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[–] 8 points 8 months ago

Wow. This explains in writing what I have been feeling about the slop.

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

    Don't agree at all. If you're using LLMs when making pull requests, be clear about it. If you've only used an LLM when making a change, then don't bother making the PR. Like if you couldn't be bothered to make the change why should anyone be bothered to review it?

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  • [+] -15 points 8 months ago* (3 children)
  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Standards and practises shift from project to project. As we stand currently these "vibe-coders" are choking out a lot of FOSS projects while contributing fuck all. LLMs aren't intelligent, they're just token prediction engines, they'll never understand why something is done in a particular way, or how it works, because they cannot understand.

    Can you produce something good with it? Yeah, sure, if you put a person in charge to vet all of that code, who fully understands the output and the implications. At that point however the person might as well just have written it themselves.

    If you want to use LLMs for some goofy one-off project for yourself, then go nuts. Don't fucking spam others repositories with code you didn't bother writing, just for some clout or whatever.

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  • [+] -9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago

    I was debating even answering this. You've displayed that you're perfectly okay with outsourcing your agency and thinking to something that lacks the capability to do either, and so responding seems entirely pointless. For all I know you're just a machine outputting garbage based on some script. This is a public forum viewable to third parties, so that I guess makes the effort worth it.

    There's not a single problem with what you propose, but a number of compounding problems that makes the usage in general problematic, and disclosure important. For the sake of brevity, let's disregard the environmental and ethical concerns of using LLMs and supporting the companies behind them. Mind you, I think these concerns are fully valid and in a broader context should most definitely not be disregarded.

    LLMs are trained on massive datasets. The companies have time and again proven their complete disregard for where they're sourcing the data. Here for example is an ongoing list of lawsuits against various "AI" companies but you obviously don't need more than eyes to see this; how else would their image models be able to reproduce images of copyright and trademark protected characters?

    The ability of the LLMs to produce code means that they've gobbled up large amounts of code as well, in various languages. If these companies have stolen other types of data for use in their training, why would they not have stolen code? Code also comes in various licenses, and you can't generally mix and match these licenses freely.

    Now let's paint up a scenario. Say, ten years ago, a junior developer wanted to contribute to an open source project. Maybe their commit wasn't very good to begin with, but people offered feedback, and let's say eventually the PR was approved. The person came up with their own solution to a problem, and learned a bunch in the process.

    Now let's say someone tasks an "agent" with fixing a problem. The LLM churns for a bit, and then spits out a solution. Let's say it works, and it fits the submission guidelines. Let's be charitable and say that everything works out perfectly, the maintainers accept the PR and everything is hunky-doory.

    Then a company comes along and notices chunks of code in the FOSS project are reproductions of what's in their proprietary, or differently licensed codebase. What happens then? Who has the responsibility? Obviously the maintainers of the FOSS project.

    The sloperator in the second example didn't learn shit. They gained nothing of value, and the maintainers of the project now has to go through and remove whatever infringing code they've unknowingly added to their codebase.

    A more common problem FOSS projects are facing today is a complete inundation of nonsense PRs and reports by agents run by people who aren't actually looking to improve the projects. They're just unleashing a torrent of slop, overwhelming the maintainers of the projects, and breaking existing workflows. curl for example are no longer doing bug bounties because people used agents to submit nonsense for their maintainers to wade through. curl is one of those semi-invisible projects used absolutely everywhere, and so them not being able to keep doing bug bounties is a loss to everyone.

    Is prejudice a part of this? Yes. I do judge people who have elected to give up their agency and have a pattern matcher do their thinking for them. I think that's pitiable, and I'm not ashamed of admitting that. Remove my prejudice from the equation however, and the points still stands.

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  • [–] 8 points 8 months ago

    No. LLM-generated code can follow all standards and best practices while being utterly conceptually flawed. Code that is conceptually flawed would usually stink from afar, but LLMs enable people to easily produce utterly flawed code that does not smell, ruining one of the main rules of thumb that progranmers use to review code.

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    [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    This etiquette is similar to "Let me Google that for you" being frowned upon.

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  • [–] 10 points 8 months ago

    I feel like it conveys the exact opposite of what I think you are saying. The article conveys the same feeling as the LMGTFY people have.

    When people ask a question they could have googled they give you the mental task of figuring it out for them instead of doing it themselves. Similarly when someone forwards AI output without reading it they give the recipient the mental task of figuring out if the AI is making sense.

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