Comment by eestrada
6 months ago
And that increase in LLM usage has resulted in an enormous increase of code duplications and code churn in said open source projects. Any benefit from new features implemented by LLMs is being offset by the tech debt caused by duplication and the maintenance burden of constantly reverting bad code (i.e. churn).
Yes. The internet has also created a ton of email spam but I wouldn't say "we've never seen a single valid contribution to our project that had internet help". Many millions of developers are using AI. Sometimes in a good way. When that results in a good MR, they likely don't even mention they used Google, or stackoverflow, or AI, they just submit.
If they never got a valid contribution to their project through the internet, yes, they would say exactly that.
They don't say it because the internet provides actual value.
I mean, I certainly would say “I’ve never seen a single commercial email that was valid and useful to me as a customer”, and this is entirely because of spam. Any unsolicited email with commercial intent goes instantly, reflexively, to the trash (plus whatever my spam filters prevent me from ever seeing to begin with). This presumably has cost me the opportunity to purchase things I genuinely would’ve found useful, and reduced the effectiveness of well-meaning people doing cold outreach for actually-good products, but spam has left me no choice.
In that sense, it has destroyed actual value as the noise crowds out the signal. AI could easily do the same to, like, all Internet communication.