Comment on Linus Torvalds to critics of AI coding in Linux: "Fork it. Or just walk away."
socsa@piefed.social 1 week ago
Realistically, this is as much about not wanting to police constant AI drama as it is about AI coding utility. Like it or not that cat is out of the bag, but as long as you enforce the same development guidelines in terms of code quality, PR rules and such, the impact should be small. Arguably the bigger issue would come with taking a hardline approach where you inevitably spend a bunch of time arguing over AI accusations. We are already quickly approaching a point where it feels half the Internet is AI, and the other half is arguing about whether something is or isn’t AI. That’s just not going to work for FOSS development.
iocase@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I’m arguing that it’s not a small difference since the cognitive burden is put on maintainers who are already overworked. Now they need to edit through AI PR manure to find decent requests. A lot of OSS projects have stopped taking public PRs for this reason. It shifts the cognitive burden from the programmer to make good code, onto the reviewer to read and understand AI slop contribution.
socsa@piefed.social 1 week ago
Yeah I think those workflows will adapt eventually, with more maintainers and some kind of more formal trust or reputation process to help sort things. It sucks but figuring out how to deal with it is really the only path forward. Otherwise all the cognitive load goes to arguing about AI.
I also think the worst offenders will get bored once the novelty wears off, and if the standards are kept high enough that getting a PR through still requires some amount of human work.
iocase@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Does any of what you just said sound reasonable or likely?
Epp@lemmus.org 1 week ago
Yes and yes.
Jako302@feddit.org 1 week ago
Straight up banning ai won’t solve this issue either. People will just commit code either way and simply won’t tell you they used ai.
iocase@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
We’ve had low code tools before that caused similar issues. Nothing like AI though… I do agree with the other commenter here that a reputation system is probably the path forward. Something like a minimum number of PRs accepted on gold standard projects or something? People will game that too though and post slop regardless…