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A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI
by hliyan 1mo ago
A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.
- NuclearPM 1mo agoTerminates???
- smallerfish 1mo agoWe need sufficiently severe penalties for vibe coding. First time out we break your legs, but if you come back with another vibed patch its around the back of the barn for you.
- m4rtink 1mo agoNuke it from orbit.
- qsera 1mo agoWhat stops them from submitting PRs from another account?
- kaffekaka 1mo agoWhat stopped them before?
- qsera 1mo agoBefore they were not able to spam large PRs
- Supermancho 1mo agoWhy not? I'm pretty sure a developer could spam large PRs before and regardless of AI involvement is allowed or not.
- inigyou 1mo agoHow would you generate enough large PRs to count as "spam"? You could add gibberish or delete random lines of code but it was obviously not plausible looking.
- JohnHaugeland 1mo agothis article is about the flood of junior developers who are producing enormous prs they’ve never seen full of untrustworthy code that a human hasn’t evaluated arguing that it’s possible to make them by hand isn’t just missing the point; it’s missing the entire discussion
- Supermancho 1mo ago> arguing that it’s possible to make them by hand isn’t just missing the point; it’s missing the entire discussion >> Before they were not able to spam large PRs I was replying to someone insinuating that there was something I might have missed. Interjecting about the topical article, is a derail of this thread for some reason that is personal to you. Good luck with whatever.
- zeendo 1mo agoObviously they could have. Obviously it's much easier now.
- Mawr 1mo agoYou can cut down a tree regardless if you use a knife or a chainsaw. You can get to work each day regardless if you walk or drive.
- cdata 1mo agoI can't speak for all, but many mature open source communities have explicit or ad-hoc reputation schemes that are used to triage contributions. A fresh account means starting over with zero reputation, which in turn means your contributions wait at the back of the line.
- MithrilTuxedo 1mo agoReputation, or lack thereof. Proof of authority, essentially.
- jayofdoom 1mo agoNothing. And that's the problem -- the issue isn't "should a contributor be able to use AI" it's quickly becoming "is this entire contributor an AI agent". Every actual-human who gets a bad first experience hurts the project. The contributors having to be suspicious of new people hurts the project. The whole thing just sucks, and I don't know how to fix it. I use claude-code, but the AI ecosystem and some of the autonomous tooling coming out of it -- which some people "helpfully" use irresponsibly and point at OSS projects they aren't personally invested in -- enables a LARGE amount of abusive behavior towards open source projects. This is even before we get into how many infrastructural resources crawlers eat up. Me, and most other OSS contributors, signed up to be a mentor, to create software, to work together ... not to be the equivalent of a reddit moderator banning AI agents left and right.
- digitaltrees 1mo agoWhat is a good project for a human to get human mentorship? Asking for a friend :)
- lrvick 1mo agohttps://stagex.tools https://stagex.tools Always happy to train up new packagers and maintainers.
- zenoprax 1mo agoThis is the second time I've seen this project mentioned on HN. Their white paper is very interesting and aligns closely with my interests but I don't see much on the main site about how to get involved. Are they using their Matrix server to filter out drive-by/low-effort contributions?
- lrvick 1mo agoI am the founder of the project. We accept every contribution that solves a problem, even drive-bys. Though they may often sit for a bit as we often merge in batches. If there is something missing, make a PR by all means. Ask any questions on matrix.
- cineticdaffodil 1mo ago[dead]
- 2Gkashmiri 1mo agoIn anonymous systems, where we don't use real names, your "handle" has an "age". That becomes your most prized possession. I have a reddit account thats over 12 years old. I have left the posts/comments open. That means, my "post history" becomes a way to advertise my skills. I can reference comments from a year ago or 6 months ago about a certain topic to show how I handled something. That does have an effect on people. As opposed to a random 1 day old account. No one takes them seriously, I guess the same is here as well
- ipaddr 1mo agoNo one takes a 12 year old Reddit account seriously either. It's not a platform you can take anyone seriously. The biggest trolls have 12 year old accounts.
- clort 1mo agothe age is not the measure of quality. the GP said they left the posts/comments open. anybody can read that and check if they are or not a serious contributor
- inigyou 1mo agoBe extremely careful with that account then, because they ban accounts for the most minor things now. Stuff like posting evidence disproving something the moderator agrees with. And they ban your account from the whole site, not just from that subreddit any more. Automated algorithms also ban accounts for reasons that don't make any sense. So if you're using your account to advertise yourself and look for jobs, I'd use it only for that. All off-topic discussion should be on a different account with a different physical device and IP address (reddit checks these things and cross-bans) that have never interacted with your main account.
- tremon 1mo agoWhat part of [0] or [1] makes you think that it is easy to have multiple accounts? [0] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer#Becoming_a_Debian_Maintainer https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer#Becoming_a_Debian_M... [1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper/JoinTheProject/NewMemberCheckList https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper/JoinTheProject/NewMe...
- kikoreis 1mo agoWell. This is Debian, known for how strict they are about vetting developers. I just remembered Sladen refusing to key sign because my passport circa 2005 didn't have a machine readable slug in it. https://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint https://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint
- smashed 1mo agoDebian is notoriously very strict on accepting maintainers and they are not anonymous.
- ahartmetz 1mo agoPresumably they are trying to farm karma / reputation, which (I think, mostly) doesn't work if they need to switch accounts all the time.
- lokar 1mo agoTo me, that touches on the central issue. I think most people support the “I don’t care about the tool, only the outcome “ But, we have long had a stable social system for collaboration, and in particular dealing with low quality contributions. Mostly (or at least ideally) it involves taking some time to look at the contribution and provide some feedback. The time invested is not worth it on a single exchange basis, but it’s a repeat game, so you are investing in the future. LLMs, and people willing to just spam crap they don’t really understand blows that all up.
- hypfer 1mo agoNah, that was already blown up way before LLMs existed. Foss wasn't exactly not miserable before 2022. The dysfunction just got amplified so that we cannot fix it anymore by just throwing more human resources at the problem.
- lokar 1mo agoI tried to nod a bit to the inconsistency. Some projects clearly lost patience with imperfect contributions long ago. But many were still pretty supportive. This dynamic also plays out in many companies. I see a lot of posts from mid to sr engineers frustrated with plummeting code quality and unsure how to manage the reviews. They are increasingly pulling away from the idea that they should mentor people to do better.
- Retric 1mo agoThe correct response to irresponsible AI use in the workplace is maintaining standards and rejecting poor quality. Performance improvement plans as a fair warning followed by firing people works for incompetence or laziness, AI doesn’t change anything. I’ll admit I’ve seen a spike in negative performance reviews but this is the new normal people will adapt.
- blackqueeriroh 1mo agoIt’s almost like late-stage capitalism isn’t built to support mentorship and education and enabling human improvement!
- Keyframe 1mo agoyeah, that's fair. Problem so far has been when poor developers send massive volume of slop for review. Takes time and effort to review or at least glance and test it, especially if developer hasn't bothered.
- notatoad 1mo agothat seems like two separate problems. too many patches from unknown and untrusted contributors is a triage problem - telling a known and trusted contributor they can't use AI to help work on something just because other people are sending slop for review is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- catlifeonmars 1mo agoMore like throwing the bathwater out with the baby.
- bfgeek 1mo agoThe issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review. A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner. The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch author will just copy paste from an LLM, so the reviewer is essentially just coding with an LLM with more steps. Prior to LLMs reviewing code was a mentorship experience, the patch author would likely learn a bunch afterwards. Now less so. As a result a lot of projects are closing to external contributors. I'm not sure what the answer is, LLM are great at speeding up coding/understanding/etc, but the valuable/expensive piece of work has shifted to reviewing.
- Loughla 1mo agoThe question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
- 1718627440 1mo agoIt's a well-known trope, that it's harder to read code than to write it, and review is more complicated than to read it, so I do not understand what you want to imply?
- blackqueeriroh 1mo agoMaybe it is for people who have written code all their lives, but as someone who started with reading code and has read far more code than I’ve ever written, reading code is WAY easier for me.
- sarchertech 1mo agoIf you have little experience writing code, do you know that you actually understand what you’re reading though? For example could you reproduce the code you read immediately after writing it? It’s very easy to “read code” if you’re just reading for surface level understanding.
- ThereAreOther1s 1mo ago[flagged]