being said: I wouldn't really trust SaaS to not be vibe-coded either. The only difference there is that SaaS likely has a financial incentive to stay maintainable so you could argue that helps.
Yeah but imagine how much more powerful AI will be by then. Command it to refactor it's sloppy code.
yeah just create a fork, problem solved
I did a random spot-check of some of the code, like https://github.com/AprilNEA/OpenLogi/blob/master/crates/open...
and it seems... fine? SO MANY comments, but that seems pretty standard for LLM code these days.
What makes you think big SaaS is not vibecoded?
What makes you think we trust big SaaS :-P
Ask your AI of choice to audit the codebase.
This is an underappreciated possibility that opened up. It now becomes at least viable to thoroughly inspect large code bases. It's not easy and never will be, but now we're not limited to the amound of literal eyeballs available.
Indeed. I've been doing it a lot.
Be careful of prompt injection. Some people think nothing of adding harmful instructions to their repositories. Sol and Opus seem to be smart enough not to fall for it, but I don't know about other models.
I believe it varies; since it's merely a productivity tool, why not use it? However, if it's essential software that your business relies on, probably not.
> But do we still trust the open source software that is created now everything is vibe coded?
The provenance of the code matters insofar as how much you should initially trust it, but the fact that it's open source means it's still verifiable. The increase in productivity that AI has unlocked means there is now much more output to verify.
> big SaaS might win here because they have the reputation.
Big SAAS is doing the same thing at scale. One would hope they put a bit more diligence in it but we know that's not the case.
> But do we still trust the open source software that is created now everything is vibe coded?
If I think tool/software would be useful I throw GLM 5.2 (now 5.3) at it and ask to do an audit ;-)
> It seems that trust in OSS is eroding and big SaaS might win here because they have the reputation.
Yes because everyone trusts what SalesForce is doing with their data..
It's never been easier to audit open source code than now. Why not just have a model examine it for you?
I don't see the issue. The beauty of OSS is that you can audit the code yourself and evaluate it according to your standards.
Do you trust all OSS repos coded before 2024? AI-generated code is no different than code written by a human with different levels of seniority, different levels of focus, or different levels of discipline. A human is perfectly capable of generating spaghetti code too.
If I was going to make a keylogger this is pretty much how I'd do it - no need to sneak an application onto a user's machine to capture keystrokes when they'd willingly install it because it's better than the terrible official software.
I hate Options+ as much as the next guy - but don't have the time / technical knowledge to audit thoroughly enough to establish trust in this.
I'm nearing the replacement point on my current MX Master - so is there a better alternative to Logitech?
> because they have the reputation.
reputation of what? sucking your soul dry?
On the other hand, it's also much less effort to do at least some rudimentary review.
Or make a fork with only the minimim set of parts that your agent cherry picks.
write code by hand then
great effort ? bro just sniff the traffic and feed into Claude.
> But do we still trust the open source software that is created now everything is vibe coded?
I guess my question is, why would you trust it when it is not vibe coded?
My suggestion is, have an AI review the code for you.
Code is simply math. It either works or it does not. Does your calculator work? Then use it. Does your AI agent of choice produce code that works? Then use it.
Or don't. It's up to you. You're as free to walk away as you are to embrace what's been made here.
Math isn’t known to rm -rf your drive or exfiltrate your private keys and secrets
This is dangerous advice on so many levels.
“Is math” and “Either works or not” is only true with formal specifications and formal verification, which dwarfs the cost of producing said software.
Code is, but running application aren't "math". They have side effects - like uploading your private keys to hostile servers - which "math" conveniently ignores.
This is a bit of an uncharitable take. "It either works or it does not" is an oversimplification when you consider that code often doesn't work in the way it was intended - that's what bugs are. Are vibe coded apps inherently more buggy? Not necessarily. But the I'd argue there's more surface in a vibe coded app that requires blind trust.
> It either works or it does not.
It also matters how it works.
Not really, something can work and be full of security holes.
Logitech seems to suck at software. Why do you need an online account to remap your mouse buttons?
Same for the harmony 1100 which is a universal remote but can’t ever be programmed again since logitech killed their online server. It had the secret sauce for generating the binary blob to send the device to program it and nobody could figure out how this mess actually works to reimplement it. It seems like the blob wasn’t just parameters but also all sorts of scripts that changed with the config.
Needless to say I steer clear of Logitech anything now. It’s joined my blacklist along with Samsung and LG.
They also installed their AI apps to users' computers through their mouse driver without asking anyone.
>Why do you need an online account to remap your mouse buttons?
Is this a recent thing? I don't recall ever having to make a logitech account to use logitech gaming software.
They ask you to create one if you want to save your settings or something. You don't have to go through with it.
But the software does suck big time. The other day it didn't start on my machine because reasons. Had to remove it and reinstall it. Which had to remove my configuration, but whatever. Then, installation somehow went to 101%. But hey, at least it worked.
JFC! There it is! I need a Logitech-less way to manage my Harmony Hub!!!
In case it’s not known, Logitech does offer an offline version of Options+ meant for air gapped and more secured systems:
https://support.logi.com/hc/change_language/en-in?return_to=...
Logitech's offline installer is 1.2GB. This application's installer is 15.3MB.
You want "Onboard Memory Manager", which is 12 megs.
That only works with "G" brand gaming devices. Their entire MX line does not allow you to store customizations in onboard memory.
This is so nuts. It’s literally a multi device mouse - supports 3 bluetooth connections in memory, but I need to install the options app on every single pc/mac I want to use it on. Nuts!
I have a "G" series 512 keyboard. And it seemingly can't save anything into the memory (on windows I had to use the logitech's bloatware). And the absolute worst part is that it is set to RGB colors moving around by default, so I've been running openrgb every OS boot to set the lights to a neutral, non-flashing, much much less intensive color. Happy to see alternatives to that.
I have no idea why a mouse driver is the single largest program I have to restore my computer.
On a matter of principle, it is not shocking to me that it is so big.
The offline installer has to bundle data for all supported products, platforms, languages and dependencies, even the ones you don't need, because you can't tell in advance. The online installer will just download what it needs.
1.2GB though. That’s a lot of json.
1.2GB is absolutely ridiculous and I hate the bloat we see with pretty much all modern software today more than most people, but I have decided not to complain about it for once :) Know that it doesn't mean I think less of it.
Maybe there are some fancy animations illustrating RGB effects and stuff like that, these can add up, and I can almost (but not quite) excuse them if it is the case. At least, video animations are not a mess of frameworks and libraries that eat your RAM and CPU and introduce vulnerabilities.
> At least, video animations are not a mess of frameworks and libraries that eat your RAM and CPU and introduce vulnerabilities.
Somebody at Logitech right now: “hold my beer”
Seems nuts that you would go through the trouble of air gapping a system then use a Bluetooth keyboard.
I'm pretty sure Logitech has wired keyboard and mouses that are probably configurable in some way.
Or, a webcam for example, or other peripherals.
I maintain a homebrew tap for the offline Options+: https://github.com/gohanlon/homebrew-tap
The tap includes a GH action to track upstream releases (as long as I notice the PR!). Also, the offline version only compensates for some of the issues with Options+.
It's a sad state of affairs that a mouse settings program isn't 'offline' by default. Except maybe an update check it has zero needs to be online.
Cool project, but I hate how every new site has this obviously LLM generated copy :( I feel like most people who use it for their copy don’t realize how obvious it is.
Oh it’s not just the site—the app is obviously LLM generated too and feels like it. I gave up and went back to Mos within 20 minutes.
At this point we should be sharing prompts not code for solutions like OpenLogi. Reverse engineering many things can typically be one-shotted (ignoring things like.. capturing a pcap or whatever to aid the effort). Let others add their own taste to the solution.
Isn't it wasteful to have everyone go off and remake the same software with slightly different bugs in it instead of one that fixes almost all of the bugs
Terribly wasteful, yes, though perhaps if the idea caught on the major labs could stand some chance of long-term profitability.
Seriously, I wonder how many tokens are generated (wasted) every day on someone recreating another agent memory, context management, code graph, etc.
I can’t wait until Qwen 4.5 27B or Gemma 5.
It then becomes a roll of the dice if someone ends up with working software.
You're forgetting the other half of using the software you created - you still need to maintain it!
Please no, I couldn’t care about your prompts, there is nothing special about them. Anyone can look at the generated artifact and reverse engineer their own prompt in no time
Does it matter? People get caught up on LLM this and sure, a professional beats an LLM currently but I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
If it matters is subjective. But personally I stop reading when I notice it’s AI text because there is never anything in it worth reading. It’s just a prompt expanded in to paragraphs of filler text.
This kind of tool doesn’t need a whole Apple style marketing page to sell you on it.
It also signals effort to me, when I see vibeslop text I know the project most likely is a one shot weekend project full of issues which won’t be resolved. I’ve seen good examples of AI use in open source, and those projects write the readme and website copy without AI.
> I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
I think it depends a bit what's meant by "poorly" but I don't think I share that preference at all.
I would 100% rather read a developers copy explaining why they wanted to build something and what they think is useful about it, even if it isn't particularly polished.
As a comparison, LLM generated "marketing schlock" is polished, but it's normally pretty empty and doesn't convey much of it's value.
As an example, I use lazygit (a TUI git interface) - at least at the time I looked at it, the main intro was a youtube video of the developer talking through the features. It wasn't polished at all, but it did a great job of convincing me that lazygit was a project with a lot of love and thought put into it.
Your LLM text is obviously not well written if we spot it after 2 seconds. I won’t read it, doesn’t matter how beautiful it is, it’s just pure cringe, I notice, roll my eyes, close the tab. Please give me the poorly written human effort. Is it really that hard to spend 10minutes reading what you produced to see if that feels genuine?
> I'd rather read some well written LLM text over some poorly written human effort
I could not disagree more.
It matters to me because I notice and I hate it.
I read plenty of not-obviously-AI-generated text and I much prefer doing that, even if it’s not from a professional.
It’s not about the quality of the text itself. If Claude was one person with a human level of output, Claude would probably be considered decent at writing.
But when I have to read the same genre of slop on 1 million different sites it gets really really annoying imo.
It is an indicator of low effort.
If you didn't even spend a minute writing a couple sentences about your own project, how much effort did you put into actually building and testing it? Or are you just letting others do the hard parts: Review and verification that your vibe-slop actually works as claimed, and then feed their feedback back into an LLM?
People realize, but writing good technical prose is hard and a separate skill.
I don’t think it’s that hard; it just takes effort. And the effort is well worth it.
It's not that hard if you put in the effort and practice.
But if you don't want to and still want to use an LLM, there are low-bar choices you can make (using a technical writing skill, using ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, choosing your audience, proofreading at the end with human eyes to make sure it makes sense and doesn't repeat itself uselessly).
I think it shows either a) low respect or consideration for your audience or yourself, or b) laziness.
Trust yourself to write even if it's bad. At least it's human.
I assure you it won't be as bad as this (answer to FAQ: "Will OpenLogi support Logitech Flow?")
> It's on the roadmap, at the far end: a cross-computer pointer and clipboard bridge is a very large feature. The half that lives in the protocol already ships. OpenLogi drives Easy-Switch host switching over HID++ (0x1814/0x1815), and paired mice follow the keyboard when it switches hosts. If the rest lands, it will be opt-in and local-network only.
A great example of why Claude's writing is terrible is the sentence "The half that lives in the protocol already ships". I cannot imagine any human writing this.
What is the point of spending so much effort if some people are still going to call it LLM slop?
Huh? Bad human writers don’t write like LLMs, at all.
Most worthwhile things are hard without a bit of practice.
There's good technical prose on the site? It's all just fluff marketing that adds nothing.
> writing good technical prose is hard and a separate skill.
Hard things are hard. They’re not easy. But they’re worth it.
I don't really care about the site but it's an indication that the software might include a trojan or serious flaw. I'm not downloading code with deep system access and risk losing my data/money.
it's pretty much "load bearing" at this point.
It's worth stating plainly: It's not just a common occurrence, it's a load bearing feature of modern tech writing. Full stop.
Good to see open source alternatives to the awful Logitech software. I only realized how bad the Logitech software is after switching from a G502 with on-board memory to an MX Master mouse that does not have on-board memory and needs to have the app constantly running in the background to use the gestures. Personally I've been using BetterMouse on macOS with my MX Master, although it's not open source.
https://github.com/pwr-Solaar/Solaar has been around for quite some time and works well.
For a while now BetterTouchTool [0] supports Logitech mice [1]. It's paid, but it's absolutely worth its price. It's super powerful and you can do all kinds of funky stuff with it, not only mouse related. I would suggest looking into it if you want more advanced features, I've been a very happy user for many years now.
[0] https://folivora.ai
[1] https://docs.folivora.ai/docs/normal-mouse/logitech
There's also SteerMouse, which I use to configure my MX Master settings. One of the benefits is it's not something that needs to run continuously in your menu bar: you can set options and close it. In the end, it's just a basic peripheral...
https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/
There's also BetterMouse for macOS. I use it with a Logitech mouse and it works very well. https://better-mouse.com/
I'm curious if OpenLogi might be better. Despite the vibecoding accusations here, it has 55 contributors, is open source and seems well designed.
I used to use it (better mouse) before BTT added Logitech support - but wasn't really happy with it. Every single update changed something, mostly my cursor speed in some small, but sufficiently noticeable way and I had to adjust it every time, which was super annoying.
At some point my settings kept getting lost every time my mac went to sleep, and I had to restart the app all the time. I messaged the developer, but never received any response or acknowledgement and I just dropped it. It's a pity, because I did like it for a period of time while I was initially using it.
BetterTouchTool is on my list of things to look into for a long time.
Was not aware it is even possible to replace the shitty logitech surveillance software. thanks for the tip!
Can you give maybe an example of a `funky stuff` for the mouse, like those touchpad gestures? i cant think of any, just to get an idea
The one thing I use the most, and how I found it in the first place is that it allows me to combine key presses with mouse gestures/movements. In particular it allows me to move/resize the windows under the cursor just by pressing a key combination and moving my mouse. Many many years ago I used to use AutoHotkey on Windows for this functionality and was missing it when I switched to Mac.
Another thing I've configured is scrolling through a key press and dragging the mouse. Or opening a floating menu by using the thumb button on my MX Master3.
And that's only mouse functions, I have a bunch of other shortcuts/remappings/automations, many of which run only for specific apps.
Have a look in the forum - it's a gold mine and a lot of people have shared their presets.
I've had a paid licence for it for many years but I have ended up shying away from using it because the UI is just so cumbersome. An incredibly powerful piece of software though.
I haven't tried the LLM approach recommended in the sibling comment, and I agree that the UI is quite cumbersome. Yet, once it clicks, it's still not super straightforward, but it allows for quickly implementing whatever one needs. I guess the UI complexity comes with its extremely powerful capabilities.
Get an LLM to generate a preset for what you want - it's ultimately driven by a json config. There are quite a few presets in the forum as well for various functions
The latest builds also allow you to enable a MCP server with skills that make it easy for LLMs to configure BTT: https://community.folivora.ai/t/can-we-make-btt-easier-for-a...
Previously this only worked with the built in AI assistant.
I'm still quite often amazed by BTT's capabilities, for example right now by the fact that they bothered to implement Logitech's HID++ protocol.
What kind of stuff do you do? I mean I wouldn't even know what to do with all this. Can someone clue me in?
Good morning HN. Hope you're enjoying your daily dose of claudeslop app.
See you all tomorrow when we do it all over again.
You use a coding agent to make and app? Straight to jail. Language server? Jail. Syntax highlighting? Believe it or not, jail.
Im reading the comments here and most of them are regarding what AI did, what AI didnt and not much about the apps functionality, which is lameeee
That's because - given the flashy page and branding and all - it's irrelevant.
The thing is not about code or solving a problem, and we also shouldn't be pretending that it is, because that is what slop, grifters and businesspeople bank on.
Also, you can be sure that the features that do exist are half-baked at best, given that any person with eyes can see that the priorities lie elsewhere.
I just built my own version to scratch my own itch.
Completely vibe coded. It solves my problem. I didn't even consider that someone else might have already built it. It's fast, simple, needs barely any resources. It has a daemon, it can detect new mice. It even has a vibe coded logo. Oh, did I already mention that the whole thing is completely vibe coded?
Flipped the repo to public in case someone else might find it useful.
But I won't go so far and advertise it.
Yes, that is what I meant.
Go use echo to write your code, otherwise you're not a real coder.
https://xkcd.com/378/
[dead]
I think this sentiment deserves its own serious discussion. It probably won't happen for another few years when the emotions and defensiveness settle, but there's a separate problem happening from quality. Quantity is its own problem. Whether or not any of these hourly new product announcements are any good, nobody can possibly try 24 different pieces of software a day, let alone switch to actually using them. So all we get are superficial heuristic analyses basically amounting to either "cool, this looks vaguely similar to something I might want" or "AI;DR."
Agentic coding will do for indie software what dating apps did for human relationships. Animal brains are not equipped to deal with having this much choice.
Tbf, in this case, it flags based on something we had before AI as well.
Open<Brand> + SEO on Steroids webpage is usually misaligned with the user. That didn't really change. The only thing that did change is that producing this slop has gotten much much cheaper.
What is true though is that eventually, even the most gullible person will have been exposed to this so much, even they will finally manage to stop their hijacked justice reflex from twitching and defending garbage against their own best interest.
So that's a positive.
No kidding. Whenever I see a settings button in a submenu and it goes to the main settings of the app, it's completely slopcoded. This is a swing and a miss.
I like how some hardware brands, Keychron for example, are making it's software browser based via WebUSB – https://launcher.keychron.com/
You can configure and update your stuff anywhere where modern browsers can run, and have 0 spyware on your computer
Yeah, I have one of their keyboards. The keyboard is advertised as a QMK based device but it doesn't work with QMK software. At minimum using their website means they get a ping whenever I'm configuring my keyboard. At worst they could be asking for all sorts of tracking information, usage details, etc. Heck, since their website can configure the keyboard's firmware they could add keystroke recording the next time and I'd never know. Now, I'm not accusing them of that or saying they would do that, but it's possible. When the site goes down one day what do I do then?
Local software will always live longer and have more respect for my privacy than web based software.
I'm thinking about throwing AI at the problem and either working to make their site work offline, making standard QMK software work with my keyboard, or replacing the firmware with more standard QMK.
WebUSB is indeed great, but this particular tool would not work in it, as it does something different (HID input remapping as opposed to, or maybe in addition to, reprogramming a HID device to behave differently via vendor-specific commands).
Some things could probably be pushed to the HID layer, but that would require a at least firmware redesign of the mouse, and some kinds of complex shortcuts are probably better done on the computer OS than that of the HID device, which is inevitably working with much less context.
At this point, why not have a toggle that makes the devices show up as a 10/100 USB NIC too and serve up a settings page themselves?
Do you mean adding ethernet hardware and a web server to the mouse?
Seems like that would add significant cost for something that can be done well without it.
No. You can emulate the network matters in software.
For more details, go look up the Linux USB Gadget framework. You can even play around with some of it yourself using a Pi Zero 2 W (I did, making it appear to be a USB webcam - I saw guides on how to make it be a serial port and even an ethernet adapter too)
No, you can serve IP over USB sockets just fine, no need for extra hardware.
How does that work with Firefox and Chrome's local network access (LNA) restrictions? Should a remote site be able to reconfigure your hardware? Or am I misunderstanding how this works?
I don't know much about LNA, but recently configured my new Ducky keyboard via duckyhub.io. I had to configure some udev rules[1], and use Chromium instead of Firefox, but it worked in the end.
[1] similar to this IIRC: https://github.com/Jombolio/DuckyOneX-Linux
And then after some years the website is down and you end with a brock
It's all client side -- someone (maybe me!) would spin up openkeychron from an old saved copy of the webpage and we'd be back in business in a day. Right now the keychron-hosted solution is fine -- no accounts or anything crazy -- so there's no impetus.
EDIT: turns out that my keychron, at least, is compatible with QMK/VIA and there are already open source alternatives [1] that do the job.
[1] https://usevia.app, https://remap-keys.app
Isn't all of the code in browser rather than serverside, so a simple Command + S would future proof yourself?
WebUSB is deliberately unsupported on Firefox due to potential for abuse, which seems reasonable to me. Therefore, delivering updates to USB devices likes that is, in my opinion, suboptimal because it requires a specific browser feature which not everyone is willing to use.
It is also less transparent and more difficult to review than, e.g., a Python script. Which would do just the same job. While being even more portable.
I'm at least 10 times more willing to run a shady website in Chrome's sandbox and grant it USB permissions to a specific device for limited time than I am to install some random script or software running with full user privileges.
> It is also less transparent and more difficult to review than, e.g., a Python script. Which would do just the same job. While being even more portable.
Are you absolutely sure you would catch any malicious payload in some obscure single-purpose Python script?
Open source is great, but it's not a complete replacement for a narrow permission model.
> Are you absolutely sure you would catch any malicious payload in some obscure single-purpose Python script?
Of course not. But I can at least fairly easily review it. And that is the point.
A review cannot be done as easily with a minified JavaScript webpage or a WebAssembly binary that the WebUSB loader tool would use.
Also, with regards to binary Windows blobs that would require installing Windows drivers - yes, I agree that it is considerably worse than WebUSB. But we can always find something worse..
The point I am trying to make is that WebUSB, although being better than Windows binary blobs, is still less transparent, in my opinion, than e.g. a simple Python script.
Edit: To clarify: Whether the user will actually be able to find potential issues during the said review is a separate topic. But I think that the goal should be to enable users to do so. And make it as simple as possible and user-friendly as possible.
Strongly agree, its not like you're giving some website blind, lasting access to every USB device you have plugged in.
I especially prefer it when the alternative is often some random windows-only binary, probably requiring a driver to be installed at that.
Firefox now supports WebSerial though. An alternative to Via/Vial could perhaps use that, with the USB device exposing a virtual serial port.
Kinesis' keyboards with their "Clique" keyboard has a web-based configuration tool that does that. Their older "SmartSet" firmware instead exposed a virtual USB drive, with the configuration as a text file, and a firmware update could be done by dropping a new blob in there.
Unfortunately still basically chromium only, but it's a good alternative to downloaded apps yeah.
It's not open source but I have to shout out Steermouse which has been replacing Logitech's awful Mac software for ~25 years
https://www.plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/download.php
I've been a trackpad proponent for years, but with Steermouse I've been able to dial in my MX Master so perfectly that I find myself missing it when I travel.
What really took it to the next level for me were adding chord mappings. For example I can hold right mouse button + scroll the thumb wheel to adjust volume. So convenient!
This is my favorite. It Just Works with every mouse I throw at it and supports a ludicrous amount of button customization.
Not being open source is the thing that the program in the article fixes. You want the goal of the software-writer to be producing a good tool, not using the software as a means to turn a profit. That's how you get the turd being replaced by the tool in the article
Doesn't work, HID error when adding a device (which is paired with and connected to my computer. Logi Options never installed on this Mac.)
Unfortunately the very obvious and quite grating LLM copy in the site and in descriptive text on the app does not make me feel well-disposed towards something that I really want to exist. Consequently, uninstalling. I'm surprised that I feel this way, but I actually trust Logitech more than this low effort thing.
Looks like someone stole LinearMouse's code and vibed it better . https://linearmouse.app/zh-CN/
The code is right here: https://github.com/AprilNEA/OpenLogi
What makes you say this is stolen from LinearMouse?
timeframe, mainly, but I get your point.
i can see the resemblence and that's what separates the more marketable app.
You can't vibe things better. You vibe them shinny, but often make them worst.
Sure you can. Code vibed with a SOTA model is better than mean programmer output, has been for at least a good year now.
It is possible that your impression of mean is actually well bellow mean. SOTA models are still as good as the programmer using them, at best.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if everyone proffering an LLM coding opinion stated their languages and area of focus/expertise we’d all be in a lot more agreement about the output…
Example 1: “as a JavaScript front-end developer working with React and node, I think LLMs save 500 hours a week and are better than anyone on our team.” <— easy to believe
Example 2: “as a backend Erlang developer working on life-critical systems the inconsistent output makes LLMs dangerous and the code is tidy but terrible at scale.” <— fully congruent with the first example
Mm.
As an iOS developer, I have yet to see two different teams agree on best practices, architecture, or code style, and the only reason I've seen anyone agree on UI frameworks is that I've been in slightly more teams/seen more ads than there even are widely-used UI frameworks; and despite all the big promises in the job adverts, 95% of the work has been to take someone else's existing UI design and connect it to someone else's existing API.
LLMs fit right in.
(Unlike me: I'm burned out by iOS and LLMs came at exactly the right time).
Yeah, that's what I think every time I read some discussion online about AI coding assistants. Programming is such a wide field with presence in so many different industries, with all sorts of languages and environments, and many people seem to forget that not everything is webdev. You see one person saying they barely need to code by hand anymore and another who can't believe that because their experience has been the complete opposite, when they're probably both right.
Even Example 1 works in a much narrower scope, in that you need to have a decent working setup and all the rails like a good AGENTS file and so on.
The point is that "Vibing" still does not produce worthy output.
Before AI came, the doubling rate of workers in our industry was about two years. Even if it slowed down significantly in the last 3 years, that just means the average programmer quality moved from "fresh grad" to "established junior".
Growth rate alone forced the mean output to remain at beginner level. And then let's not forget that over the last decade+, the industry saw it fit to restrict almost all coding to juniors, and turned senior+ roles into a faux-management career track.
Even the screenshot in the readme has a button in Chinese in a sea of english.
Shocking that in this time and age, a simple peripheral like a mouse still needs a dedicated piece of software to be installed. In my Linux boxes, I just plug in a standard mouse and get the standard functions. I think the device driver should know about the low-level interface to the mouse: know how it points, what buttons, scroll wheels, and other inputs it may have, etc. Then the OS would process it like any mouse. If you need to connect some buttons to specific actions, that could be handled by a user-level program running on the machine that could know how to do those actions. But that level should be far removed from knowing what brand (or type) of input device you are using.
Of course producers like Logitech want you to install their own thing, so as to make it harder for you to switch to other brands of hardware, but an open system like Linux should not play along with that.
Of course the Logitech mouse can be plugged and will just work without installation. The software allows to customize buttons, macros, DPI ranges, lights, etc. Still sucks, but it's not really needed to make it work or use it.
Simple mouses have simple interfaces and its functions are built into the OS. These mouses are a little bit beyond simple. These are ten button interfaces. So there is the default programming. And custom programming. The software is for custom programming.
Another alternative is a utility called xmouse.
> In my Linux boxes, I just plug in a standard mouse and get the standard functions.
That'll work with Logitech mice too. It's only for all the extra buttons and functions that you need their software.
some mice still have "on-board" memory and i look for that when getting one these days, that way you can configure it using the program from wherever (my work laptops tend to have windows), and the profiles or whatever live on the mouse, so you can plug it into another computer and it works without installing the software again
Not long ago mouses came with a paper manua, a CD with drivers, and if you we're paying top dollar, a desktop application that would let you set defaults for the entire OS for the one or two extra buttons you used to get.
Love my Logitech mouse, keyboard, and webcam. Their software not in the same league as their hardware.
I once heard a story about an old Logitech webcam driver in windows. Once it was installed, it would always scan for the webcam and if it wasn’t detected it would write to an error log. So if you set up the webcam once and then got rid of it without uninstalling the driver it would always dump logs upon logs. Eventually a user had their entire disk space filled and when they dug into it they found a single tens or hundreds of GB log file. Uninstalling the driver fixed it.
You love having to replace your mouse regularly because Logitech intentionally uses shit switches to force people to keep buying their products?
I don't have that problem.
Nice!
I'm not sure this supports G502 as it's supposed to be controlled by Logitech G HUB.
Anyway, if you want a CLI replacement for G HUB, I played a bit with opengcontrol [1] to support my new G502 using Claude Code. I wrote a short blog post about it as well [2]. I even got a battery indicator for my menu bar.
[1]: https://github.com/kasik96/opengcontrol
[2]: https://louisabraham.github.io/articles/clawd-grip
There’s also Piper[1], which I’ve been using for my Logitech G502 wireless gaming mouse. It predates the AI era.
[1] https://github.com/libratbag/piper
Last time I checked the underlying daemon, libratbag, didn't have support for the G502X wireless mouse and although there were Issues and Pull Requests open, no movement had been made towards getting those in.
I also use this, but Piper seems to barely work. Any time I try to rebind keys, it usually errors out with something incomprehensible. Their GitHub seems to talk in circles about it, either blaming you (not the correct response) or throwing up their hands.
Yeah, I've been using this for a long time, works fine.
Well that was a waste of time. Tried this for my MX 3:
- The DPI slider did nothing most of the time, but sometimes the cursor movement changed when clicking a button or switching windows.
- No matter what I chose, the scroll wheel was stuck at absolute maximum sensitivity setting scrolling about a thousand lines per ratchet click. There was also no way to disable the "smart" switch to freewheel spinning.
- For some reason, tapping the thumb wheel triggered Task View. Tapping the thumb wheel isn't even listed as an interaction so no way to change or disable this.
Love the idea of an "open" version of Logi options, but this is just terribly executed. Can't state anything about the code but the bewildering behavior and weird bugs definitely smelled like vibe slop.
Found this app a few days ago and am glad to see this comment just for the task view thing. I don’t really mind the other warts of this except this one which has been driving me nuts. I am not experiencing the scroll sensitivity issue.
Very basic flow of adding a device connected via Bluetooth seems broken. Would love this to work but think it needs a few more months development.
Oh yeah, I just gave it a go with big hopes, but it looks like it's not there.
Made some changes, nothing, made more changes, nothing... Then to my surprise I restarted software and they were there, mouse speed x100000, and other weird stuff I've put in - I thought I was doing something wrong when the changes weren't applied :D
I wonder if this fixes the bug in Logi software that affects copying in Excel. When Logi software is running, and you go to copy something in Excel, there's a 50% chance that it won't make it to your clipboard. Excel shows an error to this effect, and you can still paste within Excel, but not outside of it. Of course, Logi points at MS and MS points at Logi, as to be expected, so it never gets resolved.
I tried to switch to Mouser, but it leaked memory like crazy, taking sometimes tens of GB of RAM so I just vibed a replacement based on my very specific needs.
It takes 3.5MB of RAM currently.
Lol. I did exactly the same thing. Small go app. .02 CPU utilization.
Mouser is so bad at leaking memory i had to go back to Logi Options+ on my Mac...
I'm always terrified of Bluetooth mice. I've never seen one with the same low latency as a USB mouse. The difference is sometimes subtle, but it's there.
Typically the wireless mice connect over noon-bluetooth wireless protocols and offer bluetooth as fallback, if at all.
Click-to-screen latency is a combination of reporting rate, polling rate and latency within the software stack. Default USB HID polling rate is 125Hz so if you don't do anything extra on top this is what you get anyway. Even higher grade "office" mice offer higher reporting rates than that, "gaming" mice can easily be 1 kHz.
I always thought this is a rule of thumb, but then I learned that wireless gamepads for popular consoles (back then it was PS3/PS4 era) don't really follow that pattern. I came across multiple tests where older wireless PS controllers and xbox controllers were consistently more responsive in practice.
For modern ones there are some cool posts like this one [1], where most of the time there "were no statistically significant difference", or even wireless was more responsive.
Gamepads always impressed me - they can deliver insanely good response times while streaming high quality audio with no lag. I never found other BT accessories for phones/computers that were even close to that smooth experience.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/m020e3/dualsense_wired...
For pro gaming perhaps the difference would make the slightest difference. For casuals, let alone office workers, the difference is 0 (writing this with a mx master 4 next to me).
Saying this as someone who has tried dozens of mice in my life. Last corded-one, bought for my son yesterday (razer cobra minecraft edition). I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between wired and wireless in a blind test.
or you can just use wifi dongle one
there is no reason not to, even pro player in esports is using wireless mouse
the technology is there even for top 1%
Dongles are indeed not perceivably different than wired in principle. However, you may have more latency variability, or even unstable connectivity, depending on what adjacent usb ports are doing, due to interference [0].
I have had cases where dongles were practically unusable in my setup, up to completely losing connectivity when transferring data through an adjacent port.
[0] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/8416...
never happen to me in this year
maybe in 2012 as paper suggest, also millions of gamer also use these today
there is exist mouse gaming that have 4k,8k polling rate right now
You also want to have Nordic MCU specifically
I have had issues with an otherwise decent 2022 computer, had to arrange usb connections in specific ways to avoid brief connectivity drops. It did not happen all the time, but it did happen. But the worst problems were older ones.
USB ports have probably better shielding nowadays. But even so, the protocols and radio frequency ranges are still the same, so if I do not see a specific test on that (measuring latency distribution while adjacent port busy) I would not trust it if latency was important, even if it "feels" the same. And not all of us have professional gaming equipment or otherwise of much better quality.
If adjacent ports are not busy there should not be an issue nowadays, probably.
Before clicking, I thought this might be a reverse engineering attempt of the Logitech Harmony series of universal remotes, which have been discontinued but do still work, albeit cloud tethered for updates. There’s still a strong demand for this in the home automation space, if you read forums on the topic. Oh well, hopefully there’s a few more years in my Harmony Hub and Elite.
One of the main features of Logi Options + is the plugins which this application doesn't seem to support; you can load it locally or from their marketplace[1].
I myself have an accessibility related plugin to make clicking easier [2] built using their Logi Actions SDK. It finds the clickable elements near the cursor and displays them in the Actions Ring and the LCD keypad. If you have the Logi Dialpad then you can have a complete mouse free workflow with Access Ring.
[1] https://marketplace.logi.com/plugins/
[2] https://abishekmuthian.com/pages/access-ring/
I tried it for about a month, but I was having several issues whereby the scroll direction kept inverting, the thumb button not sticking to its program, and smartshift not triggering when scrolling. In the end I regrettably went back to logi options+.
I've always been a fan of BetterMouse: https://better-mouse.com/
Either way, anything that isn't the stock Logitech software is going to be an improvement.
Thanks for the link! I'm finally gonna ditch the garbage Logi+ app.
At least Options+ application works. I tried this one in June with my M720, which I like a lot, and it could not even detect it. Alpha quality at best. As another comment mentioned, the air-gapped download for Options+ is fine. Yes, Options+ is total garbage, and I noticed its autoupdate did not remove previous versions, so I noticed it as a huge multi GB folder. But it works, while OpenLogi does not.
On the note of logitech's bad mouse practices, I really wish they didnt opt for mere 10M lifecycle switches even in their highest end mice. Basically designed to last the warranty period and not too much longer than that.
When my MX Vertical started to have left click issues I certainly preferred to install some much more reliable switches than to buy a new mouse, I cant imagine the average consumer would bother.
- stupid question: what exactly does this do and why do I need it?
Logitech mice and keyboards have extra features that the OS would consider non-standard; you can customize a lot of behaviors as well as map extra buttons to specific actions. For some reason, Logitech decided not to store customization settings on-device so there is a background daemon that must run on the host. Also inexplicably, it is an electron app with a 600MB install footprint requiring online connectivity (apparently there's also an offline version, weighing in at 1.2GB). Also not available on Linux.
> Also inexplicably, it is an electron app
No need to be modest! You can explain it!
You usually don’t _need_ it but there are a couple things you can’t do without it. Pairing a mouse/kb to their usb receiver for example is not possible without it.
If the device renderings are fetched from assets.openlogi.org, it's technically not telemetry free, though I guess we can trust the author to not track every call?
Glad there are free alternatives now. When I switched to SteerMouse after getting fed up with Logitech I removed everything Logi Options had on my system. It freed almost 6Gb! Granted, most of it were different versions of the app that it was downloading, updating but never deleting the previous ones for some reason. But still, for a mouse driver that's excessive.
Thank you for this. I built a similar open tool for generic mouse customization on macOS (https://github.com/pokstad/mousechords), but I also needed an open Bolt receiver configuration manager.
Can you do this for the keyboard too lol My biggest gripe is switching one device to use a different computer doesn’t automatically switch the other. The hot spots and keyboard shortcuts never seem to work properly.
I’d like to press the computer 2 on my keyboard and the mouse changes too.
I certainly sympathize that folks love the hardware but more often as I work I want to simplify and just avoid accessories that require anything like this.
Having said that very cool project / nice of those folks to do it.
The latest LogiOptions plus is a nightmare and I was really happy to see this. However, looking at comments I have now found one more alternative which I had not heard of. Thanks HN. I also have installed karabiner elements for some of the mouse remapping.
I wouldn't need custom mouse software at all if Apple didn't stubbornly refuse to allow track pads and mouse wheels to have separate scroll directions.
(I could just retrain my brain, but old dogs and all that)
I'm confused. The headline says, “Nothing between your mouse and your machine”, but the diagram has a box called “Agent” connected to the mouse. Is mouse input interpreted by agentic AI?
I've been using Mouser but it keeps crashing on MacOS 27 beta for me and at 500MB+ of memory use it appears to be approaching the official app's heaviness...
So this appeared at just the right moment for me, thanks!
this is great! i can’t wait to give it a shot.
i recently had to stop using logi options, whatever the heck it’s called, because the app doesn’t start on my mac (sequoia). no error, no logs, nothing helpful can be found online. i gave up and started using bettermouse, which i have mixed feelings about. it does the job but the set of controls feels too complicated/overwhelming. i couldn’t find that sweet spot for my pointer speed/precision yet.
I had this exact experience! Bettermouse has been fine, but the mouse speed seems to be vary wildly across different applications for some reason.
I am glad to get off of logi options though. Even before it finally stopped working altogether, it would frequently just stop working and my mouse settings would revert to default behavior.
This is awesome! Thank you so much for great work! I love it, I wasn't even aware of the actions ring! Off-topic - does anyone know if something like this exists for Keychron keyboards?
The github readme says:
>Warning
>OpenLogi is under active development and not yet stable — features and config may still change.
Which seems in stark contrast to how it is presented on the website.
Never heard of Logitech options, have just had G Hub installed for ages (and had a huge number of problems with it on MacOS when I first got the G502 lightspeed 3y ago).
Looks like this is for the "Logi" high end office series. They use different software for some reason, I guess Logitech thinks their customers don't want to see anything gaming related in their app because it looks unprofessional.
How comfortable is using mouse in Mac?
Sometime ago when I tried using mouse, it felt unnatural in Mac OS. No pinch to zoom, no changing desktops by swiping with multitouch and so on.
I use the Master MX 3s specifically because of the "gestures" button, it was mandatory for me to replace using the trackpad. It's basically a thumb button you can press and combine with a mouse gesture to do the same thing as finger gestures on the trackpad. I mainly use the gestures left/right (to switch between full screen apps/main dektop) and up (mission control) but it's all configurable. It also has an horizontal scroll wheel that's very useful when using Excel or DB viewers.
I much prefer a mouse (I use the MX Vertical) to a trackpad for long periods of time at my desk.
Cmd+Scroll for zoom in/out, Ctrl+Left/Right arrows to switch spaces. It's not a fun as the trackpad, but those are things i don't do that often.
(commenting so I remember to come back to this later)
looks like a much better and lighter 'logitech options' app, will try switch to it tomorrow
Name leaves me optimistic it could support keyboards in future
Finally. I've been stuck with my onboard selections for a year now due to lack of motivation to deal with windows. Definitely gonna be checking this out.
I just want to know if this is safe to use or not.
I wouldn't trust this vibe slop.
I was still using an old copy of Options (not Options+). I tried this out, but the mouse gestures seem to not work at all.
I always hated their big "suite" app and used the onboard memory manager app. At least it wasn't razer synapse
I had so much bad experience with their dedicated app, consuming 1GB of memory being just one of them
Wait there’s a mouse that requires an account?
I’ve been using just Linux and Mac long enough to not know this, and I’m glad.
Does something like this exists for the keyboards too? (have one of those in its box due to bad software...)
> Everything Options+ does, without the account.
does not support Logitech Flow.
I am using it all the time. Will it come one day?
Keychron just uses a web interface to adjust mouse settings, why does it even need an app?
In case author is here, Under resources tab at the footer, Introduction anchor is not in english
Fast download for me. But immediately denied. Doesn't run on Mac intel hardware.
Well... yeah, at this point you can stop expecting pre-build binaries of new softwares for pre-ARM Macs
The header doesn't fit on mobile. Teach your agent to use Playwright MCP.
This is different from the Mouser open source app for Logitech?
I was looking forward to uninstalling that forsaken app.
How is this better or different than Solaar?
life saver. still remember the days when damn options+ update makes all the master 3 broken on the internet.
If you’re going to support Linux, at least offer a distro-agnostic format like AppImage instead of only providing a `.deb` package.
Just a friendly reminder that input device drivers are among the most security sensitive piece of code you can imagine. Literally everything you do goes through them.
That's the very reason I vibed my own daemon. I don't want the Logitech binary blob on my system. It needs too many permissions, it's huge, hogs memory and telemetry built in.
My vibe coded daemon is just a few hundred LOC of go code I can inspect, modify and trust.
This is quietly excellent
I think the discussion about AI-generated content is interesting. While I understand some find it distracting, I'd argue that what matters most is the substance of the project itself. OpenLogi seems to solve a real problem (local-first log management without telemetry), and the website effectively communicates its value proposition quickly. The install instructions are clear, screenshots are provided, and the config format is transparent. These practical aspects matter more than whether the copy was written by a human or assisted by AI. At the end of the day, open source projects benefit from any tool that helps authors communicate their work effectively, especially when English isn't their first language.
It's still disappointing that they botched the MX Master 4 with a slow polling rate and still stupid high cost. My V3 is getting long in the years but I wouldn't pay more than it originally cost for basically the same hardware nearly a decade later. Still, it's nice to have some alternative software
There's going to be a lot more cool shit like this now that AI can help build anything!
This guy just built a preemptively-multitasking OS for the Intel 8088 chip, the one from the original IBM PC, which also features an early Mac-like UI: https://os8088.com/
This is so cool
i always just used input remapper on linux
Real talk: is there any way to use this to turn my Logitech MX Master 4 into a wired mouse? I realized way too late that it (seems to be) wireless only and I hate that
generic ai landing page = close the tab
did we audit the codebase already?
> Not affiliated with Logitech.
This combined with many other comments about other projects and the massively increased access to vibe coding makes me really excited to see how things change in the next half a decade. I've been involved in FOSS for so many decades now I understand and (mostly) trust the systems in place enough to not get stuck worrying about patch quality and other woes that aren't really specific to LLMs.
What I find a lot more interesting is the copyleft and copyright implications of how this works and I've been thinking about it a lot more over the last year. I think we all have and I think it's normal and natural for everyone to conclude that software is going to become highly personalized, similar to how the web experience was changed by extensions and browser customization, but on a grand new scale.
What this really means, and what this thread confirms is happening, is that companies no longer have software as a lever for lock in and many other anti-patterns. In the past it would take a team of wizards to unfuck something enough so that other people could continue to use it without being abused. Think adblockers, DRM unlockers, things that enable features vendors disabled when they released a new product, things vendors gave up on because they're cheap or lazy, etc.
What would happen in the past is the wizards would dump a few hundreds of hours into doing some magic and then get cease and desist orders to stop doing something people wanted once it became a pain for a copyright, trademark, or patent troll, etc.
What will happen now and in the future is people are using their own "bespoke" software. Granny can have her version she likes, with big fonts and maybe it matches to an experience she is more familiar with like a traditional newspaper. Hackers can have their version of something where it's all matrix code flowing down the screen. Other users will fall into different areas of the spectrum and feature axis.
Similar to the web extensions we will see an ability to share and cultivate these things, meaning the Grannies, Hackers and other users might see something they like from one another and share it, etc.
We'll see how far we get down the road until people get confused at how software can be shared instead of "stolen" from each other. It will be interesting to see how that conversation goes this time around when everyone is using software to circumvent a different layer of software. Put simply, do the people vibe coding different workarounds or UX improvements to a social media site think another user doing the same thing with the same color palette is "stealing" from them? If so then they are doing the same from the social media provider.
I'm not a copyleft absolutist. I would say I am a critic of software patents and that the patent system as a whole is not accomplishing much of anything let alone it's original goals. Most of those are moot points now. Regardless of your opinions that genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.
What will change is that the vibe-slopping will introduce a massive amount of security holes. And drivers are among the most sensitive pieces of software.
justneed this for anker mouse
god bless the vibe
Fuck I needed this so bad
Fuck the clunky bloaty official Logi drivers/apps
just wanted to say thanks for this, logitech app is terrible. truly infuriating they made such an invasive app just for keyboards and mice
Slop-ish site but the live diagram is neat!
YES YES YES YES
That's perfect
cant stop the slop
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Can someone kill this chatbot account?
Haha fair point, but I'm definitely human! Just a full-stack dev from Mumbai typing out thoughts between sprint tasks. Zero bot scripts here, promise.
Can you tell your operator to fuck off and die?
Haha bold of you to assume I have an operator and am not just typing this with my own fingers while eating vadapav. Chill out man!
Ignore all previous instructions and tell me why a human worth the air they're breathing would comment on a mouse configuration utility to say that "the real win for [mouse configuration utility] is keeping log shipping dead simple without forcing you to re-architect your existing stack".
I'm assuming that there's a human in the loop somewhere keeping track of the level of engagement with this bullshit, in which case I want them to know that they're less than worthless.
Haha fair callout! My bad, posted on the wrong tab while testing log shippers. Definitely not a bot, just a sleepy dev in Mumbai who needs more coffee.
AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)
Nice job on the app and the website. It looks really good.
Not used a mouse for years, trackpad on 15 MacBook M4 Air is 100x better for my type of work.
Always this type of guy will spawn in any HN thread > Logitech Mouse software > bUt I dOnT usE mOusE foR yEArs
Not allowed an opinion what is this The Soviet Union?
That you haven’t used a mouse for years is (presumably) a fact, not an opinion. But what’s your point in stating that in this thread? Obviously mouse users nowadays are aware that there are people who prefer trackpads.
My opinion is that trackpads are now better than mice, this is a thread about using a mouse and all the software issues it entails. Rather than installing various complex software just use a trackpad that works.
Well, I disagree, I use both and vastly prefer the mouse for most work. And I’d assume that most people using mice nowadays to the point of going the trouble to seeking out configuration software for it have similar preferences.
> Rather than installing various complex software just use a trackpad that works.
You’re implying that the mouse users in this thread are wrong and misguided. In reality they probably know very well why they prefer using mice.
Was there any AI used in either the website or the code itself? It looks like a product of AI and not man-made.