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I don't want your PRs anymore

dpc.pw

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Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#111

Post by dpc_01234 »

arjie wrote: post #79

Realistically, there are a much larger set of things that I don't mind forking these days. It is quite a bit of effort to get to a set of things that mostly don't have bugs, but in the past I might fork a few things[0] but these days, I vendor everything, and some things I just look at the feature list and have Claude rebuild it for me. So I totally understand why actual project maintainers and authors wouldn't want…

I'm currently running on a fork of Helix text editor, which I heavily gutted to replace the block cursor with a beam-style (like one in insert mode, but just all the time). Since the maintainers are drowning in PRs (472 open ATM), I understandably don't expect them to have time for my weird ideas. Then I pile on top whatever PRs I want that I find useful out of these 472, and with a little bit of LLM help I have a very different text editor than the upstream.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#112

Post by perrygeo »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #25

The author sounds like he actually responds to feature requests, though. Typical behavior I'm seeing is that the maintainer just never checks the issue tracker, or has it disabled, but is more likely to read PR's.

As it should be. Issues are a dime a dozen, sometime coherent, rarely relevant. There is no barrier to submitting a garbage issue.

PRs, at the very least, provide a quality gate. You have to a) express the idea in runnable code and b) pass the tests.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#113

Post by tonyarkles »

boricj wrote: post #103
tonyarkles wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> west manifest Zephyr-based project?

No, it predates it by a couple of decades. But our modern embedded firmware projects all use Zephyr and west, so I just created a west manifest, stole parts of the scripts/ folder from the Zephyr repository to have a working "west patch" command and went to town. If I had more time to work on it, I'd have gotten "west build", "west flash" and "west debug" working too (probably with bespoke implementations) and remove…

Awesome! Yeah, I haven't used west-sans-Zephyr yet but interestingly enough NXP decided to use it for their MCUXpresso framework: https://github.com/nxp-mcuxpresso/mcuxsdk-manifests/blob/mai...

I have mixed feelings about west in general, but I like it enough that I'd probably look at doing something like that in the future too for harmony-sake with our existing Zephyr projects.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#114

Post by kajaktum »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #82
rebolek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very shortsighted and it’s like polishing gun to shoot your foot with it. If it’s "take it home OSS" and "there is not much need to submit PRs or issues" then why would anybody submit PRs and issues for "for critical bugs or security fixes"? If they have fix and it works for them, they’re fine, afterall. And while we’re at it, why would anybody share anything? It’s just too much hassle. People will either com…

> then why would anybody submit PRs and issues for "for critical bugs or security fixes"? Why do they do that at present? There are plenty of cases where it's a hassle but people still do it, presumably out of a sense of common decency.

I think people do that because they are closely involved with the code/plumbing. If they spend a week fixing a bug, they feel the weight of the changes that they made with every line that they wrote. If they just fixed the issue in passing and moved on to the next thing, I don't know if they would feel the same weight to contribute back.

More often than not, LLMs fixes an issue as a downstream user. So there's even less pressure to fix the issue. Because if library A does not work on Windows, it would just use mash together library B and C and something from itself to fix the work around it.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#115

Post by dpc_01234 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #32

I like how fast this is changing The fact-of-life journaling about the flood of code, the observation that he can just re-prompt his own LLM to implement the same feature or optimization all of this would have just been controversial pontificating 3 months ago, let alone in the last year or even two years. But all of a sudden enough people are using agentic coding tools - many having skipped the autocomplete AI coder…

Author here. Here is my PoV on that evolution.

1 year ago Claude Code was relatively new, and a first polished tool that really fitted my CLI-centeric dev-views. I used Aider before, but Claude Code was just much better. The autocomplete AI coders did not seem useful, and didn't have good integrations with Helix text editor. However even the frontier models were relatively bad in practice. Useful but not trustworthy at all. Being wrong/stupid 5-10% of the time compounds quickly.

6 months ago agents became really robust at just writing code they were told to write. Around that time I started really leaning into LLM-assisted coding, which require some skill, experience and adapting own workflows and tooling. And it takes time and effort.

Right now frontier models are really productive and robust. Sure it's still a fancy-autocomplete under the hood, so one needs to plan around that, but it's more common for Slopus finds bugs in my old human-written code, than I find bugs in its new code, especially that one can now easily write and maintain tons of tests which otherwise would never get done. LLMs don't have context and good judgment, so it still takes a lot of designing and steering the agent to write the right thing, but that's OK. And as the productivity bottleneck shifted very heavily from writing code to all other thing around it, it makes it very apparent that it's not that the clanker now that needs to get better, but the process around it.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#116

Post by arjie »

dpc_01234 wrote: post #111
arjie wrote: post #79

Realistically, there are a much larger set of things that I don't mind forking these days. It is quite a bit of effort to get to a set of things that mostly don't have bugs, but in the past I might fork a few things[0] but these days, I vendor everything, and some things I just look at the feature list and have Claude rebuild it for me. So I totally understand why actual project maintainers and authors wouldn't want…

I'm currently running on a fork of Helix text editor, which I heavily gutted to replace the block cursor with a beam-style (like one in insert mode, but just all the time). Since the maintainers are drowning in PRs (472 open ATM), I understandably don't expect them to have time for my weird ideas. Then I pile on top whatever PRs I want that I find useful out of these 472, and with a little bit of LLM help I have a ve…

That's exactly the same viewpoint I have.

How do you like Helix as a starting point? Currently, I'm having Claude write a little personal text editor with CodeEditTextView as a starting point and now that I saw your comment I suddenly realized I mostly like using a modal editor and only didn't do it here because I'm moving from a webpage (where Vimium style stuff never appealed to me). Good hint that. I wonder if neovim's server mode will be helpful to me.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#117

Post by socratic_weeb »

This is sad. Human endeavors always benefit from the distributed contribution of the many, which keps everyone's egos and preferences in check while approaching the most optimal global solution in the limit. Every social institution works like this, and FOSS is no different. Centralization almost never works in social endeavours. Not to mention the dubious ethical implications of using (potenially stolen) LLM code in FOSS projects.

This might be controversial, but we need more Stallmans; that is, people who care about the ethical implications of tech, and not just the tech.

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#118

Post by matheusmoreira »

boricj wrote: post #30

I've been on both ends of this. As the maintainer of ghidra-delinker-extension, whenever I get a non-trivial PR (like adding an object file format or ISA analyzer) I'm happy that it happens. It also means that I get to install a toolchain, maybe learn how to use it (MSVC...), figure out all of the nonsense and undocumented bullshit in it (COFF...), write byte-perfect roundtrip parser/serializer plus tests inside bina…

> I usually find it easier to take their branch, do all of that work myself (attributing authorship to commits whenever appropriate), push it to the master branch and close the PR than puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments into doing all of that for me.

My most negative experiences with free and open source contributions have been like that. The one maintainer who engaged with me until my patches got into master was the best experience I ever had contributing to open source software to this day.

Pretty sad that people see engaging with other developers as "puppeteering someone halfway across the globe through GitHub comments"...

Re: I don't want your PRs anymore

#119

Post by dpc_01234 »

guelo wrote: post #44

It's interesting that this is the opposite of Steve Yegge's conclusion in his Vibe Maintainer article where he says he's merging 50(!) contributor PRs a day. https://steve-yegge.medium.com/vibe-maintainer-a2273a841040

My prediction is that there will be a Cambrian explosion-like event in software practices for 5-10 years (assuming continuous broad affordability availability), because LLMs can afford us a lot of freedom in trying a lot of new things including writing new tooling and changing the process. There's a lot to explore and I guess we'll collectively see what sticks.
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