81–90 of 129 posts
Do what I do:
1. Close PR
2. Block user if the PR is extremely low effort
The last such PR I received used ‘’ instead of '' to define strings. The entirety of CI failed. Straight to jail.
I recently had a quandary at work. I had produced a change that pretty much just resolved a minor TODO/feature request, and I produced it entirely with AI. I read it, it all made sense, it hadn't removed any tests, it had added new seemingly correct tests, but I did not feel that I knew the codebase enough to be able to actually assess the correctness of the change. I want to do good engineering, not produce slop, bu…
I feel this so much. In my opinion, all of the debate around accepting AI generated stuff can be boiled down to one attribute, which is effort. Personally, I really dislike AI generated videos and blogs for example, and will actively avoid them because I believe I "deserve more effort".
similarly for AI generated PRs, I roll my eyes when I see an AI PR, and I'm quicker to dismiss it as opposed to a human written one. In my opinion, if the maintainers cannot hold the human accountable for the AI generated code, then it shouldn't be accepted. This involves asking questions, and expecting the human to respond.
I don't know if we should gatekeep based on effort or not. Obviously the downside is, you reduce the "features shipped" metric a lot if you expect the human to put in the same amount of effort, or a comparable amount of effort as they would've done otherwise. Despite the downside, I'm still pro gatekeeping based on effort (It doesn't help that most of the people trying to convince otherwise are using the very same low effort methods that they're trying to convince us to accept). But, as in most things, one must keep an open mind.
proof of work could make a comeback
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see plenty of well meaning people use ChatGPT and think they’re being helpful. You’re better off with patience and polite explanation than assuming they’re all cynical/selfish assholes trying to cut corners. Some people just get excited and don’t really think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but you should at least try to explain it to them once. Never know when you might educate someone.
I've seen a variety of approaches used (I'm not usually the one doing the confronting) but I still haven't seen any shame, etc. Which is weird, because it's not like it's one monolithic group? But it's still what I've seen. It might be that people have their change of heart more privately, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see plenty of well meaning people use ChatGPT and think they’re being helpful. You’re better off with patience and polite explanation than assuming they’re all cynical/selfish assholes trying to cut corners. Some people just get excited and don’t really think about what they’re doing. It doesn’t excuse the behavior, but you should at least try to explain it to them once. Never know when you might educate someone.
I think you can both be right. Someone posting their first slop PR deserves a different response than the spammers. Unless they lie about it.
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Thanks, doing my best. It's one of the reasons I want to get more of my AI-skeptical colleagues onboard with AI development. They're skeptical for good reasons, but right now so much progress is being driven by those who lack skills, taste, or experience. I understand those with lots of experience being skeptical at the claims, I like to think I am too, but I think there's clearly something here, and I want more peop…
Being a skeptic doesn't make one an irrational hater (surely such people exist and might be noisy and taint all skeptics as such) I am learning how to make good use of agent assisted engineering and while I'm positively impressed with many things they can do, I'm definitely skeptical about various aspects of the process: 1. Quality of the results 2. Maintainability 3. Overall saved time There are still open problems…
At some point of time the code starts to be "not yours", you don't recognise it anymore. You don't have the connection to it. It's like your everyday working in another company...
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I would like to state for the record that the strategy to swap em-dashes into double-hyphens between the generation and posting step is probably not enough transformation to disguise this behaviour. Whoever is running this clawdbot or whatever it is should really be putting that information on the account page.
The answer to this implies that the requirement to be welcoming only applies to humans, but even in this hostile and sarcastic document, it doesn't go far enough.
Open source maintainers can be cruel, malicious, arbitrary, whatever they want. They own the project, there is no job requirements, you have no recourse. Suck it up, fork the thing, or leave.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I did not feel that I knew the codebase enough to be able to actually assess the correctness of the change. The good engineering approach is to verify that the change is correct. More prompts for the AI does nothing, instead play with the code, try to break it, write more tests yourself.
I exhausted my ability to do this (without AI). It was a codebase I don't know, in a language I don't know, solving a problem that I have a very limited viewpoint of. These are all reasons why pre-AI I'd never have bothered to even try this, it wouldn't be worth my time. If you think this is therefore "bad engineering", maybe that's true! As I said, I ended up discarding the change because I wasn't happy with it.
And that's the critical point! I think it's fine to send the diff in; and clearly mark it as AI / vibe-coded. (Along with your prompts.)