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Projects are shutting down due to Microslop's Github CoPilot making AI contributions easy and plentiful (programming.dev)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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Why aren't people moving away from Github? There's Codeberg, Gitlab, and radicle. What's holding them back?

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[+] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (12 children)
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  • [–] [S] 6 points 8 months ago

    I think part of the problem is Microslop's Github Copilot in the web, which makes it possible for non developers to quickly and easily create PRs without understanding a single thing about programming, let alone software development.

    It wouldn't surprise me of people genuinely think they are helping.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    Let's deal with the mountain of AI slop garbage in the same way as what worked before:

    We need some kind of reputation system for open source contributors. If you push slop, I don't want to see your PR. If you consistently make worthwhile contributions, I'll check out your PR.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    How has that worked before? I've never encountered the system in practice. Can you give an example and explain how it works?

    My fear is that newcomers will be locked out because of the assumption their code is LLM code but it genuinely is theirs. Or that they used an LLM, are willing to learn, think the code is genuinely good, but don't know why it's bad.

    Very curious how the existing system works.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    You mean reputation systems for filtering out low quality submissions? That's why they exist. Spam filters, reddit, stack overflow, Lemmy, whatever. And people say "what about newcomers who start with no reputation" but it always seems to work out somehow.

    My point was that "was this made by AI" is the wrong question. Not everything made using AI is dogshit, nor is everything made by real people always good. And you won't always be able to tell the difference at all. Rather, let's focus on the spam problem

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Binary reputation systems aren't good. I can say something that right and it can be downvoted because it goes against a person's beliefs, because I'm unpopular, because a certain group doesn't like it, because, because, because. Popularity is not a good measure of quality. Just look at the "publish or die" system. Just because you've been cited multiple times doesn't make your paper right.

    Imagine a trans contributor being downvoted just because they're trans. How is that a good system? Do you expect trans people should only contribute in software projects where trans people are accepted? How are you going to prevent brigading?

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (5 children)

    This is interesting and sounds like how I've been using it - basically like customised stack overflow answers.

    Would you mind elaborating a little on your approach? Are you saying you provide it with guidance and links or are you asking it for those?

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  • [+] 2 points 8 months ago* (4 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    So kind of like a personalised learning assistant? I realise it's different but this inverted instruct approach puts me in mind of Doctorow's reverse centaur!

    Don't you find that the links you get are hallucinated though? Even if they're not now you can imagine this collapsing into slop echoes...

    I've tended to ask for examples to help me bootstrap new projects. A bit like getting customised docs. I certainly haven't had enough success with generated code to think about automatically adopting it.

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