>Beats me. AI decided to do so and I didn't question it.

Haha that's comedy gold, and honestly a good interview screening situation - you'd instantly pass on the candidate!

He told me "I spent n days to architect the solution"

He shows me claude generated system design .. and then i say ok, I went to review the code. 1hr later i asked why did you repeat the code all over at the end. Dude replies "junk the entire PR it's AI generated"

Terminal AI users are genuinely *slow* individuals.

These people are functionally illiterate; they are not able to extract information by reading a bit of text in the same ways that you or I are.

These people are very, very *gullible*.

Adding Ai generated comments are IMHO some of the most rude uses of Ai.

A slightly sarcastic (or perhaps not so slightly..) mental model of legal conflict resolution is that much of it boils down to throwing lots of content at the opposing side, claiming that it shows that the represented side is right and creating a task for the opposite side to find a flaw in that material. I believe that this game of quantity fits through the whole range from "I'll have my lawyer repeat my argument in a letter featuring their letter head" all the way to paper-tsunamis like the Google-Oracle trial.

Now give both sides access to LLM... I wonder if the legal profession will eventually settle on some format of in-person offline resolution with strict limits to recess and/or limits to word count for both documents and notes, because otherwise conflicts fail to get settled in anyone's lifetime (or won by whoever does not run out of tokens first - come thinking of it, the technogarchs would love this, so I guess this is exactly what will happen barring a revolution)

I am referring to the act of merely pasting the output of a model as a comment.

Have the decency to understand what the LLM is writing and write your own message.

> Here's the AI-written copyright analysis...

I'm not going to spend more time reading than what you have spent writing!

The guy just posted a huge ai slop pr, do you think that's the correct place for "very interesting field observations about legal"?

What else could it refer to than you can't back up copyright ownership questions with "ai said so"??

Pretty soon we'll have AIs talking to each other.

[0] https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml/pull/14369#issuecomment-35565...

When contributions are small and tightly human-controlled it's also less likely that potential legal concerns will arise, since it means that any genuinely creative decisions about the code are a lot easier to trace.

(In this case, the AI seems to have ripped off a lot of the work from OxCaml with inconsistent attribution. OxCaml is actually license compatible (and friendly) with Ocaml but obviously any merge of that work should happen on its own terms, not as a side effect of ripoff slop code.)

It is not just patience, he is ready to spent a shitload of time explaining basics to strangers. Such an answer would take, I believe would take a very least half an hour to compose, not counting the time you need to read all the relevant discussion to get the context. But yeah, it would be great to have more people like him around.

People aren't prompting LLMs to write good, maintainable code though. They're assuming that because we've made a collective assumption that good, maintainable code is the goal then it must also be the goal of an LLM too. That isn't true. LLMs don't care about our goals. They are solving problems in a probabilistic way based on the content of their training data, context, and prompting. Presumably if you take all the code in the world and throw it in mixer what comes out is not our Platonic ideal of the best possible code, but actually something more like a Lovecraftian horror that happens to get the right output. This is quite positive because it shows that with better prompting+context+training we might actually be able to guide an LLM to know what good and bad looks like (based on the fact that we know). The future is looking great.

However, we also need to be aware that 'good, maintainable code' is often not what we think is the ideal output of a developer. In businesses everywhere the goal is 'whatever works right now, and to hell with maintainability'. When a business is 3 months from failing spending time to write good code that you can continue to work on in 10 years feels like wasted effort. So really, for most code that's written, it doesn't actually need to be good or maintainable. It just needs to work. And if you look at the code that a lot of businesses are running, it doesn't. LLMs are a step forward in just getting stuff to work in the first place.

If we can move to 'bug free' using AI, at the unit level, then AI is useful. Above individual units of code, like logic, architecture, security, etc things still have to come from the developer because AI can't have the context of a complete application yet. When that's ready then we can tackle 'tech debt free' because almost all tech debt lives at that higher level. I don't think we'll get there for a long time.

Then they're not using the tools correctly. LLMs are capable of producing good clean code, but they need to be carefully instructed as to how.

I recently used Gemini to build my first Android app, and I have zero experience with Kotlin or most of the libraries (but I have done many years of enterprise Java in my career). When I started I first had a long discussion with the AI about how we should set up dependency injection, Material3 UI components, model-view architecture, Firebase, logging, etc and made a big Markdown file with a detailed architecture description. Then I let the agent mode implement the plan over several steps and with a lot of tweaking along the way. I've been quite happy with the result, the app works like a charm and the code is neatly structured and easy to jump into whenever I need to make changes. Finishing a project like this in a couple of dozen hours (especially being a complete newbie to the stack) simply would not have been possible 2-3 years ago.

Yep, that's how you get better output from AI. A lot of devs haven't learned that yet. They still see it as 'better autocomplete'.

A good AI development framework needs to support a tail of deprecated choices in the codebase.

Skills are considerable better for this than design docs.

LLMs do not learn. So every new session for them will be rebuilding the world from scratch. Bloated Markdown files quickly exhaust context windows, and agents routinely ignore large parts of them.

And then you unleash them on one code base that's more than a couple of days old, and they happily duplicate code, ignore existing code paths, ignore existing conventions etc.

Finding and fixing that subtle, hard to reproduce bug that could kill your business after 3 years.

But it's not going to be as easy as "just regenerate everything". There are dependencies external to a particular codebase such as long lived data and external APIs.

I also suspect that the stability of the codebase will still matter, maybe even more so than before. But the way in which we define maintainability will certainly change.

I'd argue that when the code is part of a press release or corporate blog post (is there even a difference?) by the company that the LLM in question comes from, e.g. Claude's C compiler, then one cannot reasonably assert they were "not using the tools correctly": even if there's some better way to use them, if even the LLM's own team don't know how to do that, the assumption should be that it is unreasonable to expect anyone else to how to do that either.

I find it interesting and useful to know that the boundary of the possible is a ~100kloc project, and that even then this scale of output comes with plenty of flaws.

Know what the AI can't do, rather than what it can. Even beyond LLMs, people don't generally (there's exceptions) get paid for manually performing tasks that have already been fully automated, people get paid for what automation can't do.

Moving target, of course. This time last year, my attempt to get an AI to write a compiler for a joke language didn't even result in the source code for the compiler itself compiling; now it not only compiles, it runs. But my new language is a joke language, no sane person would ever use it for a serious project.

The danger is, it doesn't quite scale up. The more complex the project, the more likely the AI is to get confused and start writing spaghetti code. It may even work for a while, but eventually the spaghetti piles up to the point that not even more spaghetti will fix it

I'll get that's going to get better over the next few years, with better tooling and better ways to get the AI to figure out/remember relevant parts of the code base, but that's just my guess

>Presumably if you take all the code in the world and throw it in mixer what comes out is not our Platonic ideal of the best possible code, but actually something more like a Lovecraftian horror that happens to get the right output.

These statements are inaccurate since 2022 when LLMs started to have post training done.

I wouldn't call this a fiasco, it reads to me more that being able to create huge amounts of code - whether the end result works well or not - breaks the traditional model of open source. Small contributions can be verified and the merrit-vs-maintenance-effort can at least be assessed somewhat more realistically.

I have no bones in the "vibe coding sucks" vs "vibe coding rocks" discussion and I reading that thread as an outsider. I cannot help but find the PR author's attitude absolutely okay while the compiler folks are very defensive. I do agree with them that submitting a huge PR request without prior discussion cannot be the way forward. But that's almost orthogonal to the question of whether AI-generated code is or is not of value.

If I were the author, I would probably take my 13k loc proof-of-concept implementation and chop it down into bite-size steps that are easy to digest, and try to get them to get integrated into the compiler successively, with being totally upfront about what the final goal is. You'd need to be ready to accept criticism and requests for change, but it should not be too hard to have your AI of choice incorporate these into your code base.

I think the main mistake of the author was not to use vibe coding, it was to dream up his own personal ideal of a huge feature, and then go ahead and single-handedly implement the whole thing without involving anyone from the actual compiler project. You cannot blame the maintainers for not being crazy about accepting such a huge blob.

I struggle to think how someone thinks this is polite. Is politeness to you just not using curse words?

But I am biased. After having lived a number of years in a country where I would say the average understanding of politeness is vastly different from where I've grown up, I've learned that there is just a difference of opinion of what is polite and what isn't. I have probably been affected by that too.

Ah yes. "It's AI I don't care" and "AI has very deep reasoning about code, prove me wrong" are the height of politeness.

That said, I don't feel like this topic is important enough to go on about it, I probably spend enough keystrokes on it already.

But I guess we could've used a few other synonyms: https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/impolite inconsiderate, thoughtless, impertinent (2nd meaning) :)

It's just that in my reading, I did not find his demeanor in the comment thread to be impolite. He was trying to sell his contribution and I think that whatever he wrote was using respectful language.

The effort asymmetry is what's rude. The maintainers take their project very seriously (as they should) and are generous enough with their time to invite contribution from outsiders. Showing up and dropping 13k lines of code, posting comments copy+pasted from a chat window, and insisting that your contribution is trustworthy not because you thought it through but because you fed it through a few LLMs shows that you don't respect the maintainers' time. In other words: you are being rude. They would have to put in more upfront effort to review your contribution than you put in to create it! Then they have to maintain it in perpetuity.

Doing it without any prior discussion with the maintainers is disrespectful to the maintainers and the architecture work they put in.

Trying to "sell" your contribution is disrespectful and implies you know better than the maintainers.

Cockily saying "the AI knows better than you" is disrespectful.

Respectful and polite language does not prevent being disrespectful.

if you will , place yourself in the shoes of the repository maintainer. a random person (with a personal agenda) has popped up trying to sell you a solution (that he doesn't understand) to a problem (that you don't see as problematic). after you spending literal hours patiently explaining why the proposition is not acceptable , this random person still continues attempting to sell his solution.

do you see any impoliteness in the reframed scenario ?

The way I interpret this thread is that the PR poster had a certain itch and came up with a vibe-coded solution that helped him. Now he's trying to make that available for others too. The maintainers don't want it because it's too large a PR to review properly and because they don't want to have to maintain it afterwards.

I can totally see both positions.

I was just referring to the fact that - in my opinion - unlike others here, his writing did not appear impolite to me. But you know, that's just me. I thought that he was trying to sell his code, and it's not unusual to get rejected at first, so I can't blame him for trying to defend his contribution. All I'm saying is that I thought he did so in a respectful manner, but of course you could argue that the whole endeavor was already an act of impoliteness, in a way?!

I learnt something from this thread.

That, respectfulness and politeness are more from intentions/actions than from speech alone. Politeness of language without any respect for the actual function of that speech is pointless. Indeed, that this what the LLMs are trained for. Form over function. And many humans get fooled by it and are also clueless like the person dropping the steaming turd of a PR.

everybody should collectively tell him to fuck off

"Beats me"

Do you consider this "professional and polite"? Raise your standards.

I'm also quite surprised that apparently you cannot utter what is clearly just a personal opinion -- not a claim of objective truth -- without getting downvoted. But then again, the semantics of votes are not well-defined.

At the same time, I'm quite grateful for the constructive comments further down below under my original post.