Comment by dspillett
1 day ago
> I personally wouldn't care if it was AI-generated or not, as long as the content fit the latter category.
The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review. Those that have been properly reviewed for correctness (tested to ensure actually working with no obvious undesirable side effects, tweaked where needed to be readable and understandable, fitting the other guidelines of the project, etc) will be indiscernible from human-only contributions, but there are a lot of people who make no such effort so the majority are not nearly this good.
> The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review.
That sounds like a contributor problem. Not an AI problem.
I still don't understand a "no AI" policy whose only purpose is to weed out bad PRs. You should be weeding out bad PR's regardless of their source. I don't see why treating a purely human-authored, but bad, piece of code should be treated any differently than an AI-authored one.
All they've accomplished is creaking an environment where good code can't be submitted unless the submitter lies.
A tool that encourages bad behavior at scale is a bad tool. Blaming individuals for a collective problem leads to no improvements.
It’s just a social thing. Two identically bad submissions have different social contexts.
> > The problem is that a lot of AI contributions are lazily produced without review.
That sounds like a contributor problem. Not an AI problem.
Ish. The tool is not doing the job fully, the contributor is not doing their task properly, checking for that, and fixing the issues.
> I still don't understand a "no AI" policy whose only purpose is to weed out bad PRs. You should be weeding out bad PR's regardless of their source.
Think of it like offering a job, and getting 100s of CVs. You don't have time to review each in detail, so you weed out a chunk of them using superficial cues that have been indicators of issues in the past. They are filtering the other contributions too, the no AI rule is just part initial triage to save a lot of time.
You have missed a key point in what I wrote: "Those that have been properly reviewed for correctness [before being submitted] will be indiscernible from human-only contributions". It is like a Turing test: if you take the effort to make your AI aided contributions good enough to be indiscernible from good human-only contributions then the no-AI filter won't bother you because the people or automations enforcing it won't be able to discern that your contribution was assisted.
> where good code can't be submitted unless the submitter lies.
No. Unless it looks like a good contribution looks.
The problem a lot of projects are facing right now is being inundated by bad PRs from people using AI without the effort to, or likely the knowledge of how to, properly understand and explain & document the change. People have a limited amount of time and if the filter saves a lot of time then maybe losing one or two good contributions due to the filter is worth it - better that than the project stalling under the weight of managing all the PRs.
This is one of the reasons, even pre-AI, some projects declared themselves "open source but not open contribution".
Saying you didn't use AI when you did, regardless of the end product, is lying. What definition of the word lie wouldn't cover that?
You should not be weeding out bad PRs regardless of their source! A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; bad PRs from a human author often mean things such as "I'd like to learn how this works and join your community". So it can be both satisfying and worthwhile to spend your effort on cleaning it up, even if it starts to take as much or even more effort than doing it yourself would have.
You're not the first person I've seen argue that authorship doesn't matter, so I don't want to blame you for it, but I really don't understand where that idea is coming from. To me it seems obviously wrong.
> You should not be weeding out bad PRs regardless of their source! A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author; bad PRs from a human author often mean things such as "I'd like to learn how this works and join your community".
I think the difference in perspective might come from the fact that to many people the code and features matters more than any community or the idea of participating in it. If it works, it works.
Or maybe they’re not even indifferent about the community, just upset at people throwing away working code.
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> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author;
Says who? How can you say I'm categorically wrong when your entire point rests upon an opinion?
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So you can run your project that way.
You don't get to dictate that other people run their projects that way.
> A pull request is a social artifact whose value and meaning is dependent on its author
...and the project to which it is submitted.
SpicyLemonZest is not the sole arbiter of what PRs mean and stand for.
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Probably because a human authored contribution, no matter how bad, can be trained to make it good and also improves the community.
> can be trained to make it good and also improves the community.
AI can be trained. Also, AI can create code that improves the community. It's replies like this that leave me even more confused.
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