r/socialistprogrammers

I’m looking for web developers to help build a free-to-use, cooperatively and democratically owned mutual aid platform: a website, and later a mobile app, that connects people and groups who need or offer goods and services.

Core features: location-based matching, local-first prioritization, secure messaging, verified reviews/reputation, customizable user and group pages, and strong privacy protections.

The long-term goal is to make mutual aid a common, accessible practice that strengthens community and reduces reliance on corporations.

I’m currently an unpaid founder looking for collaborators who are interested in helping shape this project from an early stage. If this sounds like your kind of project, comment or message me.

I'm reading a lot of tech news. Of course, most of it is just bullshit about CEOs pointing out how their product will revolutionize the world. Whatever.

I get that things are changing in IT. It's a lot but it's also just what it is. However, not only do I hate the "if you don't do this, you're done" narrative. But also, how the fuck can everybody just switch from manual coding to utilizing 10 AI agents? Have we completely forgot about finances? Tokens cost money for fucks sake.

The last few days, I've read about the Anthropic Claude Code guy stating he runs 1000 agents in the night. I've read about another former tech Google guy stating that if you're still coding manually, you're way behind. And besides marketing and capitalism, all I can think about is "what the fuck? Who can afford that?". Like, even if the general narrative of AI replacing coding skills were true, where is any kind of consideration about resources? Yea cool, run your fucking 1000 agents if you're free to spend any money in the world. But thinking about actual developers, who can spend that money? Most devs I know have a hard time even getting a "normal" subscription to any AI. I myself don't even get any because my employer doesn't deem it necessary..

Does anybody else feel like this is an extrodinary intensification of class conflict? Yea, if you have 1000s of dollars to spend monthly, you can create all the agents. But if you're even relatively normal, what you can do with a Claude Pro subscription is so much more limited.

I don't even want to discuss IF AI will replace this and that. What annoys me the most is that people are just talking about AI if it were a preference. It's fucking not. It starts with a preference if you want to use it or not, but then resources matter. If I wanted to do all my programming with AI, I COULD NOT. Because I'm too poor. So what does that say considering the Anthropic guy just told me that I'm done if I don't?

The more I develop it, the more it seems like bullshit to me — I’d like your opinion.

The idea for this web app comes from the growing lack of participation in Italian trade unions and from the fact that, when I realized I was a socialist, I had trouble finding the right union to join.

So I wanted to create a map of Italian trade unions, giving each numerical ratings on certain axes (internal/external political engagement, political and economic vision, services offered, etc.), then have the user take a quiz and finally suggest the most compatible unions — based both on the user’s value system and on their CCNL (the national collective working contracts system in Italy, where each sector has at least one).

So the web app’s flow is: user enters, takes the quiz, and gets the resulting unions.

The main issues are:

1. Who am I to judge? Initially, I’d need a set of already surveyed unions with their value systems and numerical ratings pre-assigned. Also, the balancing of how much each question shifts a given axis depending on the answer (I was thinking of using the Likert scale — maybe that simplifies things). I need to do this balancing as democratically as possible, and I don’t know how. Maybe introducing a vote system could work out but seems to me that my vision could still be an issue.

2. The logic of consumption. I think a problem of our times is that unions are perceived as just another service to turn to when you have an individual need — whether work-related or for help with taxes — rather than the worker associations they actually are. This app seems to respond more to a consumer logic than to actually empowering and educating workers.

What do you think? Legitimate doubts? Insurmountables? Useless app?

Of course the code would be entirely open source.

Sorry if the english was not ok, this was written in Italian and automatically translated

Hey everyone! I've always been pretty interested in socialism and after four, arduous years recently got a degree in Computer Science last Fall! And this might seem a bit silly to ask but it's never really occurred to me to ever look into how the two (Socialism and Computer Science) could intersect... so for that reason, I'd like to humbly ask if anyone has well... any idea of how a fella like me can sorta make sense of this field.

I mean, I've got a lot of ideas and they're all sorta scattered, especially still being a fresh grad and having a few friends who are still in Uni. Looking back on it, there's always been (maybe not officially stated) a sort of understanding that WE (students and recent grads) have to fit into this system of Big Tech. Like, it was never really suggested to us that maybe we COULD change this system and we COULD do some good for everyone. Instead, it seemed like our sort of goal was to just grind out our four years, stack our resumes and shoot for a job at one of the Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley.

And I don't know, I just... haven't really felt all that satisfied with things and well... I'd like to know if there's an alternative to what we've got right now. Honestly, just looking to learn a lit and maybe do some good too! I'm always open to chat and absolutely always ready to listen!