Comment on Linus Torvalds to critics of AI coding in Linux: "Fork it. Or just walk away."
iocase@lemmy.zip 1 week agoWell it’s what maintainers are already doing. Closing community contributions or burning out. A reputation system can be games unless the requirements for contributing are so restrictive it kills contributions anyways since most people don’t have the time and energy to get 100 PRs reviewed and accepted in a gold-standard group of projects to prove they won’t suggest slop.
Honestly I think the solution is the true price of tokens being charged to end users. If it costs you $15 instead of $0.10 to generate a slop PR now you actually give a shit about how it works. I think we’re heading there soon… Anthropic already hiked their prices 9-27X, and it looks like they need at least 2 more of those hikes in a row to begin to break even.
I think the eventual mature path for AI is as a coding assistant instead of autopilot. An expensive tool you use like an intern for making unit tests or finding a persistent bug in your code.
Epp@lemmus.org 1 week ago
Eh…I don’t know that that’s a viable solution.
Take me, for example - I get $19 of tokens per month through one of my employers. That used to be more than enough to do nearly everything I wanted every month. Now, that’s one minor feature per month. So I don’t bother even using them. Instead, I use the GPU on my leisure/gaming laptop, and it processes all my LLM requests locally. So I have unlimited tokens.
I think the actual solution is patience. As the tools improved in quality, so too do the quality of the PR. Soon, I believe, they will be better quality than they have been ever before. If maintainers can just hold out that long … 🤞
iocase@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
I don’t know about that. The constraint seems to be context since AI struggles to hold all of the pieces for a project mentally while making changes like an experienced maintainer can. I find AI is a lot like using a credit card. It seems like free money at first until you start paying back the tech debt of a junior programmer who had no idea how to architect a project. You end up making your own legacy code base, except you were the one who made it… And because your context has long since been wiped clean from using your AI it can’t remember why it did what it did.
“Only Claude and God knew what this did when Claude made this code. Now that it’s context has expired, only God knows.”