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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#151

Post by nullc »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #14
Waterluvian wrote: post #10

I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”

You should care. If someone submits a huge PR, you’re going to waste time asking questions and comprehending their intentions if the answer is that they don’t know either. If you know it’s generated and they haven’t reviewed it themselves, you can decide to shove it back into an LLM for next steps rather than expect the contributor to be able to do anything with your review feedback. Unreviewed generated PRs can stil…

> is that they don’t know either

It would be nice if they did, in fact, say they didn't know. But more often they just waste your time making their chatbot argue with you. And the chatbots are outrageous gaslighters.

All big OSS projects have had the occasional bullshitter/gaslighter show up. But LLMs have increased the incidence level of these sorts of contributors by many orders of magnitude-- I consider it an open question if open-public-contribution opensource is viable in the world post LLM.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#152

Post by smokel »

QuercusMax wrote: post #109
smokel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing also seems to align with the idea that greenfield projects are well-suited for AI, whereas brownfield projects are considerably more challenging.

Brownfield projects are more challenging because of all the context and decisions that went into building things that are not directly defined in the code. I suspect that well-engineered projects with plenty of test coverage and high-quality documentation will be easier to use AI on, just like they're easier for humans to comprehend. But you need to have somebody with the big picture still who can make sure that you…

Also, as soon as the code no longer fits within the context window of an LLM, one must resort to RAG-based solutions, which often leads to a significant decline in quality.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#153

Post by bagels »

Waterluvian wrote: post #10

I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”

You have other choices, such as not contributing.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#154

Post by rangerelf »

oceanplexian wrote: post #59
raincole wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one side has much more "scalability" than the other, then the other side has very strong motivation to match up. - People use AI to write cover letters. If the companies don't filter out them automatically, they're screwed. - Companies use AI to interview candidates. No one wants to spend their personal time talking to a robot. So the candidates start using AI to take interviews for them. etc. If you don't at le…

Both sides will use AI and it will ultimately increase economic productivity. Imagine living before the invention of the printing press, and then lamenting that we should ban them because it makes it "too easy" to distribute information and will enable "low quality" publications to have more reach. Actually, this exact thing happened, but the end result was it massively disrupted the world and economy in extremely po…

Imagine being so deluded and disconnected that you actually believe that AI has any similarity with the printing press regarding the benefits to The People.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#155

Post by nullc »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #121
KritVutGu wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely right. AI is just a tool to DDoS maintainers. Any contributor who was shown to post provably untested patches used to lose credibility. And now we're talking about accommodating people who don't even understand how the patch is supposed to work?

That’s not what I said though. LLM output, even unreviewed and without understanding, can be a useful artifact. I do it all the time - generate code, try running it, and then if I see it works well, I can decide to review it and follow up with necessary refactoring before integrating it. Parts of that can be contributed too. We’re just learning new etiquettes for doing that productively, and that does includes testin…

If the AI slop was that valuable a project regular, who actually knows and understands the project, would be just as capable of asking the AI to produce it.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#156

Post by oblio »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #55
thallavajhula wrote: post #27

I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences. I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to hu…

> AI is only as smart as the human handling it. I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI? I was original pr…

As a summary, any scaling tech greatly exacerbates differences.

Nassim Taleb is the prophet of our times and he doesn't get enough credit.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#157

Post by sheepscreek »

Waterluvian wrote: post #10

I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”

We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.

Programming languages were a nice abstraction to accommodate our inability to comprehend complexity - current day LLMs do not have the same limitations as us.

The uncomfortable part will be what happens to PRs and other human-in-the-loop checks. It’s worthwhile to consider that not too far into the future, we might not be debugging code anymore - we’ll be debugging the AI itself. That’s a whole different problem space that will need an entirely new class of solutions and tools.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#158

Post by showcaseearth »

ineedasername wrote: post #31
spaceywilly wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as they make it easy to add a “made with AI” tag to the PR, it seems like there’s really no downside. I personally can’t imagine why someone would want to hide the fact they used AI. A contractor would not try to hide that they used an excavator to dig a hole instead of a shovel.

>I personally can’t imagine why someone would want to hide the fact they used AI. Because of the perception that anything touched by AI must be uncreative slop made without effort. In the case of this article, why else are they asking for disclosure if not to filter and dismiss such contributions?

Did you actually read the post? The author describes exactly why. It's not to filter and dismiss, but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't actually understand anyway. If you can articulate how you used AI, demonstrate that you understand the problem and your proposed solution (even if AI helped get you there), then I'm sure the maintainers will be happy to work with you to get a PR merged.

>I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#159

Post by adastra22 »

jerf wrote: post #139
adastra22 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a matter of the tools not getting there though. If there was a summarization system that could compress down the structure and history of the system you are working on in a way that could then extract out a half-filled context window of the relevant bits of the code base and architecture for the task (in other words, generate that massive prompt for you), then you might see the same results that you get with And…

I agree that the level of complexity of task it can do is likely to rise over time. I often talk about the "next generation" of AI that will actually be what we were promised LLMs would be, but LLMs architecturally are just not suited for. I think the time is coming when AIs "truly" (for some definition of truly) will understand architecture and systems in a way that LLMs don't and really can't, and will be able to d…

Yes, but:

(1) The process of creating "a very, very precise and detailed understanding of the actual problem" is something AI is really good at, when partnered with a human. My use of AI tools got immensely better when I figured out that I should be prompting the AI to turn my vague short request into a detailed prompt, and then I spend a few iteration cycles fixing up before asking the agent to do it.

(2) The other problem of managing context is a search and indexing problem, which we are really, really good at and have lots of tools for, but AI is just so new that these tools haven't been adapted or seen wide use yet. If the limitation of the AI was its internal reasoning or training or something, I would be more skeptical. But the limitation seems to be managing, indexing, compressing, searching, and distilling appropriate context. Which is firmly in the domain of solvable, albeit nontrivial problems.

I don't see the information theoretic barrier you refer to. The amount of information an AI can keep in its context window far exceeds what I have easily accessible to my working memory.

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