Comment by mnming
2 days ago
I wonder if it's the best outcome? The contributor doesn't seem to have a bad intention, could his energy be redirected more constructively? E.g. encouraging him to split up the PR, make a design proposal etc.
2 days ago
I wonder if it's the best outcome? The contributor doesn't seem to have a bad intention, could his energy be redirected more constructively? E.g. encouraging him to split up the PR, make a design proposal etc.
I think it's for me to redo the PR and break it into smaller pieces.
There's value in the PR in that it does not require you to install the separate OxCaml fork from Jane St which doesn't work with all the OCaml packages. Or wasn't when I tried it back in August.
A big part of software engineering is maintenance not just adding features. When you drop a 22,000 line PR without any discussion or previous work on the project, people will (probably correctly) assume that you aren't there for the long haul to take care of it.
On top of that, there's a huge asymmetry when people use AI to spit out huge PRs and expect thorough review from project maintainers. Of course they're not going to review your PR!
AI actually has the advantage here in my experience. Yes, you can do AI wrong and tell it to just change code, write no documentation, provide no notes on the changes, and not write any tests. But you would be dumb to do it that way.
As it stands now you can set AI to do actual software development with documentation, notes, reasoning for changes, tests, and so on. It isn’t exactly easy to do this, a novice to AI and software development definitely wouldn’t set it up this way, but it isn’t what the tech can really do. There is a lot to be done in using different AI to write tests and code (well, don’t let an AI who can see the code to write the tests, or you could just get a bunch of change detector crap), but in general it mostly turns out that all the things SWEs can do to improve their work works on AI also.
6 replies →
Is (or should that be) the goal, responsibility, or even purview of the maintainers of this project?
The constructive outcome is the spammer fucks off or learns how to actually code.
Lots of people all over the world learn some basics of music in school, or even learn how to play the recorder, but if you mail The Rolling Stones with your "suggestions" you aren't going to get a response and certainly not a response that encourages you to keep spamming them with "better" recommendations.
The maintainers of an open source project are perfectly capable of coercing an LLM into generating code. You add nothing by submitting AI created code that you don't even understand. The very thought that you are somehow contributing is the highest level of hubris and ego.
No, there's is nothing you can submit without understanding code that they could not equally generate or write, and no, you do not have an idea so immensely valuable that it's necessary to vibe code a version.
If you CAN understand code, write and submit a PR the standard way. If you cannot understand code, you are wasting everyone's time because you are selfish.
This goes for LLM generated code in companies as well. If it's not clear and obvious from the PR that you went through and engineered the code generated, fixed up the wrong assumptions, cleaned up places where the LLM wasn't given tight enough specs, etc, then your code is not worth spending any time reviewing.
I can prompt Claude myself thank you.
The primary problem with these tools is that assholes are so utterly convinced that their time is infinitely valuable and my time is valueless because these people have stupidly overinflated egos. They believe their trash, unworkable, unmaintainable slop puked out by an LLM is so damn valuable, because that's just how smart they are.
Imagine going up to the Civil Engineer building a bridge and handing them a printout from ChatGPT when you asked it "How do you build a bridge" and feeling smug and successful. That's what this is.
> The maintainers of an open source project are perfectly capable of coercing an LLM into generating code. You add nothing by submitting AI created code that you don't even understand. The very thought that you are somehow contributing is the highest level of hubris and ego.
Thank you! I was struggling to articulate why AI generated PRs annoy me so much and this is exactly it.