Comment by creesch
5 days ago
You said a bunch without saying much. It also doesn't track. If the majority of AI work is supposed to be done by agents, capable of doing the entire process including making PRs. Then, why isn't there an explosion in such PRs on a large amount of open source projects? Even more so, why am I not seeing these PRs on AI related open source projects? If I need to target it even more directly, why am I a not seeing hints of this being applied on code agent repositories?
Call me naive, but you'd think that these specifically want to demonstrate how well their product works. Making an effort to distinguish PRs that are largely the work of their own agents. Yet, I am not seeing that.
I have no doubt that people find use in some aspects of these tools. Though I personally more subscribe to the interactive rubber ducky usage of them. But 90% from where I am standing seems like a very, very far way off.
From what I've heard anecdotally, there have been a bunch more PRs and bug reports generated by AI. But I've also heard they're generally trash and just wasting the project maintainers' time.
More than likely loads of the PR’s you see _are_ mostly AI work, you just don’t know that because the developers cleaned it up and just post it as their own. Most PR’s where I work are like this, from what I see from speaking to the developers.
We must be moving in different circles as I am not seeing the same. Even if I went along with that reasoning it ignores the lack of highly visible work on projects that would want to advertise the effectiveness of their own tooling.
As I already said, I see a distinct lack of such labeled activity on open source ai code tools.
You'd think that those projects creating agentic tooling would want to show how effective they are. In fact, I would expect the people behind such projects to be all over threads like this pointing to tangible PRs, commits and other tasks these agents can apparently do so well.
Yet, all I am getting as pushback is vague handwaving "trust me, I am seeing it" claims. Even the blog post itself is nothing but that.
> Then, why isn't there an explosion in such PRs on a large amount of open source projects?
People don't like working for free, either by themselves or with an AI agent.
1) Open source projects see plenty of commits where people happily work for "free".
2) Did you stop reading after that sentence? Because there is a whole lot more that follows, specifically:
> If I need to target it even more directly, why am I a not seeing hints of this being applied on code agent repositories? Call me naive, but you'd think that these specifically want to demonstrate how well their product works. Making an effort to distinguish PRs that are largely the work of their own agents. Yet, I am not seeing that.
The entire open source community disagrees.