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AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

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Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#141

Post by jdiff »

yomismoaqui wrote: post #78
bgwalter wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You are using it wrong!" This is insulting to all pre-2023 open source developers, who produced the entire stack that the "AI" robber barons use in their companies. It is even more insulting because no actual software of value has been demonstrably produced using "AI".

> It is even more insulting because no actual software of value has been demonstrably produced using "AI". Claude Code and Amp (equivalent from Sourcegraph) are created by humans using these same tools to add new features and fix bugs. Having used both tools for some weeks I can tell you that they provide a great value to me, enough that I see paying $100 monthly as a bargain related to that value. Edit: typo

GP is pointing out the distinct lack of AI driven development in the wild. At this point, agents should be visibly maintaining at least a few popular codebases across this world wide web. The fact that there aren't raises some eyebrows for the claims that are regularly made by proponents. Not just the breathless proponents, either. Even taking claims very conservatively, FOSS maintainer burnout should be a thing of the past, but the only noted interaction with AI seems to be amplifying it.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#142

Post by OptionOfT »

nico wrote: post #8

> They are experienced open source developers, working on their own projects I just started working on a 3-month old codebase written by someone else, in a framework and architecture I had never used before Within a couple hours, with the help of Claude Code, I had already created a really nice system to replicate data from staging to local development. Something I had built before in other projects, and I new that m…

Now the question is: did you gain the same knowledge and proficiency in the codebase that you would've gained organically?

I find that when working with an LLM the difference in knowledge is the same as learning a new language. Learning to understanding another language is easier than learning to speak another language.

It's like my knowledge of C++. I can read it, and I can make modifications of existing files. But writing something from scratch without a template? That's a lot harder.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#143

Post by marcellus23 »

candiddevmike wrote: post #104
yomismoaqui wrote: post #22

Someone on X said that these agentic AI tools (Claude Code, Amp, Gemini Cli) are to programming like the table saw was to hand-made woodworking. It can make some things faster and better than a human with a saw, but you have to learn how to use them right (or you will loose some fingers). I personally find that agentic AI tools make me be more ambitious in my projects, I can tackle some things I didn't tthougth about…

> to programming like the table saw was to hand-made woodworking This is a ridiculous comparison because the table saw is a precision tool (compared to manual woodworking) when agentic AI is anything but IMO.

The nature of the comparison is in the second paragraph. It's nothing to do with how precise it is.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#144

Post by bluefirebrand »

helloplanets wrote: post #125
bluefirebrand wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If by "people" you mean "experienced software engineers", My post is a single sentence and I literally wrote "people with no experience"

He addressed your point in the paragraph before that. The paragraph from which you quoted was meant to show the difference between your point and the fact that the original research was indeed measuring software engineers.

My point is that I was very clear about what people I was referring to.

No need for all the "if by people you mean" rigamarole

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#145

Post by mlyle »

la_fayette wrote: post #132
mlyle wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I recently have done my first couple heavily AI augmented tasks for hobby projects. I wrote a TON of LVGL code. The result wasn’t perfect for placement, but when I iterated a couple of times, it fixed almost all of the issues. The result is a little hacked together but a bit better than my typical first pass writing UI code. I think this saved me a factor of 10 in time. Next I am going to see how much of the clea…

When you argued that it saved you time by a factor of 10, have you even measured that properly? I initially also had the feeling that LLMs save me time, but in the end it didn't. I roughly compared my performance to past performance by the amount of stories done and LLMs made me slower even if I thought I am saving time... From several month of deep work with LLMs I think they are amazing pattern matchers, but not pr…

I am pretty confident. Last similar LVGL thing I did took me 10-12 hours, and I had a quicker iteration time (running locally instead of the test hardware). Here I spent a little more than an hour, testing on real hardware, and the last 20 minutes was nitpicking.

Writing front-end display code and instantiating components to look right is very much playing to the model’s strength, though. A carefully written sentence plus context would become 40 lines of detail-dense but formulaic code.

(I have also had a lot of luck asking it to make a first pass at typesetting things in Tex, too, for similar reasons)

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#146

Post by nerdjon »

antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

I will never forget being in a code review for a upcoming release, there was a method that was... different. Like massively different with no good reason why it was changed as much as it was for such a small addition.

We asked the person why they made the change, and "silence". They had no reason. It became painfully clear that all they did was copy and paste the method into an LLM and say "add this thing" and it spit out a completely redone method.

So now we had a change that no one in the company actually knew just because the developer took a shortcut. (this change was rejected and reverted).

The scariest thing to me is no one actually knowing what code is running anymore with these models having a tendency to make change for the sake of making change (and likely not actually addressing the root thing but a shortcut like you mentioned)

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#147

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

antimora wrote: post #50

I'm one of the regular code reviewers for Burn (a deep learning framework in Rust). I recently had to close a PR because the submitter's bug fix was clearly written entirely by an AI agent. The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause. This is exactly what AI tends to do when it can't identify the actual problem. The code was unnecessarily verbose and even included tests for muting the error.…

> The "fix" simply muted an error instead of addressing the root cause.

FWIW, I have seen human developers do this countless times. In fact there are many people in engineering that will argue for these kinds of "fixes" by default. Usually it's in closed-source projects where the shittiness is hidden from the world, but trust me, it's common.

> I suspect their motivation was just to get a commit on their record. This is becoming a troubling trend with AI tools.

There was already a problem (pre-AI) with shitty PRs on GitHub made to try to game a system. Regardless of how they made the change, the underlying problem is a policy one: how to deal with people making shitty changes for ulterior motives. I expect the solution is actually more AI to detect shitty changes from suspicious submitters.

Another solution (that I know nobody's going to go for): stop using GitHub. Back in the "olden times", we just had CVS, mailing lists and patches. You had to perform some effort in order to get to the point of getting the change done and merged, and it was not necessarily obvious afterward that you had contributed. This would probably stop 99% of people who are hoping for a quick change to boost their profile.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#148

Post by tjr »

thinkingemote wrote: post #122
munificent wrote: post #113

> The inability of developers to tell if a tool sped them up or slowed them down is fascinating in itself, probably applies to many other forms of human endeavour, and explains things as varied as why so many people think that AI has made them 10 times more productive, why I continue to use Vim, why people drive in London etc. In boating, there's a notion of a "set and drift" which describes how wind and current push…

Exactly! Waze the navigation app tends to route users on longer routes but which feels more fast. When driving we perceive our journey as fast or slow not by the actual length but by our memories of what happened. Waze knows human drivers are happier with driving a route that may be longer in time and distance of they feel like they are making progress with the twists and turns. Ai tools makes programming feel easier…

That sounds like a navigation tool that I absolutely do not want! Occasionally I do enjoy meandering around, but usually fastest / shortest path would be preferred.

And I'm not sure about the other either. In my 20+ year career in aerospace software, the most memorable times were solving interesting problems, not days with no struggle just churning out code.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#149

Post by daxfohl »

BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #117
blake1 wrote: post #94

I think a reasonable summary of the study referenced is that: "AI creates the perception of productivity enhancements far beyond the reality." Even within the study, there were some participants who saw mild improvements to productivity, but most had a significant drop in productivity. This thread is now full of people telling their story about huge productivity gains they made with AI, but none of the comments conte…

I’ve noticed that you can definitely use them to help you learn something, but that your understanding tends to be more abstract and LLM-like that way. You definitely want to mix it up when learning too.

I've also had bad results with hallucinations there. I was trying to learn more about multi-dimensional qubit algorithms, and spent a whole day learning a bunch of stuff that was fascinating but plain wrong. I only figured out it was wrong at the end of the day when I tried to do a simulation and the results weren't consistent.

Early in the chat it substituted a `-1` for an `i`, and everything that followed was garbage. There were also some errors that I spotted real-time and got it to correct itself.

But yeah, IDK, it presents itself so confidently and "knows" so much and is so easy to use, that it's hard not to try to use as a reference / teacher. But it's also quite dangerous if you're not confirming things; it can send you down incorrect paths and waste a ton of time. I haven't decided whether the cost is worth the benefit or not.

Presumably they'll get better at this over time, so in the long run (probably no more than a year) it'll likely easily exceed the ROI breakeven point, but for now, you do have to remain vigilant.

Re: AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

#150

Post by alganet »

imiric wrote: post #133
alganet wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You couldn't be more wrong. Explanation missing. > If you've ever programmed, or worked with programmers, that is not an extraordinary claim at all. One step ahead of you. I already say this is engineered to encourage belief "I want to be good, big brain, and open source is good, I want to be good big brain". It's marketing. > A mental model of the software is what allows a programmer [yadda yadda] I'm not saying i…

I'm confused by what your point is, then. You want evidence of an abstraction that exists in the minds of experienced developers? That's like asking for evidence of humor or love. We accept these things as real because of shared experiences, not because of concrete evidence.

My point is that the paper has no point, the article on the paper is a stretch, and none of this is relevant in any way except creating chatter.

It's useless from the research perspective. But it is a cup-holder for marketing something.

I already laid this out very clearly in my first comment.

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