If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?

The headlines said that 30% of code at Microsoft was AI now! Huge if true!
Something like MS word has like 20-50 million lines of code. MS altogether probably has like a billion lines of code. 30% of that being AI generated is infeasible given the timeframe. People just ate this shit up. AI grifting is so fucking easy.
- yeah, the "some projects" bit is applicable, as is the "machine generated" phrasing
  @gsuberland pointed out elsewhere on fedi just how much of the VS-/MS- ecosystem does an absolute fucking ton of code generation
  (which is entirely fine, ofc. tons of things do that and it exists for a reason. but there's a canyon in the sand between A and B)
  
  All compiled code is machine generated! BRB gonna clang and IPO, bye awful.systems! Have fun being poor

Baldur Bjarnason's given his thoughts on Bluesky:
My current theory is that the main difference between open source and closed source when it comes to the adoption of “AI” tools is that open source projects generally have to ship working code, whereas closed source only needs to ship code that runs.
I’ve heard so many examples of closed source projects that get shipped but don’t actually work for the business. And too many examples of broken closed source projects that are replacing legacy code that was both working just fine and genuinely secure. Pure novelty-seeking

Had a presentation where they told us they were going to show us how AI can automate project creation. In the demo, after several attempts at using different prompts, failing and trying to fix it manually, they gave up.
I don't think it's entirely useless as it is, it's just that people have created a hammer they know gives something useful and have stuck it with iterative improvements that have a lot compensation beneath the engine. It's artificial because it is being developed to artificially fulfill prompts, which they do succeed at.
When people do develop true intelligence-on-demand, you'll know because you will lose your job, not simply have another tool at your disposal. The prompts and flow of conversations people pay to submit to the training is really helping advance the research into their replacements.
- My opinion is it can be good when used narrowly.
  Write a concise function that takes these inputs, does this, and outputs a dict with this information.
  But so often it wants to be overly verbose. And it's not so smart as to understand much of the project for any meaningful length of time. So it will redo something that already exists. It will want to touch something that is used in multiple places without caring or knowing how it's used.
  But it still takes someone to know how the puzzle pieces go together. To architect it and lay it out. To really know what the inputs and outputs need to be. If someone gives it free reign to do whatever, it'll just make slop.

No the fuck it's not
I'm a pretty big proponent of FOSS AI, but none of the models I've ever used are good enough to work without a human treating it like a tool to automate small tasks. In my workflow there is no difference between LLMs and fucking grep for me.
People who think AI codes well are shit at their job
- In my workflow there is no difference between LLMs and fucking grep for me.
  Well grep doesn't hallucinate things that are not actually in the logs I'm grepping so I think I'll stick to grep.
  (Or ripgrep rather)
  
  With grep it’s me who hallucinates that I can right good regex :,)
  
  Hallucinations become almost a non issue when working with newer models, custom inference, multishot prompting and RAG
  But the models themselves fundamentally can't write good, new code, even if they're perfectly factual
- No the fuck it's not
  Because it's a upscaled translation tech maybe?
  
  These views on LLMs are simplistic. As a wise man once said, "check yoself befo yo wreck yoself", I recommend more education thus
  LLM structures arw over hyped, but they're also not that simple
- There are plenty of open issues on open source repos it could open PRs for though?
  
  I'm guessing if it would actually work for that, somebody would have done it by now.
  But it probably just does it's usual thing of bullshitting something that looks like code, only now you're wasting the time of maintainers as well who have to confirm that it is bobbins.

please don't encourage them, someones got to review that shit!
- Ai review baby!!! Here we go!

Don't fucking encourage them

It's so bad at coding... Like, it's not even funny.

You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers.
Mostly said by tech bros and startups.
That should really tell you everything you need to know.

So how do you tell apart AI contributions to open source from human ones?
- It's usually easy, just check if the code is nonsense
- To get a bit meta for a minute, you don't really need to.
  The first time a substantial contribution to a serious issue in an important FOSS project is made by an LLM with no conditionals, the pr people of the company that trained it are going to make absolutely sure everyone and their fairy godmother knows about it.
  Until then it's probably ok to treat claims that chatbots can handle a significant bulk of non-boilerplate coding tasks in enterprise projects by themselves the same as claims of haunted houses; you don't really need to debunk every separate witness testimony, it's self evident that a world where there is an afterlife that also freely intertwines with daily reality would be notably and extensively different to the one we are currently living in.
  
  There are AI contributions happening all the time, lol. What are you even talking about?
- if it’s undisclosed, it’s obvious from the universally terrible quality of the code, which wastes volunteer reviewers’ time in a way that legitimate contributions almost never do. the “contributors” who lean on LLMs also can’t answer questions about the code they didn’t write or help steer the review process, so that’s a dead giveaway too.
  
  Bad code quality is a myth.
- GitHub, for one, colors the icon red for AI contributions and green/purple for human ones.
  
  Ah, right, so we're differentiating contributions made by humans with AI from some kind of pure AI contributions?

As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).
This is the most entertaining thing I've read this month.
- @spankmonkey @dgerard
  "I can't sing or play any instruments, and I haven't written any songs, but you have to let me join your band"
  
  "i'm a lawyer i will file a CoC complaint"
- yeah someone elsewhere on awful linked issue a few days ago, and throughout many of his posts he pulls that kind of stunt the moment he gets called on his shit
  he also wrote a 21.KiB screed very huffily saying one of the projects’ CoC has failed him
  long may his PRs fail
- I tried asking some chimps to see if the macaques had written a New York Times best seller, if not MacBeth, yet somehow Random house wouldn't publish my work

Man trust me you don't want them. I've seen people submit ChatGPT generated code and even generated the PR comment with ChatGPT. Horrendous shit.
- The maintainers of curl recently announced any bug reports generated by AI need a human to actually prove it's real. They cited a deluge of reports generated by AI that claim to have found bugs in functions and libraries which don't even exist in the codebase.
  
  you may find, on actually going through the linked post/video, that this is in fact mentioned in there already
- Today the CISO of the company I work for suggested that we should get qodo.ai because it would "... help the developers improve code quality."
  I wish I was making this up.
  
  My boss is obsessed with Claude and ChatGPT, and loves to micromanage. Typically, if there's an issue with what a client is requesting, I'll approach him with:
  What the issue is
  At least two possible solutions or alternatives we can offer
  He will then, almost always, ask if I've checked with the AI. I'll say no. He'll then send me chunks of unusable code that the AI has spat out, which almost always perfectly illuminate the first point I just explained to him.
  It's getting very boring dealing with the roboloving freaks.
  
  90% of developers are so bad, that even ChatGPT 3.5 is much better.

why is no-one demanding to know why the robot is so sexay
- Sorry for being late, busy wanking off to the sexy robot in the article. So ye, anyway, why'd you do that?
  
  to get you into ahem vibe coding
- Hi hi please explain my boner
- I don't know what this has to do with this thread, but maybe ask Hajime Sorayama, he kind of came up with the whole concept of sexy robots.
  
  Real men know what's what.
- not super into cyber facehugger tbh
  
  as long as you don’t yuck my yum we good
  
  but look how delighted they are!

We submit copilot assisted code all the time. Like every day. I'm not even sure how you'd identify ours. Looks almost exactly the same. Just less work.
- copilot assisted code
  The article isn't really about autocompleted code, nobody's coming at you for telling the slop machine to convert a DTO to an html form using reactjs, it's more about prominent CEO claims about their codebases being purely AI generated at rates up to 30% and how swengs might be obsolete by next tuesday after dinner.
- Don't worry, if you apply yourself really hard one day you might become an actual engineer. Keep trying.
- Oh cool what do you work on? I’d love to know the product.
  
  Definitely not dozing myself in this place 🤣
- @IsThisAnAI @dgerard I spray shit at the wall all the time. Like every day
  The people who own the walls are vexed
  
  Cheers who don't use AI to assist them are worse than those that do. Feel bad.

Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.
They won't understand how they did so much with so little. You're all gourmet chefs in a future of McDonalds.
- My first actual real life project was building a data analytics platform while keeping the budget to a minimum. With some clever parallelism and aggressive memory usage optimisation I made it work on a single lowest-tier Azure VM, costing like $50 to run monthly, while the measurable savings for the business from using the platform are now measured in the millions.
  Don Knuth didn't write all those volumes on how software is an art for you to use fucking Node.JS you rubes, you absolute clowns
- @DarkCloud @dgerard
  The first commercial product I worked on had 128 bytes of RAM and 2048 bytes of ROM.
  It kept people safe from low oxygen, risk of explosions, and toxic levels of two poisonous gases including short term and long term effects at fifteen minutes and eight hour averages.
  Pre-Internet. When you're doing something new or pushing the limits, you just have to know how to code and read the datasheets.
- Nah, we're plumbers in an age where everyone has decided to DIY their septic system.
  Please, by all means, keep it up.
  
  You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I'm increasingly disconcerted by the rise of "devops" who can't actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.
  
  This is dead on! 99% of the fucking job is digital plumbing so the whole thing doesn't blow the up when (a) there's a slight deviation from the "ideal" data you were expecting, or (b) the stakeholders wanna make changes at the last minute to a part of the app that seems benign but is actually the crumbling bedrock this entire legacy monstrosity was built upon. Both scenarios are equally likely.
- Hot take, people will look back on anyone who currently codes, as we look back on the NASA programmers who got the equipment and people to the moon.
  I doubt it'll be anything that good for them. By my guess, those who currently code are at risk of suffering some guilt-by-association problems, as the AI bubble paints them as AI bros by proxy.
  
  Meh, I have so many bangers laughing at actual AI bros that I could make my CV just all be sneers on them, I think this particular corner of the internet is quite safe
  
  I think most people will ultimately associate chatbots with corporate overreach rather rank-and-file programmers. It's not like decades of Microsoft shoving stuff down our collective throat made people think particularly less of programmers, or think about them at all.
- Perhaps! But not because we adopted vibe coding. I do have faith in our ability to climb out of the Turing tarpit (WP, Esolangs) eventually, but only by coming to a deeper understanding of algorithmic complexity.
  Also, from a completely different angle: when I was a teenager, I could have a programmable calculator with 18MHz Z80 in my hand for $100. NASA programmers today have the amazing luxury of the RAD750, a 110MHz PowerPC chipset. We're already past the gourmet phase and well into fusion.

I treat AI as a new intern that doesn't know how to code well. You need to code review everything, but it's good for fast generation. Just don't trust more than a couple of lines at a time.
- I treat AI as a new intern that doesn’t know how to code well
  This statement makes absolutely zero sense to me. The purpose of having a new intern and reviewing their code is for them to learn and become a valuable member of the team, right? Like we don't give them coding tasks just for shits and giggles to correct later. You can't turn an AI into a senior dev by mentoring it, however the fuck you'd imagine that process?
  
  You can't turn an AI into a senior dev by mentoring it, however the fuck you'd imagine that process?
  Never said any of this.
  You can tell AI commands like "this is fine, but X is flawed. Use this page to read how the spec works." And it'll respond with the corrections. Or you can say "this would leak memory here". And it'll note it and make corrections. After about 4 to 5 checks you'll actually have usable code.
- you sound like a fucking awful teammate. it's not your job to nitpick and bikeshed everything they do, it's your job to help them grow
  "you need to code review everything" motherfucker if you're saying this in context only of your juniors then you have a massive organisational problem
  
  it's not your job to nitpick and bikeshed everything they do
  Wow. Talk about projection. I never said any of that, but thanks for letting everyone know how you treat other people.
  The point is AI can generate a good amount of code, but you can't trust it. It always needs to be reviewed. It makes a lot of mistakes.

Damn, this is powerful.
If AI code was great, and empowered non-programmers, then open source projects should have already committed hundreds of thousands of updates. We should have new software releases daily.

That illustration is bonkers
- this guy, use his stuff a lot
  
  Ah so you’re consistently choosing to make us horny!!!
  
  Wait what this looks exactly like the art in the dentist office I go to. They have superheroes doing dental things, like Catwoman aggressively using their nails to pick at her teeth lol. Is this person near Seattle do you know?

If LangChain was written via VibeCoding then that would explain a lot.
- so what are the sentiments about langchain? I was recently working with it to try to build some automatic PR generation scripts but I didn't have the best experience understanding how to use the library. the documentation has been quite messy, repetitive and disorganized—somehow both verbose and missing key details. but it does the job I wanted it to, namely letting me use an LLM with tool calling and custom tools in a script
  
  Given the volatility of the space I don't think it could have been doing stuff much better, doubt it's getting out of alpha before the bubble bursts and stuff settles down a bit, if at all.
  Automatic pr generation sounds like something that would need a prompt and a ten-line script rather than langchain, but it also seems both questionable and unnecessary.
  If someone wants to know an LLM's opinion on what the changes in a branch are meant to accomplish they should be encouraged to ask it themselves, no need to spam the repository.
  
  seems like garbage to me
  
  sounds like you figured out the referenced problem for yourself already

AI isn't bad when supervised by a human who knows what they're doing. It's good to speed up programmers if used properly. But business execs don't see that.
Even when I supervise it, I always have to step in to clean up it's mess, tell it off because it randomly renames my variables and functions because it thinks it knows better and oversteps. Needs to be put in it's place like a misbehaving dog, lol
- autoplag isn’t bad when supervised by a human
  even when I supervise it, it’s bad
  my god you people are a whole kind of poster and it fucking shows
- yeah nah, it's bad then too actually
  
  How? It's just like googling stuff but less annoying