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Gentoo AI Policy

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Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#161

Post by JonChesterfield »

jjmarr wrote: post #47
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…

I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review…

This is exciting. Thank for for raising the point. I've posted https://discourse.llvm.org/t/our-ai-policy-vs-code-of-conduc... to see what other people think of this. Thank you for your commit, and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code that you don't understand in the review, as it makes my point rather more forcefully than otherwise.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#162

Post by JohnBooty »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…

There are a number of other issues such the ethical and environmental ones. However, this one in isolation...

    Popular LLMs are really great at 
    generating plausibly looking, but meaningless 
    content. They are capable of providing good 
    assistance if you are careful enough
I'm struggling to understand this particular angle.

Humans are capable of generating extremely poor code. Improperly supervised LLMs are capable of generating extremely poor code.

How is this is an LLM-specific problem?

I believe part of (or perhaps the entire) the argument here is that LLMs certainly enable more unqualified contributors to generate larger quantities of low-quality code than they would have been able to otherwise. Which... is true.

But still I'm not sure that LLMs are the problem here? Nobody should be submitting unexpected, large, hard-to-review quantities of code in the first place, LLM-aided or otherwise. It seems to me that LLMs are, at worst, exposing an existing flaw in the governance process of certain projects?

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#163

Post by jjmarr »

anon22981 wrote: post #157
optionalsquid wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosing that you used AI three days after making the PR, after 4 people had already commented on your code, doesn't sit right with me. That's the kind of thing that should be disclosed in the original PR message. Especially so if you are not confident in the generated code

Sounds like a junior vibe coder with no understanding of software development trying to boost their CV. Or at least I hope that’s the case.

I graduated literally 3 months ago so that's my skill level.

I also have no idea what the social norms are for AI. I posted the comment after a friend on Discord said I should disclose my use of AI.

The underlying purpose of the PR is ironically because Cline and Copilot keep trying to use `int` when modern C++ coding standards suggest `size_t` (or something similar).

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#164

Post by const_cast »

attentive wrote: post #88
dizlexic wrote: post #56

This might get me in trouble, but with all the negativity I’m seeing here I’ve got to ask. Why do you care? Their sandbox their rules, and if you care because you want to contribute you’re still free to do so. Unless you’re an LLM I guess, but the rest of us should have no problem. The negativity just seems overblown. More power to them, and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it.

> and if this was a bad call they’ll revisit it. how would they know? - this is (one of) the ways for people to let them know

Let's stop bullshitting, nobody here is going to contribute to Gentoo and is now put off because of this policy change.

What we're looking at is mostly JavaScript monkeys who feel personally offended because they're unable to differentiate criticism of their tools from criticism of their own personal character.

The outrage is purely theoretical.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#165

Post by const_cast »

Veedrac wrote: post #34
logicprog wrote: post #4

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? > Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. This is massively overblown. If…

I get why water use is the sort of nonsense that spreads around mainstream social media, but it baffles me how a whole council of nerds would pass a vote on a policy that includes that line.

To be completely fair, AI really does use more water than other typical compute tasks, because AI takes A LOT of compute.

No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second.

I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens!

Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#166

Post by jjmarr »

overfeed wrote: post #130
h4ny wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't make a decision on the tradeoff, the LLVM community did. I also disclosed it in the PR. That's not what the GP mean. Just because a community doesn't disallow something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. > I also try to mitigate the code review burden by doing as much review as possible on my end That's great but... > & flagging what I don't understand. It's absurd to me that people should commit cod…

> It's absurd to me that people should commit code they don't understand The industrywide tsunami of tech debt arising from AI detritus[1] will be interesting to watch. Tech leadership is currently drunk on improved productivity metrics (via lines of code or number of PRs), but I bet velocity will slow down, and products be more brittle due to extraneous AI-generated, with a lag, so it won't be immediately apparent.…

I agree with more review. The reason I wrote the PR is because AI keeps using `int` in my codebase when modern coding guidelines suggest `size_t`, `uint32_t`, or something else modern.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#167

Post by totallymike »

puilp0502 wrote: post #80

Every time I encounter these kinds of policy, I can't help but wonder how these policies would be enforced: The people who are considerate enough to abide by these policies, are the ones who would have "cared" about the code qualities and stuff like that, so the policy is a moot point for these kinds of people. OTOH, the people who recklessly spam "contributions" generated from LLMs, by their very nature, would not r…

If nothing else, it gives maintainers a sign to point to when closing PRs with prejudice, and that's not nothing. Bad faith contributors will still likely complain when their PRs are closed, and having an obviously applicable policy to cite makes it harder for them to keep complaining without getting banned outright.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#168

Post by perching_aix »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #161
jjmarr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review…

This is exciting. Thank for for raising the point. I've posted https://discourse.llvm.org/t/our-ai-policy-vs-code-of-conduc... to see what other people think of this. Thank you for your commit, and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code that you don't understand in the review, as it makes my point rather more forcefully than otherwise.

graceful...

> and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code

https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970#issuecommen...

irony really is dead

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#169

Post by thesz »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #159
thesz wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of resolved conversation contains a comment "you should warn about incorrect configuration in constructor, look how it is done in some-other-part-of-code." This means that he did not put serious effort into understanding what, when and why others do in a highly structured project like LLVM. He "wrote" the code and then dumped "written" code into community to catch mistakes.

Have you ever contributed to a very large project like LLVM? I would say clearly not from the comment. There are pitfalls everywhere. It’s not so small that you can get everything in your head with only a reading. You need to actually engage with the code via contributions to understand it. 100+ comments is not an exceptional amount for early contributions. Anyway, LLVM is so complex I doubt you can actually vibcode…

  > Have you ever contributed to a very large project like LLVM?
Oh, I did. Here's one: https://github.com/mariadb-corporation/mariadb-columnstore-e...

  > I would say clearly not from the comment.
Of course, you are wrong.

  > It’s not so small that you can get everything in your head with only a reading.
PSP/TSP recommends writing typical mistakes into a list and use it to self-review and to fix code before sending it into review.

So, after reading code, one should write down what made him amazed and find out why it is so - whether it is a custom of a project or a peculiarity of code just read.

I actually have such a list for my work. Do you?

  > You need to actually engage with the code via contributions to understand it. 100+ comments is not an exceptional amount for early contributions.
No, it is not. Dozens of comments on a PR is an exceptional amount. Early contributions should be small so that one can learn typical customs and mistakes for self review before attempting a big code change.

That PR we discuss here contains a maintainer's requirement to remove excessive commenting - PR's author definitely did not do a codebase style matching cleanup job on his code before submission.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#170

Post by JonChesterfield »

perching_aix wrote: post #168
JonChesterfield wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exciting. Thank for for raising the point. I've posted https://discourse.llvm.org/t/our-ai-policy-vs-code-of-conduc... to see what other people think of this. Thank you for your commit, and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code that you don't understand in the review, as it makes my point rather more forcefully than otherwise.

graceful... > and especially for not mentioning that it's AI generated code https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/146970#issuecommen... irony really is dead

Thanks for digging that out, it was hidden in github's folding of many messages
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