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AI Usage Policy

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111–120 of 293 posts

Re: AI Usage Policy

#111
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate…

My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.

Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#112
post #6

See x thread for rationale: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2014433315261124760?s=46&t=FU... “ Ultimately, I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly.” I have a side project, git-prompt-story to attach Claude Vode session in GitHub git notes. Though it is not that simple to do automatic (e.g. i need to redact credentials).

>I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly I think AI could help with that.

simow wrote a tool that does this for Claude code

https://simonw.substack.com/p/a-new-way-to-extract-detailed-...

Re: AI Usage Policy

#113
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

To quote Luke Skywalker: Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.

Which is why I keep saying that anthropomorphizing LLMs gives you good high-order intuitions about them, and should not be discouraged.

Consider: GP would've been much more correct if they said "It's just a person on a chip." Still wrong, but much less, in qualitative fashion, than they are now.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#114
I think that a warning of public ridicule may be fine. However, actually doing it is quite low brow IMO. I'm sad to see more and more otherwise admirable projects step down to that (assuming they actually do it).

Re: AI Usage Policy

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.

Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.

In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#116
post #54

TLDR don't be an asshole and produce good stuff. But I have the feeling that this is not the right direction for the future. Distrust the process: only trust the results. Moreover this policy is strictly unenforceable because good AI use is indistinguishable from good manual coding. And sometimes even the reverse. I don't believe in coding policies where maintainers need to spot if AI is used or not. I believe in exp…

As someone who has picked up recently some 'legacy' code. AI has been really good at mostly summing up what is going on. In many cases it finds things I had no idea was wrong (because I do not know the code very well yet). This is so called 'battle hardened code'. I review it and say 'yeah its is wildly broken and I see how the original developer ended up here'. Sometimes the previous dev would be nice enough to leave a comment or some devs 'the code is the comments'. I have also had AI go wildly off the rails and do very dumb things. It is an interesting tool for sure one you have to keep an eye on or it will confidently make a foot gun for you. It is also nice for someone like me who has some sort of weird social anxiaty thing about bugging my fellow devs. In that I can create options tables and pick good ideas out of that.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#117
post #82

I really like the phrase "bad AI drivers"...AI is a tool, and the stupid drive-by pull requests just mean you're being inconsiderate and unhelpful in your usage of the tool, similar to how "bad drivers" are a nightmare to encounter on a highway...so stop it or you'll end up on the dashcam subreddit of programming.

The experience of using a coding agent is that you're more of a "backseat driver" though. The AI acts as your driver and you tell it where to go, sometimes making corrections if it's going the wrong way.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.

In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.

The high-trust Boomer brain cannot comprehend the actual low-trust society of grifters in which we live.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#119
post #28

The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…

"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.) It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.

Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket.

I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.

Re: AI Usage Policy

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.

Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.

This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspects of life.

So their boss may be naive, but not hilariously so - because that is, in fact, how the world works[1]! And as a boss, they probably have some understanding of it.

The thing they miss is that AI fundamentally[2] cannot provide this kind of "correct" output, and more importantly, that the "trillion dollar companies" not only don't guarantee that, they actually explicitly inform everyone everywhere, including in the UI, that the output may be incorrect.

So it's mostly failure to pay attention and realize they're dealing with an exception to the rule.

--

[0] - Actually hurt you, I'm ignoring all the fitness/healthy eating fads and "ultraprocessed food" bullshit.

[1] - On a related note, it's also something security people often don't get: real world security relies on being connected - via contracts and laws and institutions - to "men with guns". It's not perfect, but scales better.

[2] - Because LLMs are not databases, but - to a first-order approximation - little people on a chip!

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