yarn_

First of many I hope, god bless.

thank you for this truly deranged comment

Because they're for two completely different domains?

as a fan of him this rationale did not make a shred of sense

"Both parties can have their preference" - this was already true of C where you can just turn enable unused variable warnings or turn them into hard errors, this has nothing to do with the decision.

I also don't want my lsp randomly rewriting my code (???)

Well its also just idiotic in terms of how some huge number of people write code.

I know I'll need so-and-so import, so i write it at the top of the file before i even start, I press ctrl-s and it dissapears... I honestly laughed out loud the first time i used gopls.

I really don't understand why people feel the need to include this stuff. I am not saying that out of some anti-AI sentiment, i just genuinely don't understand how peoiple have so little taste as to think it adds to their writing.

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hbbY!,f_auto,q_auto:...

Like what is this?

Me when I have literally no idea what im talking about

I was a little shocked that they could get it fully working in a week to be honest

It shouldn't be shocking, it was done using only compute, and the codebase is owned by the company who owns the compute, you literally just turn the dial up and it will be done faster. Efficacy of LLMs aside - anything they could do in 30 days they could also do in 3, if you spend more money.

I think much of the world of software has become incredibly myopic. usually taking the easy way out is just deferring the costs to your future. Problem is that those costs accrue interest.

This sums up my thoughts perfectly lately, that is a great way to put it all.

Programmers have never been any good at measuring or estimating their own productivity, there is no reason to assume that has changed (one could argue theres ample reason to assume the opposite).

Part of the problem as well is that there is some unseen/unnamable "spaghettiness"/"sloppiness"/"whatever" factor, that scales very very poorly. At the beginning it can seem fine, especially when you have some constant speed multiplier like an LLM spitting out code - but the larger exponent of the function that results from this factor being "worse" will eventually outpace that constant multiplier. You will only see it once its too late, or will never see it all because of our myopia as you say.

sad but true

the devil lies in the details

This is true, but perhaps not uniquely so, when compared to platform dependence of the standard libary already. File semantics, sync primitive gaurantees and implementations, timers and timer resolutions, etc have subtle differences between platforms that the Rust stdlib makes no further gaurantees about.

People disagree on a bunch of extremely politicized topics within the realm of nutrition and health which is famously complex and hard to understand even for experts in the field.

Yup, I'm "staggered".

We don't hire juniors and throw them boilerplate and tiny bugs while expecting them to learn along the way ad hoc

Huh? This is exactly what almost everyone does

Another good example of "the people writing good code with AI are the people who could have done it regardless"

It seems we've uncovered several feasible answers to your question of "why would you want that?"

Fair enough

Right but these are bad actors, roughly speaking, so why should I expect them to disclose the fact that they're using LLMs to me?

If someone is repeatedly sending me slop to look at I'll block them whether or not they tell me an LLM was involved

This mirrors my thoughts.

I don't see what the "deceptive practices" would be though - you can just look at the code being submitted, there isn't really the same background truth involved as with "did the thing in this video actually happen?" "do these commercial people actually think this?"

If I have a block of human code and an identical block of llm code then whats the difference? Especially given that in reality it is trivial to obfuscate whether its human or LLM (in fact usually you have to go out of your way to identify it as such).

I am an AI hater but I'm just being realistic and practical here, I'm not sure how else to approach all this.

Yep other people pointed this out as well, this makes sense to me.

Well if an agent is submitting it I'm just going to reject it, thats no problem. "Just send me the prompt".

I mean sure, in the same sense that law enforcement would be a lot easier if all the criminals just came to the police station and gave themselves up

Again though, people can trivially hide the fact they used an LLM to whatever extent, so we kind of need to adjust accordingly.

Even if saying no to all LLM involvement seemed pertinent, it doesn't seem possible in the first place.

The human who submitted the PR is 100% accountable either way, thats partly my point.

Disclosing AI has its purposes, I agree, but its not like we can reliably get everyone to do it anyway, which also leads me to thinking this way.

Sure, the point about LLM "mistakes" etc being harder to detect is valid, although I'm not entirely sure how to compare this with human hard to detect mistakes. If anything I find LLM code shortcomings often a bit easier to spot because a lot of the time they're just uneeded dependencies, useless comments, useless replication of logic, etc. This is where testing come into play too and I'm definitely reviewing your tests (obviously).

Burying your head in the sand and choosing to be a guinea pig for AI companies by reviewing all of their slop with the same care you'd review human contributions with (instead of cutting them off early when identified as problematic) is your prerogative, but it assumes you're fine being isolated from the industry.

I mean listen: I wish with every fiber of my being that LLMs would dissapear off the face of the earth for eternity, but I really don't think I'm being "isolating myself from the industry" by not simply dismissing LLM code. If I find a PR to be problematic I would just cut it off, thats how I review in the first place. I'm telling some random human who submitted the code to me that I am rejecting their PR cause its low quality, I'm not sending anthropic some long detailed list of my feedback.

This is also kind of a moot point either way, because everyone can just trivially hide the fact that they used LLMs if they want to.

Future analysis is a valid reason to keep it, thats a good point and I agree with that.

I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.

Why is this, though? I'm genuinely curious. My code-quality bar doesn't change either way, so why would this be anything but distracting to my decision making?

I agree with a lot of this, but thats kind of my point: if all these things (poor tests, non-DRY, redundant comments, etc) were true about a piece of purely human-written code then I would reject it just the same, so whats the difference? Likewise, if claude solely produced some really clean, concise and rigorously thought-through and testsed piece of code with a human backer then why wouldn't I take it?

As you allude to (and i agree), any non-trivial quantity of code, if SOLELY written by claude will probably be low-quality, but this is apparent whether I know its AI beforehand or not.

I am admittedly coming at this as much more of an AI-hater than many, but I still don't really get why I'd care about how-much or how-little you used AI as a standalone metric.

The people who are using AI "well" are the ones producing code where you'd never even guess it involved AI. I'm sure theres linux kernel maintainers using claude here and there, its not like they expect to have their patches merged because "oh well i just used claude here don't worry about that part".

(But also yes, of course I'm not going to talk to claude about your PR, I will only talk to you, the human contributor, and if you don't know whats up with the PR then into the trash it goes!)

Hah, ya exactly. I say sorry to objects if I drop them or accidently whack them, and feel remorse. What hope do I have with an LLM who talks to me?

(jk f those clankers ofc)

Likewise, leaving AI attribution in will probably have the opposite effect as well, where a perfectly good few lines of code gets rejected because some reviewer saw it was claude and assumed it was slop. Neither of these cases seems helpful to anyone (obviously its not like AI can't write a single useable line of code)."

That was my point here, it is a false signal in both directions.

"Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?"

Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for it, and actually choose to PR it in its ultimate form.

What utility do the reviews/maintainers get from you marking whats written by you vs. chatgpt? Other than your ability to scapegoat the LLM?

The only thing that actually affects me (the hypothetical reviewer) and the project is the quality of the actual code, and, ideally, the presence of a contributer (you) who can actually answer for that code. The presence or absence of LLM generated code by your hand makes no difference to me or the project, why would it? Why would it affect my decision making whatsoever?

Its your code, end of story. Either that or the PR should just be rejected, because nobody is taking responsibility for it.

I don't quite see the benefit of this, personally.

Whoever is submitting the code is still responsible for it, why would the reviewer care if you wrote it with your fingers or if an LLM wrote (parts of) it? The quality+understanding bar shouldn't change just because "oh idk claude wrote this part". You don't get extra leeway just because you saved your own time writing the code - that fact doesn't benefit me/the project in any way.

Likewise, leaving AI attribution in will probably have the opposite effect as well, where a perfectly good few lines of code gets rejected because some reviewer saw it was claude and assumed it was slop. Neither of these cases seems helpful to anyone (obviously its not like AI can't write a single useable line of code).

The code is either good or it isn't, and you either understand it or you don't. Whether you or claude wrote it is immaterial.