Comment by chii
4 days ago
> doesn’t have a brain behind it that can be accountable for the code later.
the submitter could also bail just as easily. Having an AI make the PR or not makes zero difference for this accountability. Ultimately, the maintainer pressing the merge button is accountable.
What else would your value be as a maintainer, if all you did was a surface look, press merge, then find blame later when shit hits the fan?
Even if you couldn't contact the submitter again, you could find all their past submissions to review, or expect that their more recent submissions have improved from experience, or block them from all future contributions. AI stops all that - every sumbmission is disconnected from the others, there is no single learning person with an arrow of time and a chronological life experience behind the submissions, but there also isn't a single person to block if they never change.
> "if all you did was a surface look, press merge"
As per the old joke, surface look: $5
Years of experience learning what to look for: $995
In the past a block of code that has jarring flaws says the author was likely low skill, or careless. People can fake competence but it's a low return because ugly inconsistent code with no comments and no error checking which (barely) works will keep someone employed and paid, more than pretty code which doesn't work at all will. Writing pretty code which also works implies knowledge, care, eye for detail, effort, tooling, which implies the author will have put some of that into solving the problem. AI can fake all the quick indicators of competence without the competence, meaning the surface look is less useful.
> "What else would your value be as a maintainer"
Is the maintainer paid or unpaid? If they are paid, the value is to make sure the software works and meets the business standards. If they are unpaid, what is the discussion about "value" at all? Maybe to keep it from becoming wildly broken, or maybe yes to literally be the person who presses merge because somebody has to.
If I had a magic wand I would wish for 2 parallel open source communities diverging from today.
One path continues on the track it has always been on, human written and maintained.
The other is fully on the AI track. Massive PRs with reviewers rubber stamping them.
I’d love to see which track comes out ahead.
Edit: in fact, perhaps there are open source projects already fully embracing AI authored contributions?
I agree. It would also work out like a long term supervised learning process though. Humans showing how it's really done, and AI companies taking that as a gold standard for training and development of AI.
I'm not so sure. There's already decades of data available for the existing process.
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How would you define “ahead”?
Able to make changes preserving correctness over time
Vibecoding reminds me sharply of the height of the Rails hype, products quickly rushed to market off the backs of a slurry of gems and autoimports inserted on generated code, the original authors dipping and teams of maintainers then screeching into a halt
Here the bots will pigheadedly heap one 9000 lines PR onto another, shredding the code base to bits but making it look like a lot of work in the process
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I don’t accept giant contributions from people who don’t have track records of sticking around. It’s faster for me to write something myself than review huge quantities of outsider code as a zero-trust artifact.