There is an UVC webcam driver which already partially works: External USB-Webcam experiment with UVC media add-on (I did get it working with some webcams though it still is unstable iirc). You could work from there and I doubt that you’d need a LLM or similar to do that. But having basic support for webcams is not an emotional argument. I already saw some that actually worked.
ehm:
for me this frankly sounds like a form of free speech absolutism. There is nothing stopping you from acquiring the source code, building and running programs that have been entirely vibe-coded. However, the probability for such programs to be badly written and thus in the worst case actually be dangerous (C++ is not a memory-safe language and an invalid array index can already pose a severe security risk) is pretty high. It’s totally valid to not want to endorse such programs by putting them on a repository or to include slop code in the main system, which could be a development and security nightmare.
I had the fun excercise to fix up code for a project that certainly was auto-generated for a project. Since it was a small project and memory-safety was at least enforced by the language (rust), it was manageable. However all of this could have been circumvented if the person that previously wrote the stuff would have actually sat down and had done some even basic designing. I’d prefer not having to see this in a bigger project. I already saw more than enough C programs that were done with the “aid” of LLMs and trying to debug that was a nightmare. I also recently had a fun time trying to fix a FDM 3D printer config that was slop-generated by someone after a sd-card had died. Eventually I just gave up and did everything from scratch myself which lead to much better quicker and actual results. (And I’m pretty clueless about FDM 3D printers, I should perhaps add)
Then do that. But maintaining slop code is pretty difficult too and rejecting code whose intentions are unclear as there is no person that could later be asked for the rationale why a thing was done in this or that way and with unclear licensing problems and that was generated with models that break the basic morals of FOSS software (i.e. not (being able to) attribute code to it’s original source and being reliant on having huge proprietary datasets that contain data of which the original authors did not give permission to) does sound quite rational to me.
The big models also usually don’t make a profit. OpenAI does (to my knowledge) not make any profit and is infact loosing a LOT of money. The only reason I could see for such a buisness model would be trying to make people dependant on their services and later ramping up the pricing, which would force people to pay these prices. Making yourself dependant on that does not sound like a smart idea to me and I’d rather try to solve problems myself than to make myself dependant on a model that might soon be inaccessible to me for economical reasons.