Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is asking a human to write code, if you think about it…
Dice don’t have lived experience
How does that matter for a coding task?
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
361–370 of 477 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”. The original authors have no idea what their agents are writing, these are mostly badly quality models (people doing this are not only cutting corners, but also using the less amount of money/tokens to do so). If the agent creates 200, 400 or whate…
> Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”.
I've heard this in a lot of places, don't have a way to verify this in action. Do you have any citation or just gut feel (still valid but less useful for me).
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#363Is anyone tracking how the different distros are coming down on the question? I was curious how Fedora is moving on this question, but I don't know where to look. And if one wants to hop distro either towards or away from AI, it would be nice to have a place to see the relative adoption. Linux distros are the perfect place to have a wide marketplace of options to suit every person, from completely anti-AI to complete…
LWN tends to be the best bet for these things, but you have to follow their reporting long term, or at least look for specific things you're interested in.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. And compilers made every software engineer worse at writing Assembly and better at skills higher up the stack. This will be no different.
I am pretty tired of this analogy because it does not hold up to scrutiny. The purpose of a programming language is to describe a logical routine in deterministic nonambiguous language. A program is a set of nonambiguous instructions. Heightening levels of abstraction traditionally did not result in less understanding of the program's high-level routine. An example: 'read input from CLI, do this specific transform on…
> The prompts are not analogous to a higher level of abstraction in this way; they are analogous to JIRA tickets.
Your first prompt could be instructions to guide creation of a spec, which leads to a test suite you personally validate, which leads to code to pass those tests in a deterministic way. Then it is your job to review and QA it until it is quality enough to submit to a peer for code review.
There are many many ways to use these tools and carefully monitor and quality control what they write like a good engineering lead might, even if they do not type much code themselves at work. The job of the most senior engineers often ends up being heavily biased towards reviewing code all day and maintaining quality control. This is already how things were before AI.
Torvalds reviews a -lot- of code and writes very little now.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but…
> That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.
> Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue.
It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation.
That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. And compilers made every software engineer worse at writing Assembly and better at skills higher up the stack. This will be no different.
No. Nada. Wrong. With compilers, you still had to think in depth about the code, write it, develop and maintain muscle memory, understand what you were doing. Many are not doing any of that, and coding is a skill you need to constantly practice.
> Many are not doing any of that
I do.
Most people sucked at programming before AI and they still suck after it. Who cares what "many" do. We as individuals can demand higher bars from ourselves and our teams. AI can increase that bar or lower it depending on how it is used.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://stagex.tools Always happy to train up new packagers and maintainers.
This is the second time I've seen this project mentioned on HN. Their white paper is very interesting and aligns closely with my interests but I don't see much on the main site about how to get involved. Are they using their Matrix server to filter out drive-by/low-effort contributions?
I am the founder of the project. We accept every contribution that solves a problem, even drive-bys. Though they may often sit for a bit as we often merge in batches. If there is something missing, make a PR by all means.
Ask any questions on matrix.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#368New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
This is the way it should've always been. I don't care what tool you use, but you'd better be ready to stand by and explain the results if necessary.
What happens when the people "responsible" for the code just walk away?
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use agents to build exactly what I want like I am pair programming with a jr engineer, and review every line of final output before I make a PR. I would have zero tolerance if anyone that did anything less in my orgs. Owning and understanding the code you submit is the one job that matters most now.
I feel that in a few years, or even less time, we'll see a whole bunch of companies implode, whist others remain fine.
We see it every day in the news with hacks that were, in every single case, completely preventable. That is had any competent security engineers been involved, with leadership willing to fund the cycles to do it right.
"But we passed SOC2 and that is all our customers care about" they say, right up until they are in the headlines for a data breach directly resulting from them putting all customer data in plain text internet facing databases the whole team can access from their workstations. What did they think was going to happen? Survivors bias is a hell of a drug.