Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI has a deep understanding of how this code works

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–329 of 329 posts

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

#321

Post by suspended_state »

joelreymont wrote: post #247
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been finding that the documentation the AI writes isn’t so much for humans, but for the AI when it later goes to work on the code again…well, to say AI benefits from good PRs as much as people do. You could ask the AI to break up the PR next time if possible, it will probably do so much more easily than you could do it manually.

You can ask AI to write documentation for humans. Also, I'll try to break up the PR sometime but I'm already running Claude using two $200/mo accounts, in addition to another $200/mo ChatGPT, and still running into time limits. I want to finish my compilers first.

What forces you to publish this work as a PR, or as many PRs? You could have simply kept that for yourself, since you admitted in the PR discussion that you found it useful. Many people seem to think you haven't properly tested it, so that would also be a good way of testing it before publishing it, wouldn't it?

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

#322

Post by liamness »

silverlake wrote: post #196
pluc wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair answer. How do you stop people from doing it though? How do you stop it from becoming every lazy person's first reflex instead of every smart person's third?

I don’t know. But at least you’ve identified the real problem: lazy people generating trash code. AI isn’t bad, people are.

I suppose the issue is that it's a multiplier for bad actors. It has become so much easier to generate plausible-looking code (or any number of things that would've previously required a knowledgeable human to make something that at least passes the sniff test, let's say legal documents as another example) and just overwhelm the limited bandwidth of good actors.

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

#323

Post by sky2224 »

tetris11 wrote: post #112
oliwarner wrote: post #37

There are LLMs with more self-awareness than this guy. Repeatedly using AI to answer questions about the legitimacy of commits from an AI, to people who are clearly skeptical is breathtakingly dense. At least they're open about it. I did love the ~"I'll help maintain this trash mountain, but I'll need paying". Classy.

I don't think he's dense, I think he's just a high level troll

I really hope he is trolling, but there are genuinely people that are becoming embodiments of AI model output. There's a professor at my university that is notorious for responding to emails with ChatGPT (without reading its output first) or generating assignments with ChatGPT (also without reading its output first).

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

#324

Post by globnomulous »

joelreymont wrote: post #297
globnomulous wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth asking yourself something: people have written substantial responses to your questions in this thread. Here you answered four paragraphs with two fucking lines referencing and repeating what you've already said. How do you expect someone to react? How can you expect anybody to take seriously anything you say, write, or commit when you obviously have so little ability, or willingness, to engage with others…

Remind me please, when did I sign up to meet your expectations?

My expectations are those of any reasonable, sensible person who has a modicum of software-development experience and any manners at all.

Incidentally, my expectations are also exactly the same as every other person who has commented on your PRs and contributions to discussion.

My expectations, lastly, are those of someone who evaluates job candidates and casts votes for and against hiring for my team.

Your website says repeatedly that you're open to work. Not only would I not hire you; I would do everything in my power to keep you out of my company and off my team. I'd wager good money that many others in this thread would, too.

If you have a problem with my expectations, you have a problem not with my expectations but with your own poor social skills and lack of professional judgment.

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

#325

Post by agumonkey »

mrguyorama wrote: post #194
mnming wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's the best outcome? The contributor doesn't seem to have a bad intention, could his energy be redirected more constructively? E.g. encouraging him to split up the PR, make a design proposal etc.

The constructive outcome is the spammer fucks off or learns how to actually code. Lots of people all over the world learn some basics of music in school, or even learn how to play the recorder, but if you mail The Rolling Stones with your "suggestions" you aren't going to get a response and certainly not a response that encourages you to keep spamming them with "better" recommendations. The maintainers of an open sou…

I believe there's a flood of people waiting to be able to "contribute" by publishing a lot of LLM generated code. My question is what if they manage to grab resources from the original devs ?

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

#327

Post by [deleted] »

joelreymont wrote: post #253
whilenot-dev wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly a way to avoid questions... I mean sure, but everybody else is talking about how your humongous PRs are a burden to review.

Which is something I agreed with and apologized for, and admitted was somewhat of a PR stunt. Now, what's your question?

[deleted]

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

#328

Post by zeratax »

menaerus wrote: post #278
biorach wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, please then find those for now imaginative issues and drill through them? No, that is a massive amount of work which will only establish what we already know with a high degree of certainty due to the red flags already mentored - that this code is too flawed to begin with. This is not political, this is looking out for warming signs in order to avoid wasting time. At this stage the burden of proof is on the su…

Too flawed? Did you miss that tiny detail that MR fixes a long time issue for ocaml? This is exactly political because there's no legal or technical issue. Only fluff by scared developers. I have no stakes in this but I'm sincerely surprised by the amount of unreasonable and unsubstantiated claims and explanations given in this thread and MR

I don't get why you do not understand why nobody wants to waste time on a MR where the author didn't even themselves have any interest on looking over it even once. https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369/files#diff-bc37d03... also all the unused functions...

did it fix a long time issue? maybe, but 9 tests for 13k lines doesnt give much confidence in that

and even if it worked perfectly, who will maintain this?

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

#329

Post by thwarted »

emerongi wrote: post #122
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #121

When I read this discussion on GitHub, a quite different thought than what the comments here on HN discuss comes to my mind: Why is the person who made this AI-generated pull request (joelreymont) so insistent that his PR gets merged? If I created some pull request and this pull request got rejected for reasons that I consider to be unjust, I would say: "OK, I previously loved this project and thus did such an effort…

Central to it being that you consider it unjust. The other option is to take into consideration the perspective of the maintainers, find their feedback to be just and then decide whether you want to contribute in the manner that they expect or you're not ready to do that kind of work. You don't have to stop loving a project just because you're not ready to put in the work that the maintainers expect you to put in. Wh…

> When I open a PR without discussing it at all beforehand with anyone, I expect the default to be that it gets rejected.

TNG S2E8, "A Matter Of Honor" is about this topic. The submitter introduced risk on the maintainers (the risk being here largely eating up the maintainers time needlessly) by working in isolation and only presenting the finished work without any feedback or awareness from the rest of the participants.

Post reply on HN