Robin and my objections to AI coding agents are not that they don’t work (though they work less well on Ardour’s code than some might think). The objections are to the political, social, economic and environmental impacts of LLMs as currently being developed and deployed by a variety of companies and organizations.
If you don’t care about those impacts, or think that they are overblown, then sure, using coding agents to augment development makes a lot of sense.
Like I said, I think these are valid concerns. But as a user, I also get frustrated when you can’t do something in Ardour that you can do in other DAW’s. If someone vibe-coded an open-source, Linux-native Logic clone with all its features I’d definitely try it out just to see if the experience is easier or more enjoyable.
Note: Cockos has the same personnel resources as Ardour. We just suck (more).
You guys don’t suck. Ardour’s an amazing project overall, it’s just lacking in some areas. I appreciate all the work you guys do, even if I’m not completely satisfied with the program.
We have a list of at least 50 things you can do in Ardour but can’t do in other DAWs. Does that count?
You should try out faderframe.
I agree with you. There will be consequences as this is a disruptive technology. I am a knowledge worker in IT and AI will impact this sector in many ways.
There has been similar changes before for example in the beginning of the industrial age when people moved from rural areas to cities and started working in factories. New machines made agriculture more efficient and ended many jobs there. But at the same time the same industrialization created new jobs in the cites.
Then computers were invented and removed many jobs but at the same time the need for people with computer skills emerged: punch card writers, operators, programmers, repair specialist, typists, etc.
It think something similar is happening now. There will be new jobs for those that can understand AI and bend it to their will. Many jobs wont go away but will just absorb AI as an assistant and make people more productive.
For the environmental impacts I think AI as we have it today is a resource hog. This largely because we don’t understand exactly how AI works, people just stumbled upon this new technology when trying to emulate neural cells. What we have now is a rough first version of a technology that works but uses too much resources. As time goes by it will be optimized for resource usage because competition will drive prices down and AI providers will try to shed every expense they can.
We used to have very resource and energy hungry mainframe computers in the beginning. But then decades of optimization has led to low power computers that are many times more powerful. The same will happen with AI, I believe.
I tried out the Windows version (I don’t have a compatible Linux machine available at the moment) - looks very impressive, and it seems to work, but I crashed it within a minute of using it (added another track, moved the audio on the timeline a bit, I was about to try an edit and it quit, I don’t know why. Also has random GUI freezes and hangups when opening (built-in) plug-ins). Not quite ready yet I think - and it also asked for permissions to access my network for some reason (I denied it).
The Luddites were a (later much maligned) group who understood that new technology (in their case, looms) would bring about greater productivity and efficiency, but also understood that the way that technology was going to be deployed would be damaging to large numbers of people, possibly across generations. They refused to participate in the deployment or use of that new technology for this reason (and in some cases, actively destroyed instances of it).
The fact that in another 50 years, LLM technology (or some broader category of the same general concept) may use more appropriate amounts of energy and may help some of the same types of people that it will harm today does not, for me, require me to acquiesce and participate in its deployment and use.
The technological revolutions of the past did eventually bring some kinds of benefits to large numbers of people, but not before many of them, across generations, had been hurt both physically, psychically and emotionally, not before it destroyed communities, and not before or after it required rapacious consumption of natural resources to make it real. Are we better off now that we have industrial agriculture, automobiles, refridgeration, highly automated mass production, telecommunications, computing infrastructures etc. etc ? There is no need to provide an answer to that to still acknowledge that whether the answer is “yes”, “no” or “maybe”, the costs along the way have been considerable.
Yes I’ve heard about the Luddities 
They did face a change like this and I don’t envy them.
I agree, there is no way of foreseeing what this change will bring with it. Some of it may be bad, but I just chose to look at the bright sides of it. I may be completely wrong here, but I hope the good things will outweigh the bad ones in the long run.
If all goes well one thing that might be beneficial to people in developing countries is that AI might be used as a teacher where there are no resources to hire one. This technology may bring education and knowledge and hopefully lift people out of poverty. But who knows only time will tell how it goes. The technology holds a big promise though.
But at the moment it is “best to know the enemy” and get a understanding of what it is all about and what it can do.
If someone is interested there are a two youtube channels that report what’s happening in this field. The pace is incredible and mainstream media is mostly not documenting it (where I live).
This one documents weekly every major advancement: https://www.youtube.com/@theAIsearch/videos
This one looks at things more from the human perspective: https://www.youtube.com/@AIForHumansShow/videos
If you have not followed what has happened in the last 6 months prepare to be amazed of where the technology is now.
Hm, leaving all social and political aspects aside I wouldn’t care (mostly) what tools the team uses, as long as it does not affect my user experience in terms of functionality, maintainability, stability and support
Yes, that’s basically my position on it. I don’t care whether a human, a robot, or a monkey wrote the code. My main concern is that the software works as advertised. I also prefer it if a human who understands software engineering is supervising the process. It tends to improve the quality overall.
If only my salary multiplied as well, but it would only be my responsibilities that multiply… And once AI is good enough, bye bye my job 
Sounds like a good time to go into business for yourself. Or to switch careers. I understand that losing your job sucks, but at the end of the day no one is entitled to a job. If you can’t find work in one area, then it’s time to pivot. That’s the reality, sad as it may be.
We have a list of at least 50 things you can do in Ardour but can’t do in other DAWs. Does that count?
And Logic has a whole list of things you can’t do in Ardour. Where’s the Mastering Assistant in Ardour? What about the Session Players? Or Chord ID? Or Flex Time?
You should try out faderframe.
I’ve taken a look at it, but its features are still a bit too basic for my tastes. I’m also eyeing Nota DAW, which has a larger feature set overall.
I think you missed my point. There are things you can do in one DAW that you can’t do in another. If they matter to you, they’re important. If they don’t, they’re not. It’s not an objective measurement of a DAW, but rather an observation about how well a given DAW suits a particular user’s workflow. There will never be a single best DAW for everyone, so while “there’s stuff in Logic that you can’t do in Ardour” is regrettable, it’s not really conclusive.
Logic is, of course, a very fine DAW.
Reaper doesn’t even have post fader inserts 
Go Ardour!
I am certainly old and apparently quite boring… I’m surprised how many people try these flash in the pan DAWs and Plugins out. In any other paradigm that would be odd but not in software I guess. I like my car and certainly when it’s time to trade it in I will research and try others and even though it’s free and probably enjoyable to test drive other cars I wouldn’t just go and do that today just because I can. Unless they are of obvious interest to AV Linux users I rarely try out new Plugins and any time I’ve looked at other DAWs I’ve come back to Ardour in short order (even including Mixbus!). For those with apprehensions about AI or concerns about the ecological footprint maybe don’t give these projects oxygen unless you are genuinely interested or in need of them… 
I think you missed my point. There are things you can do in one DAW that you can’t do in another. If they matter to you, they’re important. If they don’t, they’re not. It’s not an objective measurement of a DAW, but rather an observation about how well a given DAW suits a particular user’s workflow. There will never be a single best DAW for everyone, so while “there’s stuff in Logic that you can’t do in Ardour” is regrettable, it’s not really conclusive.
No, I got that. I think it’s my point you missed. But that’s mainly my fault, since I did not articulate it well.
My main gripe with Ardour is that it is still largely an engineer’s DAW. That’s great if you’re an audio engineer, but I’m a songwriter first and foremost. I’m not using Ardour to record live rock bands. I’m using it to write songs, and make professional-quality recordings of them.
The features I listed are ones that would streamline my workflow greatly. Mastering would be much less of a headache, for example, if Ardour had a mastering assistant. Something like Logic’s Session Players would make arrangements faster and easier to flesh out, especially for instruments I don’t play (basically anything other than vocals and guitar). And Flex Time would make it a lot easier to fix small timing errors that ruin an otherwise-great take.
Ultimately, I would like to see Ardour evolve into a more songwriter-and-musician-friendly DAW. The improvements from Ardour 9 onward have been a step in the right direction, but there’s still a lot more that can be done. The features I described in the last paragraph are merely things I would love to see in Ardour.
I don’t think Logic is a perfect DAW. I just think it’s a great example of one that is designed with songwriters and musicians in mind. I think Ardour could learn a lot from it as it becomes a more musician-friendly DAW. (It’s also completely inaccessible to me as a Linux user, much to my frustration.)
I like seeing that Linux’s software library is going to have it’s gaps filled after an eternity of waiting for a financial model to build around it which could never significantly materialize. That said, hilariously, I’ve been entirely focused on only playing music with other humans playing acoustic instruments live through PAs, Mixers, and Mics for the past year. So, my future becomes more and more analog and expensive while simultaneously software is going to become more pressured to be inexpensive or free.
Well, I too was surfing LinuxDaw this morning and it is intense to take it all in. I played with that StemKit separator this morning, seemed to be a nice Demucs frontend mostly. That was fun. I can’t really grade quality since I am not really out here comparing stem separation quality, I just find it entertaining to analyze parts to old songs through the demasking separation can make possible.
I’m mostly just updating my computer again which I’ll likely abandon for a month or so only to come back and see everything has escalated even further.
But, one thing I’m seeing is that my 2014 macbook pro running MX Linux I’m typing this very post on can get an even longer lease on life as it seems these coding models have the ability to build anything for anything while removing bloat. I’m nowhere near qualified to knowing whether that is an elaborate illusion, but I think the most shocking aspect of the Artcraft apps, which I am toying with, is just how small, debloated, and quick they run and I believe that is the key indictment of the software they’re attempting to feature clone.
Fair comments, indeed.
Maybe don’t worry about it, or, play it again. There are many great takes by many great artists that have far worse issues. We used to think of imperfections as part of the character, indeed sometimes, what actually makes a great take.
It is an elaborate illusion, a very elaborate illusion.
They also lack a lot of what you actually pay for with commercial software. I’m not defending the business model necessarily, but, when you pay for software, the software isn’t really the product - and there are already plenty of free open source alternatives to spite-coded apps.
(Meanwhile totally off-topic, WTF have UAD just done to LUNA… I let it update without thinking, and my eyeballs were just assaulted mid-sentence by my other monitor displaying what should have been the impeccably tasteful, minimally themed easy to navigate project menu of what was, a very fine (and very pretty) DAW, but seems to have been usurped by some pseudo apple liquid glass inspired visual chaos of cloud this and that, ‘recommended for you’ and ‘try for free’ nonsense with random use of super thin outlines and courier fonts, in a style which really smells of AI influence…). I don’t even know how to open a project anymore - or if I want to 
)
Me being me, sure, but my main problem never was a lack of available plugins. But more to not get confused by the plethora of available plugins and focus on a few and learn them well.
Then i hear of something new and cool and get distracted again. These days it is shortcircuitXT.
For more pro folks there might be a lack of certain plugins, i wouldn’t know. I sure can’t complain, au contraire.