I also have found that AI has not lived up to many of its promises and have dialed back what AI gets control of. My projects were turning into unmaintainable messes. The people who say coding is solved aren't paying attention.
Were you reviewing the changes? I've seen lots of projects with this problem. But if AI PRs have to pass the same review bar as any other PR then it shouldn't be an issue in theory (if you can actually maintain the discipline).
Yes. I started two projects with AI from scratch. Both abandoned, complete mess. Projects without AI are so easy to manage, maintain, add/remove features, etc. I use AI as a search engine on my projects instead of Google. I ask what's wrong with my code and change or improve it myself based on my experience.
The people saying programming is solved couldn't program in the first place is what I've noticed. So to them it really does feel solved, things "work" and they don't have to learn what they don't know about programming.
I had a PR in flight that got closed because of this. I had an issue with passwords in the network applet for the VPN and had used Claude to help me identify and then come up with a fix. I did spend a lot time handcrafting and making sure the quality was good, but I respect their decision and no hard feelings, but as someone who have struggled to find time and opportunity to contribute to open source it was a small set back.
I found your commit and your usage of AI seemed reasonable. It seems to me like your PR itself and the subsequent comments and correspondence was also human written.
I think a PR "in flight" shouldn't have been closed like that.
All this will do is push out developers like you that honestly disclose, and instead people will now just lie.
My guess: taking personal responsibility for the functionality, readability, and sanity of the change proposed, both atomically and in the context of the wider code base (adhering to existing conventions and patterns), to the best of the author’s ability.
I don't see how this will survive the attacker/defender gap as ls get increasingly good at cyber security and finding 0 days... but maybe it's an obscure enough is it doesn't matter?
Using AI to find vulnerabilities doesn’t mean that you need to use AI to generate the code that fixes them. And you can still ask AI whether it thinks the fix is okay, as a second opinion.
Probably because pop_os and Cosmic are so niche and their market share so low, that they're irrelevant to attackers and bad actors, when those now have much bigger fish to fry.
I think even amongst the HN and Linux userbase, pop_os is still niche, let alone amongst normies who never heard about Linux. So they can afford take the high road and treat it like their personal sandbox accepting only human written code.
But larger and more important projects like Fedora and Debian are more realistic and pragmatic with the fact that they'll have to accept AI written(but human reviewed) code, if they wish to keep up with the real world development and threats, as expressed by Linus Torvalds himself.
The thing is, the cat's out of the bag on this one now, especially in the fields of pen-testing and reverse-engineering. AI can brute-force its way into projects in ways that beat experienced researchers, so your only choice to keep up is to accept the use of AI generated fixes as a counter defense.
<< Probably because pop_os and Cosmic are so niche and their market share so low, that they're irrelevant to attackers and bad actors, when those now have much bigger fish to fry.
That is such a weird statement that I am not entirely certain where to begin. PopOS is hardly niche. Its base are all fairly common components by linux standards. And, more importantly, attackers and bad actors may other considerations in mind than sheer population size -- just to point out the glaringly obvious.
<< I think even amongst the HN and Linux userbase, pop_os is still niche
I think rather than trying to disprove it, I think I should ask why you think that? If anything, PopOS annoys me because it is just a step before ubuntu ( and ubuntu is just windows at this point ). Maybe I am defensive, because my first real distribution ( that did not share disk with windows was popos )?
2) Secondly, keep in mind that distrowatch is not representative of linux userbase. MX-Linux kept showing up at the top spot for many years despite being niche.
3) And thirdly, TOP 5 DE isn't really an achievement when Linux DE market share is overwhelmingly dominated by KDE Plasma and Gnome as the majority shareholders, with XFCE and Cinnamon trailing. So Cosmic DE if it somehow made the no. 5 spot, would still be ignorable sub <1% market share, as I initially claimed, basically invisible to bad actors.
It also means security is not held as high and vulnerabilities not as much found. A simple 0-day may survive for years. Not much effort needed to have permanent access.
Same trouble we have. Some clever person says to use AI agents for code review. 100kloc commit got flagged through on Friday. Taking this week off. Not my circus.
Faith is the problem. Extraordinary claims must stand up to scrutiny. They do not.
banning AI from PRs because you're swamped with too many low quality PRs, definitely. We pretty much are doing this with SQLAlchemy. If I'm going to have a small fix or improvement coded by an LLM (which I do all the time), I want to prompt the LLM directly, rather than having someone trying to pad their resume forward my communications onto their LLM via PRs. What's the point of that?
> If I'm going to have a small fix or improvement coded by an LLM (which I do all the time), I want to prompt the LLM directly, rather than having someone trying to pad their resume forward my communications onto their LLM via PRs. What's the point of that?
Which is why LLM PRs should just be issues (if there isn’t one already). Make the issue author a co-author on the PR. But let the maintainer actually oversee the LLM generated solution.
I think a PR "in flight" shouldn't have been closed like that.
All this will do is push out developers like you that honestly disclose, and instead people will now just lie.
I think even amongst the HN and Linux userbase, pop_os is still niche, let alone amongst normies who never heard about Linux. So they can afford take the high road and treat it like their personal sandbox accepting only human written code.
But larger and more important projects like Fedora and Debian are more realistic and pragmatic with the fact that they'll have to accept AI written(but human reviewed) code, if they wish to keep up with the real world development and threats, as expressed by Linus Torvalds himself.
The thing is, the cat's out of the bag on this one now, especially in the fields of pen-testing and reverse-engineering. AI can brute-force its way into projects in ways that beat experienced researchers, so your only choice to keep up is to accept the use of AI generated fixes as a counter defense.
That is such a weird statement that I am not entirely certain where to begin. PopOS is hardly niche. Its base are all fairly common components by linux standards. And, more importantly, attackers and bad actors may other considerations in mind than sheer population size -- just to point out the glaringly obvious.
<< I think even amongst the HN and Linux userbase, pop_os is still niche
I think rather than trying to disprove it, I think I should ask why you think that? If anything, PopOS annoys me because it is just a step before ubuntu ( and ubuntu is just windows at this point ). Maybe I am defensive, because my first real distribution ( that did not share disk with windows was popos )?
(I wasn't able to make it work on a scrap Dell I tried it on because the GPU was too old. Booted the USB key and COSMIC greeter failed to start)
1) Firstly, surce? My research shows top 5 DEs are as follows:
2) Secondly, keep in mind that distrowatch is not representative of linux userbase. MX-Linux kept showing up at the top spot for many years despite being niche.3) And thirdly, TOP 5 DE isn't really an achievement when Linux DE market share is overwhelmingly dominated by KDE Plasma and Gnome as the majority shareholders, with XFCE and Cinnamon trailing. So Cosmic DE if it somehow made the no. 5 spot, would still be ignorable sub <1% market share, as I initially claimed, basically invisible to bad actors.
Reminder that AI is quite stupid.
Faith is the problem. Extraordinary claims must stand up to scrutiny. They do not.
Which is why LLM PRs should just be issues (if there isn’t one already). Make the issue author a co-author on the PR. But let the maintainer actually oversee the LLM generated solution.
So basically you're saying you reject drive-by PRs.