According to the official Discord, “ACX has made the decision to close Booklore and step away.” Some contributors are working together on an unnamed replacement project.
For those not in the loop, Booklore was an app that for selfhosting book libraries. It had a nice UI. It was able to store metadata separately from the download files, so you could have an organized library without duplication. In recent weeks, there have been conflict about AI code, licensing, and general Discord nastiness.
RIP
You’re exactly right.
I started my career writing assembly code, by hand, for money; I did not throw my toys out of the cot when that ceased to be a particularly useful skill. I spent a great deal of my career rawdogging malloc(), but then managed runtimes came along… And I also didn’t quit because I didn’t like having training wheels forced on me. Because I understood that writing code was never my job, solving problems was and code was just one of the tools at my disposal to do so.
AI is another tool. It’s fantastically useful in the right pair of hands. Any developer who refuses to use it is simply going to be left behind - and that’s ok, because those people are not software engineers, they’re coders with a hobby - and I’d never expect to tell someone how to enjoy their hobby. But nobody should expect to be paid for it.
I dunno, if we were pushed off machine code onto non-deterministic compilers that ran on a machine thousands of miles away with no way to know when it was changed i think we’d have balked at that too, even if compilers themselves are entirely positive.
Personally, I run them on my own hardware, and am trying to learn to use and supervise them appropriately. The things they are good for they are amazing at. And yeah, they are also often mendacious and unreliable with the possibility of going rogue - but no more than any junior developer or intern. If you can’t manage an AI, you can’t manage hires either - which for a hobbyist is just fine of course, but if you’re a professional it’s not a good look.
You either learn to ride the wave, or you let it drown you. Shaking your fists at the tsumani though is a sure fire route to involuntary early retirement.
If youre talkong about local models youre not really talking about what everyone else is, and youre already avoiding the wave
I don’t see the pitchfork mob making that distinction. (And I think you are severely underestimating the capability of, say, the qwen-3.5 models locally hosted with a good CLI agent like Mistral Vibe.)