7 ms·

For well-intended open source contributions using GenAI, my current rules of thumb are: * Prefer an issue over a PR (after iterating on the issue, either you o

For well-intended open source contributions using GenAI, my current rules of thumb are: * Prefer an issue over a PR (after iterating on the issue, either you or the maintainer can use it as a prompt) * Only open a PR if the review effort is less than the implementation effort. Whether the latter is feasible depends on the project, but in one of the projects I'm involved in it's fairly obvious: it's a package manager where the work is typically verifying dependencies and constraints; links to upstream commits etc are a great shortcut for reviewers.

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago
That's a pretty good framework! Prompts from issue text makes a lot of sense.
zozbot234 7mo ago
Unfortunately, LLMs generate useless word salad and nonsense even when working on issues text, you absolutely have to reword the writing from scratch otherwise it's just an annoyance and a complete waste of time. Even a good prompt doesn't help this all that much since it's just how the tool works under the hood: it doesn't have a goal of saying anything specific in the clearest possible way and inwardly rewording it until it does, it just writes stuff out that will hopefully end up seeming at least half-coherent. And their code is orders of magnitude worse than even their terrible English prose.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- hijnksforall956 7mo ago
  [flagged]
- emperorxanu 7mo ago
  I feel like every person stating things of this nature are literally not able to communicate effectively (though this is not a barrier anymore, you can get a dog to vibe code games with the right workflow, which to me seems like quite an intellectual thing to be able to do. Despite that, you will make this argument when trying to use copilot to do something, the worst model in the entire industry. If an AI can replace you at your job, you are not a very good programmer.
  - skydhash 7mo ago
    It does generate word salad (and usefulness depends on the person reading it). If both the writer and the reader share a common context, there's a lot that can be left out (the extreme version is military signal). An SOS over the radio says the same thing as "I'm in a dangerous situation, please help me if you can" but the former is way more efficient. LLMs tend to prefer the latter.
  - recursive 7mo ago
    Copilot isn't a model. Currently it's giving me a choice of 15 different models. By all evidence, AI is nowhere close to replacing me, but to hear other people tell it, it is weeks or maybe months away. I'll just wait and see.
    - emperorxanu 7mo ago
      Remember when copilot released? It was running some openai thing at the time, now you can choose from many models sure, but if you want a BMW, buy a BMW, don't buy a Nissan with badly strapped on BMW decals.
      - recursive 7mo ago
        No, I don't remember when it was released. I don't want a Nissan or a BMW. This was provided by my employer, and I've been asked to use it. To be honest, I don't even understand how your car analogy applies to any of this.
  - calvinmorrison 7mo ago
    > If an AI can replace you at your job, you are not a very good programmer. Me and millions of other local yokel programmers who work in regional cities at small shops, in house at businesses, etc are absolutely COOKED. No I cant leet code, no I didnt go to MIT, no I dont know how O(n) is calculated when reading a function. I can scrap together a lot of useful business stuff but no I am not a very good programmer.
    - 7mo ago
- GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
  I don’t think you’re being serious. Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written. Maybe you haven’t used a decent harness or a model released in the last year? It’s usually verbose, whereas I would try the simplest thing that could possibly work. However, it can knock out but would have taken me multiple weekends in a few minutes. The value proposition isn’t even close. It’s fine to write things by hand, in the same way that there’s nothing wrong with making your own clothing with a sewing machine when you could have bought the same thing for a small fraction of the value of your time. Or in the same fashion, spending a whole weekend, modeling and printing apart, you could’ve bought for a few dollars. I think we need to be honest about differentiating between the hobby value of writing programs versus the utility value of programs. Redox is a hobby project, and, while it’s very cool, I’m not sure it has a strong utility proposition. Demanding that code be handwritten makes sense to me for the maintainer because the whole thing is just for fun anyway. There isn’t an urgent need to RIIR Linux. I would not apply this approach to projects where solving the problem is more important than the joy of writing the solution.
  - notpachet 7mo ago
    > Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written Is that really true? Like, if you took the time to plan it carefully, dot every i, cross every t? The way I think of LLM's is as "median targeters" -- they reliably produce output at the centre of the bell curve from their training set. So if you're working in a language that you're unfamiliar with -- let's say I wanted to make a todo list in COBOL -- then LLM's can be a great help, because the median COBOL developer is better than I am. But for languages I'm actually versed in, the median is significantly worse than what I could produce. So when I hear people say things like "the clanker produces better programs than me", what I hear is that you're worse than the median developer at producing programs by hand.
    - torginus 7mo ago
      It can certainly be true for several reasons. Even in domains I'm familiar with, often making a change is costly in terms of coding effort. For example just recently I updated a component in one of our modules. The work was fairly rote (in this project we are not allowed to use LLMs). While it was absolutely necessary to do the update here, it was beneficial to do it everywhere else. I didn't do it in other places because I couldn't justify spending the effort. There are two sides to this - with LLMs, housekeeping becomes easy and effortless, but you often err on the side of verbosity because it costs nothing to write. But much less thought goes into every line of code, and I often am kinda amazed that how compact and rudimentary the (hand-written) logic is behind some of our stuff that I thought would be some sort of magnum opus. When in fact the opposite should be the case - every piece of functionality you don't need right now, will be trivial to generate in the future, so the principle of YAGNI applies even more.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  So many people and systems have some how merged into just a slathering of spam to everyones senses. It's no longer about truth statements, but just, is this attention-worthy, and most of the internet, it's social media and "people" are going into the no-bin.
jacquesm 7mo ago
My rules of thumb is much shorter: don't. The open source world has already been ripped off by AI the last thing they need is for AI to pollute the pedigree of the codebase.
- sillysaurusx 7mo ago
  Suppose almost all work in the future is done via LLMs, just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses. Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?
  - logicprog 7mo ago
    I say let people hold this stance. We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features or refinements we wanted, and use that fork for ourselves, but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. With AI, it's very easy to form a good architectural understanding of a large code base and figure out how to modify it in a sane, solid way that matches the existing patterns. And it's also very easy to resolve conflicts when you rebase your changes on top of whatever is new from upstream. So, maintaining a fork is really not that serious of and endeavor anymore. I'm actually maintaining a fork of Zed with several additional features (Claude Code style skills and slash commands, as well as a global agents.md file, instead of the annoying rules library system, which I removed, as well as the ability to choose models for sub-agents instead of always inheriting the model from the parent thread; and yes, master branch Zed has subagents! and another tool, jjdag) That seems like a win-win in a sense: let the agentic coders do their thing, and the artisanal coders do their thing, and we'll see who wins in the long run.
    - short_sells_poo 7mo ago
      > We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project And this is why eventually you are likely to run the artisanal coders who tend to do most of the true innovation out of the room. Because by and large, agentic coders don't contribute, they make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them and the code quality is questionable at best. Eventually, I'm sure LLM code quality will catch up, but the ease with which an existing codebase can be forked and slightly tuned, instead of contributing to the original, is a double edged sword.
olmo23 7mo ago
Another great take I found online: "Don't send us a PR, send us the prompt you used to generate the PR."
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  What I've been begging for every time someone wants me to read their AI "edited" wall of text.

ChrisMarshallNY 7mo ago

That's a pretty good framework! Prompts from issue text makes a lot of sense.

zozbot234 7mo ago

Unfortunately, LLMs generate useless word salad and nonsense even when working on issues text, you absolutely have to reword the writing from scratch otherwise it's just an annoyance and a complete waste of time. Even a good prompt doesn't help this all that much since it's just how the tool works under the hood: it doesn't have a goal of saying anything specific in the clearest possible way and inwardly rewording it until it does, it just writes stuff out that will hopefully end up seeming at least half-coherent. And their code is orders of magnitude worse than even their terrible English prose.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
[flagged]
hijnksforall956 7mo ago
[flagged]
emperorxanu 7mo ago
I feel like every person stating things of this nature are literally not able to communicate effectively (though this is not a barrier anymore, you can get a dog to vibe code games with the right workflow, which to me seems like quite an intellectual thing to be able to do. Despite that, you will make this argument when trying to use copilot to do something, the worst model in the entire industry. If an AI can replace you at your job, you are not a very good programmer.
- skydhash 7mo ago
  It does generate word salad (and usefulness depends on the person reading it). If both the writer and the reader share a common context, there's a lot that can be left out (the extreme version is military signal). An SOS over the radio says the same thing as "I'm in a dangerous situation, please help me if you can" but the former is way more efficient. LLMs tend to prefer the latter.
- recursive 7mo ago
  Copilot isn't a model. Currently it's giving me a choice of 15 different models. By all evidence, AI is nowhere close to replacing me, but to hear other people tell it, it is weeks or maybe months away. I'll just wait and see.
  - emperorxanu 7mo ago
    Remember when copilot released? It was running some openai thing at the time, now you can choose from many models sure, but if you want a BMW, buy a BMW, don't buy a Nissan with badly strapped on BMW decals.
    - recursive 7mo ago
      No, I don't remember when it was released. I don't want a Nissan or a BMW. This was provided by my employer, and I've been asked to use it. To be honest, I don't even understand how your car analogy applies to any of this.
- calvinmorrison 7mo ago
  > If an AI can replace you at your job, you are not a very good programmer. Me and millions of other local yokel programmers who work in regional cities at small shops, in house at businesses, etc are absolutely COOKED. No I cant leet code, no I didnt go to MIT, no I dont know how O(n) is calculated when reading a function. I can scrap together a lot of useful business stuff but no I am not a very good programmer.
  - 7mo ago
GorbachevyChase 7mo ago
I don’t think you’re being serious. Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written. Maybe you haven’t used a decent harness or a model released in the last year? It’s usually verbose, whereas I would try the simplest thing that could possibly work. However, it can knock out but would have taken me multiple weekends in a few minutes. The value proposition isn’t even close. It’s fine to write things by hand, in the same way that there’s nothing wrong with making your own clothing with a sewing machine when you could have bought the same thing for a small fraction of the value of your time. Or in the same fashion, spending a whole weekend, modeling and printing apart, you could’ve bought for a few dollars. I think we need to be honest about differentiating between the hobby value of writing programs versus the utility value of programs. Redox is a hobby project, and, while it’s very cool, I’m not sure it has a strong utility proposition. Demanding that code be handwritten makes sense to me for the maintainer because the whole thing is just for fun anyway. There isn’t an urgent need to RIIR Linux. I would not apply this approach to projects where solving the problem is more important than the joy of writing the solution.
- notpachet 7mo ago
  > Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written Is that really true? Like, if you took the time to plan it carefully, dot every i, cross every t? The way I think of LLM's is as "median targeters" -- they reliably produce output at the centre of the bell curve from their training set. So if you're working in a language that you're unfamiliar with -- let's say I wanted to make a todo list in COBOL -- then LLM's can be a great help, because the median COBOL developer is better than I am. But for languages I'm actually versed in, the median is significantly worse than what I could produce. So when I hear people say things like "the clanker produces better programs than me", what I hear is that you're worse than the median developer at producing programs by hand.
  - torginus 7mo ago
    It can certainly be true for several reasons. Even in domains I'm familiar with, often making a change is costly in terms of coding effort. For example just recently I updated a component in one of our modules. The work was fairly rote (in this project we are not allowed to use LLMs). While it was absolutely necessary to do the update here, it was beneficial to do it everywhere else. I didn't do it in other places because I couldn't justify spending the effort. There are two sides to this - with LLMs, housekeeping becomes easy and effortless, but you often err on the side of verbosity because it costs nothing to write. But much less thought goes into every line of code, and I often am kinda amazed that how compact and rudimentary the (hand-written) logic is behind some of our stuff that I thought would be some sort of magnum opus. When in fact the opposite should be the case - every piece of functionality you don't need right now, will be trivial to generate in the future, so the principle of YAGNI applies even more.
cyanydeez 7mo ago
So many people and systems have some how merged into just a slathering of spam to everyones senses. It's no longer about truth statements, but just, is this attention-worthy, and most of the internet, it's social media and "people" are going into the no-bin.

jacquesm 7mo ago

My rules of thumb is much shorter: don't. The open source world has already been ripped off by AI the last thing they need is for AI to pollute the pedigree of the codebase.

sillysaurusx 7mo ago
Suppose almost all work in the future is done via LLMs, just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses. Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?
- logicprog 7mo ago
  I say let people hold this stance. We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features or refinements we wanted, and use that fork for ourselves, but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. With AI, it's very easy to form a good architectural understanding of a large code base and figure out how to modify it in a sane, solid way that matches the existing patterns. And it's also very easy to resolve conflicts when you rebase your changes on top of whatever is new from upstream. So, maintaining a fork is really not that serious of and endeavor anymore. I'm actually maintaining a fork of Zed with several additional features (Claude Code style skills and slash commands, as well as a global agents.md file, instead of the annoying rules library system, which I removed, as well as the ability to choose models for sub-agents instead of always inheriting the model from the parent thread; and yes, master branch Zed has subagents! and another tool, jjdag) That seems like a win-win in a sense: let the agentic coders do their thing, and the artisanal coders do their thing, and we'll see who wins in the long run.
  - short_sells_poo 7mo ago
    > We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project And this is why eventually you are likely to run the artisanal coders who tend to do most of the true innovation out of the room. Because by and large, agentic coders don't contribute, they make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them and the code quality is questionable at best. Eventually, I'm sure LLM code quality will catch up, but the ease with which an existing codebase can be forked and slightly tuned, instead of contributing to the original, is a double edged sword.

olmo23 7mo ago

Another great take I found online: "Don't send us a PR, send us the prompt you used to generate the PR."

duskdozer 7mo ago
What I've been begging for every time someone wants me to read their AI "edited" wall of text.