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Is it all just vapourware?

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Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#121

Post by 20k »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #109
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? Selection bias? OSS has a thing proprietary projects don't - an endless cohort of opportunists trying to wedge in a "contribution" for personal gain, be it a Hacktober t-shirt or resume boost or an occasional vulnerability (with the resume boosting being by far m…

The the idea that engineers are covertly sneaking huge quantities of LLM generated code into these projects doesn't pass the smell test, as there's lots of evidence that this isn't true. It'd be incredibly obvious if new contributors were turning up en masse and contributing absolutely incredible amounts of high quality code, because everyone would be crowing about it

Instead, if you check out something like ImGui, we can see that its largely just Omar as usual with a bunch of PRs. Nothing much seems to have changed, feature development carries on at the same pace as it did previously. This is replicated across nearly every single major long term open source project I can find

The only reason developers now feel the need to hide their LLM usage is because the LLM contributions have all been shockingly bad, so you're reversing cause and effect. If LLM contributions had been incredible, they wouldn't be frowned upon socially now. Surely someone would blow the lid on this huge covert conspiracy about how incredible their contributions to.. SFML have been?

This effect also wouldn't prevent LLMgineers from creating their own open source projects that should be absolutely outstripping the existing open source space. After all how old is ImGui? With a 10x productivity gain, it should take a year of development to easily match its features if those gains are truly real now

>if they're really good and use LLMs responsibly, they probably don't even have any ethical obligation to label LLM involvement

The copyright issues means that non disclosure is inherently unethical

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#123

Post by biql »

20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> I regularly see people claim that they are now 10x more productive with LLM code generation, and I just wonder where all the code is.

Perhaps the biggest issue hasn't been the speed of development all along but people working on wrong things, hence why progress isn't as evident. LLM helping to build something that isn't needed faster isn't going to productivity more visible.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#124

Post by TeMPOraL »

20k wrote: post #75
kvark wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe open-source development is just poorly compatible with AI workflow? Today, projects may need a community, an issue tracker, but pull requests are becoming less important. I suspect the ban of AI in established projects to be a very complex decision. Even if core developers would like to use AI, they don't want to review all of the AI-generated code from the larger community. So the only consistent way to pre…

Why would the PR format be bad for LLMs? Its just code review + merging in branches, which is what every company should be doing anyway Nothing's stopping core developers from adopting LLM generated code for themselves, while banning it for external contributors

> Nothing's stopping core developers from adopting LLM generated code for themselves, while banning it for external contributors

And if they're doing that, why would they tell you, or anyone?

And if they're doing that responsibly - collaborating with AI, and reviewing the code - they don't even have an ethical reason to tell about AI involvement, any more than telling about the StackOverflow answers or blog posts they read before coming up with some implementation.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#125

Post by internet2000 »

gr_norm wrote: post #89
mark242 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? It could be that the engineers who are extremely productive with LLMs are landing PRs that look indistinguishable from good, hand-written PRs.

If so, where are all the new features in the open-source projects I use? Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? Why hasn't CUDA been fully reverse-engineered as an open source toolchain? These are unreasonable expectations, but only in response to unreasonable claims of productivity. What before took ten years should now only take one, right? It seems likely that the gains from generating tons of code are being offset…

> Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop?

My guess is that open source folks overindex on being anti-AI.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

20k wrote: post #121
TeMPOraL wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do only the poor quality LLM code generation users make PRs to open source projects, and never the engineers that know how to really use it correctly? Selection bias? OSS has a thing proprietary projects don't - an endless cohort of opportunists trying to wedge in a "contribution" for personal gain, be it a Hacktober t-shirt or resume boost or an occasional vulnerability (with the resume boosting being by far m…

The the idea that engineers are covertly sneaking huge quantities of LLM generated code into these projects doesn't pass the smell test, as there's lots of evidence that this isn't true. It'd be incredibly obvious if new contributors were turning up en masse and contributing absolutely incredible amounts of high quality code, because everyone would be crowing about it Instead, if you check out something like ImGui, w…

> The only reason developers now feel the need to hide their LLM usage is because the LLM contributions have all been shockingly bad, so you're reversing cause and effect. If LLM contributions had been incredible, they wouldn't be frowned upon socially now

You're dismissing scale of things. OSS communities were having high-profile discussions about gatekeeping and discrimination way before LLMs were a thing, because already at that point the amount of human generated slop was becoming untenable. And yet, no one argued that this must be evidence that all human contributions are bad and humanity is a bubble waiting to pop.

> ImGui

Weird choice of an example. ImGui is common infrastructure. Who in their right mind would want to mess with that? Especially when building something to solve some end-user problem (whether N=1 or N=1 billion), ImGui is a component you include, not one you rewrite.

There's hardly any reason anyone has to contribute to that project, with or without LLMs.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#127

Post by 20k »

biql wrote: post #123
20k wrote: post #39

>If agentic development actually worked the way any of them say it does I think its fascinating just how much of a gap there is between what's being claimed, and the verifiable observable data of the open source world. Major open source projects are by and large starting to ban LLMs now, because the contributions made by LLM users have been universally terrible and unhelpful. There doesn't appear to be a single major…

> I regularly see people claim that they are now 10x more productive with LLM code generation, and I just wonder where all the code is. Perhaps the biggest issue hasn't been the speed of development all along but people working on wrong things, hence why progress isn't as evident. LLM helping to build something that isn't needed faster isn't going to productivity more visible.

There's no reason that some people wouldn't be using their new found 10x superpowers on open source projects though

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#128

Post by daveguy »

mark242 wrote: post #96
20k wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that were true, we'd expect to see massively accelerated velocity of open source projects by these engineers. They should be creating new open source projects at a truly astounding rate, with new tooling springing up every day that dwarfs the existing open source space as their productivity completely eclipses traditional development Instead, software is plodding along exactly the same as it did prior to LLM code…

Github's Octoverse report kind of gives you that evidence, no? Pull requests landed in 2025 were up 30% over 2024. This year it's going to be much higher.

That's the point. Huge increases in pull requests. Virtually no increase in features or reliability.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#129

Post by ethin »

badlibrarian wrote: post #103
ethin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay. Please generate using an AI model code for a safety-critical system which is able to be incorporated into an aircraft and that passes the coding standards and requirements in that domain and come back and tell us all about it. Surely, if AI was so good across the entire domain of software engineering, this would be trivial to do. Edit: although you might be subject to an NDA... But this is pretty much my test f…

Long bet: the NTSB will require all transportation software to be submitted for independent review, and that review process will be heavily automated by AI, within 5 years. Take it?

If we assume the current administration (and the following one) continues to be bullish on AI, then this is a suckers bet. Assuming the next administration isn't too busy cleaning up the messes of the current one.

Re: Is it all just vapourware?

#130

Post by 20k »

internet2000 wrote: post #125
gr_norm wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, where are all the new features in the open-source projects I use? Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? Why hasn't CUDA been fully reverse-engineered as an open source toolchain? These are unreasonable expectations, but only in response to unreasonable claims of productivity. What before took ten years should now only take one, right? It seems likely that the gains from generating tons of code are being offset…

> Why hasn't GIMP replicated Photoshop? My guess is that open source folks overindex on being anti-AI.

They don't though, very few people were anti AI in the early days. Open source projects were largely initially very interested in LLM usage, and generally had a pro AI contribution policy. This changed when it did not help their lives

Eg if you check out Godot, initially they were cool with LLM code, and then had to clamp down on it because it was not leading to anything good

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