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Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

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Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#71

Post by instig007 »

module1973 wrote: post #39

It's like every new innovation at this point is exacerbating the problem of us choosing short term rewards over long time horizon rewards. The incentive structure simply doesn't support people who want to view things from the bird's eye view. Once you see game theory, you really can't unsee it.

game theory doesn't expand into continuous rounds of interactions over the course of a lifetime where previous rounds' outcomes are either reset or persist based on other actors entering the game from the open world, so it really is an inferior framework for evaluating long-term strategies.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#72

Post by bensyverson »

simonw wrote: post #60
bensyverson wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon, as co-creator of Django, what's your take on this story?

I think this line says everything: > If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.

I love it. Sounds like good advice for submitting a PR to any project!

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#73

Post by instig007 »

santiagobasulto wrote: post #42

I feel like open source is taking the wrong stance here. There’s a lot of gatekeeping, first. And second, this approach is like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella. AI is here to stay. We can’t stop it, for much we try. I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change, not stopping it. For example, automating code reviews with AI.

> I feel the successful OS projects will be the ones embracing the change

You'll have to embrace the `ccc` compiler first, lol

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#74

Post by xpe »

Well said:

> Before LLMs, [high quality code contribution] was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.

Now my twist on this: This same spirit is why local politics at the administrative level feels more functional than identity politics at the national level. The people that take the time to get involved with quotidian issues (e.g. for their school district) get their hands dirty and appreciate the specific constraints and tradeoffs. The very act of digging in changes you.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#75

Post by cwillu »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #37

Curious what simon thinks about using an LLM to work on Django... I've used an LLM to create patches for multiple projects. I would not have created said work without LLMs. I also reviewed the work afterward and provided tests to verify it.

> This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed. What I see now is people who are using LLMs to generate the code and write the PR description and handle the feedback from the PR review. It’s to the extent where I can’t tell if there’d be a difference if the reviewer had just used the LLM themselves. And that is a big problem.

[…]

> If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#76

Post by zenolove »

MattGaiser wrote: post #52
jihadjihad wrote: post #6

s/Django/the codebase/g , and the point stands against any repo for which there is code review by humans: > If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. > Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor.…

> I am going to try to make these points to my team, because I am seeing a huge influx of AI-generated PRs where the submitter interacts with CodeRabbit etc. by having Claude/Codex respond to feedback on their behalf. Are people generally unhappy with the outcomes of this? As anecdotally, it does seem to pass review later on. Code is getting through this way.

It's slippery. You're swamped with low-effort PRs, can't possibly test and review all of them. You will become a visible bottleneck, and guess whether it's easier to defend quality vs. "blocking a lot of features" which "seem to work". If you're tied by your salary as a reviewer, you will have to let go, and at the same time you'll suffer the consequences of the "lack of oversight" when things go south.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#77

Post by voxl »

yieldcrv wrote: post #70

I disagree with these takes It is not pride to have your name associated with an open source project, it is pride that the code works and the change is efficient. The reviewer should be on top of that. and I hope an army of OpenClaw agents calls out the discrimination, so gatekeepers recognize that they have to coexist with this species

If you think OpenClaw is a new species then why are you happy with it's enslavement?

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#78

Post by ErroneousBosh »

lijok wrote: post #40

By what metric is “the level of quality is much, much higher” in the Django codebase? ‘cause other than the damn thing actually working, the primary metric of a codebase being high quality is how easy it is to contribute to. And evidently, it’s not.

Have you spent much time with the Django codebase?

I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9 days most of the assistance you got on the IRC channel was along the lines of "it's in this file here in the source, read it, understand it, and if you still have a question come back and ask again". I probably learned more about writing idiomatic Python from that than anything else.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#79

Post by loeber »

kanzure wrote: post #2

I like the idea of donating money instead of tokens. I think django contributors are likely to know how to spend those tokens better than I might, as I am not a django core contributor. Some projects ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730504 ) are setting a norm to disclose AI usage. Another project simply decided to pause contributions from external parties ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012 ). In…

Shameless plug: I wrote an essay a few weeks ago pushing this exact same thesis. https://essays.johnloeber.com/p/31-open-source-software-in-t...

Instead of people buying the tokens themselves, they should just donate the money to the core contributors and let those people decide how to spend on tokens.

Re: Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

#80

Post by zenolove »

acedTrex wrote: post #65
genthree wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI autocomplete and suggestions built-in to Jira are making our ticket tracker so goddamn spammy that I’m 100% sure that “feature” has done more harm than good. I don’t think anybody’s tracking the actual net-effects of any of this crap on productivity, just the “vibes” they get in the moment, using it. “I got my part of this particular thing done so fast!” I believe that to be the case, in part, because not a lot of…

Ironically my favorite use of claude is removing caring about jira from my workflow. I already didn't care about it but now i dont have to spend any time on it. I treat jira like product owners treat the code. Which is infinitely humorous to me.

Horrible degrading take. Be the change you want to see. Don't fuel the fire that's burning you.

If something's not happening, something else's making it impractical. Saying this as a 10+ years product manager and R&D person with 20+ more years of engineering on top.

I also had to deal with "managers are just complicating things" or "users are stupid and don't understand anything"; do you think I complained? No, I had engineers barter trust of their ingenuity with trust of my wisdom, and brought them to customer calls and presented them to users almost like royalty, which made them incredibly respectful as soon as they saw what kind of crap users had to deal with.

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