Thread

Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase

116 points · 167 comments · bundie

brink · 1791054618 · focus · HN ↗
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.
1. lucianmarin · 1791055784 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. fignews · 1791057618 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you considered that maybe this is a reflection of your skills rather than that of the LLM?
    sirsinsalot · 1791058188 · focus · HN ↗
    Have you considered it isn't?
    Save your "you're holding it wrong" if you're not going to suggest how to hold it.
    Cult speak escape hatches are intellectually lazy.
    fignews · 1791058956 · focus · HN ↗
    Sure, happy to provide you with an example of how to hold it (turns out Steve was right) =D
    <a href="https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent is 99% (just a guess) LLM generated. 1140 closed pull requests this week. 1.5k closed issues. The github insights page for commits doesn't load for me presumably because it can't handle this scale of commits. But I estimate ~1K commits per day on average.
    There's a blog entry <a href="https://nousresearch.com/refactoring-hermes-with-1393-agents" rel="nofollow">https://nousresearch.com/refactoring-hermes-with-1393-agents that details some work that was done by LLMs to refactor and improve the code.
    I guess they know how to hold it?
    chmod775 · 1791060958 · focus · HN ↗
    You're using quantity metrics to answer a quality question.
    I had a look at the kind of issues that are reported at that project (there's 15k of them, so I can at best assess a couple). It looks like a complete mess: A lot of concurrency and resource mismanagement issues and edge cases that in a better-managed project would have been avoided by construction. They will now will likely be solved by more defensive programming, driving overall complexity ever upwards.
    If you really want to check some quantity metrics to try to reason about code quality, look at whether "fix" PRs are overall LOC neutral or negative (not counting tests). In this project, almost every "fix" is an addition. Worse, almost every fix is more branching.
    If almost every PR is some sort of fix, and most of them add branching, and there's thousands of them weekly... That leads to only one place and I want to be nowhere near it.
    nvme0n1p1 · 1791064113 · focus · HN ↗
    Agreed. As they say, quantity has a quality all of its own.
    Show me an AI that adds features by deleting code (<a href="https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html) and I'll pay attention.

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