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AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

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Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#131

Post by jodrellblank »

hypeatei wrote: post #87
benterix wrote: post #62

Did these Ocaml maintainers undergo some special course for dealing with difficult people? They show enormous amounts of maturity and patience. I'd just give the offender Torvalds' treatment and block them from the repo, case closed.

It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. Some maintainers are definitely too nice, and it's infuriating to see their time get wasted by such delusional people.

> "It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI."

The AI wrote code which worked, for a problem the submitter had, which had not been solved by any human for a long time, and there is limited human developer time/interest/funding available for solving it.

Dumping a mass of code (and work) onto maintainers without prior discussion is the problem[1]. If they had forked the repo, patched it themselves with that PR and used it personally, would they have a broken brain because of AI? They claim to have read the code, tested the code, they know that other people want the functionality; is wanting to share working code a "broken brain"? If the AI code didn't work - if it was slop - and they wanted the maintainers to fix it, or walk them through every step of asking the AI to fix it - that would be a huge problem, but that didn't happen.

[1] copyrightwashing and attribution is another problem but also not one that's "broken brain by the existence of AI" related.

Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#132

Post by jodrellblank »

chii wrote: post #13
rogerrogerr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI/LLMs are a problem because they create plausible looking code that can pass any review I have time to do, but doesn’t have a brain behind it that can be accountable for the code later. As a maintainer, it used to be I could merge code that “looked good”, and if it did something subtly goofy later I could look in the blame, ping the guy who wrote it, and get a “oh yeah, I did that to flobberate the bazzle. Didn’t t…

> doesn’t have a brain behind it that can be accountable for the code later. the submitter could also bail just as easily. Having an AI make the PR or not makes zero difference for this accountability. Ultimately, the maintainer pressing the merge button is accountable. What else would your value be as a maintainer, if all you did was a surface look, press merge, then find blame later when shit hits the fan?

Even if you couldn't contact the submitter again, you could find all their past submissions to review, or expect that their more recent submissions have improved from experience, or block them from all future contributions. AI stops all that - every sumbmission is disconnected from the others, there is no single learning person with an arrow of time and a chronological life experience behind the submissions, but there also isn't a single person to block if they never change.

> "if all you did was a surface look, press merge"

As per the old joke, surface look: $5

Years of experience learning what to look for: $995

In the past a block of code that has jarring flaws says the author was likely low skill, or careless. People can fake competence but it's a low return because ugly inconsistent code with no comments and no error checking which (barely) works will keep someone employed and paid, more than pretty code which doesn't work at all will. Writing pretty code which also works implies knowledge, care, eye for detail, effort, tooling, which implies the author will have put some of that into solving the problem. AI can fake all the quick indicators of competence without the competence, meaning the surface look is less useful.

> "What else would your value be as a maintainer"

Is the maintainer paid or unpaid? If they are paid, the value is to make sure the software works and meets the business standards. If they are unpaid, what is the discussion about "value" at all? Maybe to keep it from becoming wildly broken, or maybe yes to literally be the person who presses merge because somebody has to.

Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#133

Post by shizzy0 »

djoldman wrote: post #5

Maintainers and repo owners will get where they want to go the fastest by not referring to what/who "generated" code in a PR. Discussions about AI/LLM code being a problem solely because AI/LLM is not generally a productive conversation. Better is to critique the actual PR itself. For example, needs more tests, needs to be broken up, doesn't follow our protocols for merging/docs, etc. Additionally, if there isn't a c…

I think it's deeply disadvantageous and legally dubious to accept code for which you don't know its provenance.

Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#135

Post by bwfan123 »

brandolini's law in action. Developer drunk on AI-koolaid dumps large swath of code which seemingly works, and consumes hours of reviewer time and energy refuting it.

Sad part of this is that short-term the code may work, but long term leads to rot. Incentives at orgs are short-term oriented. If you wont be around to clean things up when shit hits the fan, why not let AI do all the code ?

Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#137

Post by oxag3n »

FOSS model has been abused by large corporations for a while now (with not so successful counter measures as Server Side Public License).

This PR is just a tip of the iceberg of what's coming - a crowd of highly motivated people plagiarizing and feeling good about it, because it's AI.

Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#138

Post by nsagent »

jodrellblank wrote: post #131
hypeatei wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. Some maintainers are definitely too nice, and it's infuriating to see their time get wasted by such delusional people.

> " It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. " The AI wrote code which worked, for a problem the submitter had, which had not been solved by any human for a long time, and there is limited human developer time/interest/funding available for solving it. Dumping a mass of code (and work) onto maintainers without prior discussion is the problem[1]. If they had forked the repo, patched i…

It's clear Claude adapted code directly from the OxCaml implementation (the PR author said he pointed Claude at that code [1] and then provides a ChatGPT analysis [2] that really highlights the plagiarism, but ultimately comes to the conclusion that it isn't plagiarized).

Either that highlights someone who is incompetent or they are willfully being blasé. Neither bodes well for contributing code while respecting copyright (though mixing and matching code on your own private repo that isn't distributed in source or binary form seems reasonable to me).

[1]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35573...

[2]: https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35566...

Re: AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

#139

Post by torben-friis »

jodrellblank wrote: post #131
hypeatei wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. Some maintainers are definitely too nice, and it's infuriating to see their time get wasted by such delusional people.

> " It's clear some people have had their brain broken by the existence of AI. " The AI wrote code which worked, for a problem the submitter had, which had not been solved by any human for a long time, and there is limited human developer time/interest/funding available for solving it. Dumping a mass of code (and work) onto maintainers without prior discussion is the problem[1]. If they had forked the repo, patched i…

>They claim to have read the code, tested the code, they know that other people want the functionality; is wanting to share working code a "broken brain"?

There is clearly a deviation between the amount of oversight the author thinks they provided and the actual level of oversight. This is clear by the fact that they couldn’t even explain the misattribution. They also mention that this is not their area of expertise.

In general, I think that it is a reasonable assumption that, if you couldn’t have written the code yourself, you’re in no position to claim you can ensure its quality.

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