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Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

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Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#91

Post by bwfan123 »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #13
sbondaryev wrote: post #2

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).

> Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work.

Great comment. Understanding is mis-"understood" by almost everyone. :)

Understanding a thing equates to building a causal model of the thing. And I still do not see AI as having a causal model of my code even though I use it every day. Seen differently, code is a proof of some statement, and verifying the correctness of a proof is what a code-review is.

There is an analogue to Brandolini's bullshit asymmetry principle here. Understanding code is 10 times harder than reading code.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#92

Post by KronisLV »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #13
sbondaryev wrote: post #2

Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.

Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).

> AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).

Only if the person doesn't want the AI to help in understanding how it works, in which case it doesn't matter whether they use AI or not (except without they couldn't push some slop out the door at all).

If you want that understanding, I find that AI is actually excellent with it, when given proper codebase search tools and an appropriately smart model (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini), easily browsing features that might have dozens of files making them up - which I would absolutely miss some details of in the case of enterprisey Java projects.

I think the next tooling revolution will probably be automatically feeding the model all of the information about how the current file fits within the codebase - not just syntax errors and automatically giving linter messages, but also dependencies, usages, all that.

In my eyes, the "ideal" code would be simple and intuitive enough to understand so that you don't actually need to spend hours to understand how a feature works OR use any sort of AI tool, or codebase visualization as a graph (dependency and usage tracking) or anything like that - it just seems that you can't represent a lot of problems like that easily, given time constraints and how badly Spring Boot et al fucks up any codebase it touches with accidental complexity.

But until then, AI actually helps, a lot. Maybe I just don't have enough working memory (or time) to go through 30 files and sit down and graph it out in a notebook like I used to, but in lieu of that an AI generated summary (alongside docs/code tests/whatever I can get, but seems like humans hate writing docs and ADRs, at least in the culture here) is good enough.

At the same time, AI will also happily do incomplete refactoring or not follow the standards of the rest of the codebase and invent abstractions where it doesn't need any, if you don't have the tooling to prevent it automatically, e.g. prebuild checks (or the ability to catch it yourself in code review). I think the issue largely is limited context sizes (without going broke) - if I could give the AI the FULL 400k SLoC codebase and the models wouldn't actually start breaking down at those context lengths, it'd be pretty great.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#93

Post by overfeed »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #29
floortepw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You conveniently left off the follow up. > @zeroxBigBoss: .. It's not all AI, I have experience with Zig and MacOS, .. > @mitchellh: I appreciate it! And my bad on the experience, I must have misunderstood or misremembered your messages Use xcancel. For the very least to see an entire thread.

Every time.

Another victory notch for the "AI Influentist" article[1].

Step 1: thought leader reveals Shocking(tm) AI achievement

Step 2: post gets traction

Step 3: additional context is revealed, dragging the original claim from the realm of the miraculous to "merely" useful.

I don't think Mitchell intentionally misrepresented/exaggerated, but the phenomenon is reccuring. What's the logical explanation for the frequency?

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46623195

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#94

Post by falloutx »

corndoge wrote: post #18
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).

There are many cases in which I already understand the code before it is written. In these cases AI writing the code is pure gain. I do not need to spend 30 minutes learning how to hold the bazel rule. I do not need to spend 30 minutes to write client boilerplate. List goes on. All broad claims about AI's effects on productivity have counterexamples. It is situational. I think most competent engineers quietly using A…

Unless you have made some exceptional advances in the LLM agents (if you have, send me the claude skill?), you cant predict it.

If it was predictable like a transpiler, you wouldn't have to read it. you can think of it as a pure gain but you are just not reading the code its outputting.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#95

Post by pixl97 »

thephyber wrote: post #86
embedding-shape wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Movie/show reviews, product reviews, app/browser extension reviews, programming libraries, etc all get gamed. An entire industry of booting reviews has sprung up from PR companies brigading positive reviews for their clients. But for a long time, unrelated to AI. When Amazon was first available here in Spain (don't remember exactly what year, but before LLMs for sure), the amount of fraudulent reviews filling the p…

LLMs reduce the marginal cost per unit of content. When snail mail had a cost floor of $0.25 for the price of postage, email was basically free. You might get 2-3 daily pieces of junk mail in your house’s mailbox, but you would get hundreds or thousands in your email inbox. Slop comes at scale. LLMs didn’t invent spam, but they are making it easier to create more variants of it, and possibly ones that convert better…

>When snail mail had a cost floor of $0.25 for the price of postage

Hence I suspect that quite a few of these interfaces that are now being spammed with AI crap will end up implementing something that represents a fee, a paywall, or a trustwall. That should keep armies of AI slop responses from being worthwhile.

How we do that without killing some communities is yet to be seen.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#96

Post by pixl97 »

em-bee wrote: post #43
corndoge wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many cases in which I already understand the code before it is written. In these cases AI writing the code is pure gain. I do not need to spend 30 minutes learning how to hold the bazel rule. I do not need to spend 30 minutes to write client boilerplate. List goes on. All broad claims about AI's effects on productivity have counterexamples. It is situational. I think most competent engineers quietly using A…

In these cases AI writing the code is pure gain. no, it isn't. unless the generated code is just a few lines long, and all you are doing is effectively autocompletion, you have to go through the generated code with a fine toothed comb to be sure it actually does what you think it should do and there are no typos. if you don't, you are fooling yourself.

> with a fine toothed comb to be sure it actually does what you think it should do and there are no typos. if you don't, you are fooling yourself

so the exact same thing you should be doing in code reviews anyway?

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#97

Post by nwallin »

account42 wrote: post #79
stavros wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience as well. I work with AI agents a lot, they are very useful. What's not useful is some passer-by telling the AI "implement " and then sending that as a PR. I could have written a sentence to the LLM too if I wanted to, you aren't really giving me or the project any value by doing that. Now that writing the code is the easy part, we're just going to transition to having very few contributors, who…

Outside contributors have never been valuable as pure code monkeys.

Every inside contributor (besides the original author) started as an outside contributor. If the solution to the problem of LLMs is a blanket ban on outside contributors, I fear for the future of open source.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#98

Post by jauntywundrkind »

theshrike79 wrote: post #47
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #45

We've enjoyed a certain period (at least a couple of decades) of global, anonymous collaboration that seems to be ending. Trust in the individual is going to become more important in many areas of life, from open-source to journalism and job interviews.

I've been trying to manifest Web of Trust coming back to help people navigate towards content that's created by humans. A system where I can mark other people as trusted and see who they trust, so when I navigate to a web page or in this case, a Github pull request, my WoT would tell me if this is a trusted person according to my network.

At protocol (Bluesky) will I hope have better trust signals, since your Personal Data Server stores your microblog/posts and a bunch of other data. And the data is public. It's much harder to convincingly fake being a cross-media human.

If someone showed up on at-proto powered book review site like https://bookhive.buzz and started trying to post nonsense reviews, or started running bots, it would be much more transparent what was afoot.

More explicit trust signalling would be very fun to add.

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#99

Post by 0ckpuppet »

jacquesm wrote: post #48
theshrike79 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to manifest Web of Trust coming back to help people navigate towards content that's created by humans. A system where I can mark other people as trusted and see who they trust, so when I navigate to a web page or in this case, a Github pull request, my WoT would tell me if this is a trusted person according to my network.

You need a very complex weighing and revocation mechanism because once one bad player is in your web of trust they can become a node along which both other bad players and good players alike can join.

aka clown explosion

Re: Tldraw pauses external contributions due to AI slop

#100

Post by phoplar »

thephyber wrote: post #85
jacquesm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need a very complex weighing and revocation mechanism because once one bad player is in your web of trust they can become a node along which both other bad players and good players alike can join.

Trust in the real world is not immutable. It is constantly re-evaluated. So the Web of Trust concept should do this as well. Also, there needs to be some significant consequence to people who are bad actors and, transitively, to people who trust bad actors. The hardest part isn’t figuring out how to cut off the low quality nodes. It’s how to incentivize people to join a network where the consequences are so high that…

I really don't want to expand the surveillance state...
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