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?
    diek · 1791072956 · focus · HN ↗
    I find it funny that the original complaint was: "AI made a mess of the codebase".
    Your response was: "Well you're not doing it right, but these hermes devs know what they're doing".
    But the blog post you linked to shows their prompt, which is:
    > I want god files broken up. I want simplification across the board. I want unification of helpers and methods that can be reused. I want less if-if-if-if-if-if-else routing. I want code legibility up. I want interpretability of the codebase and how things connect to each other up.
    So it sounds like AI made their code a mess too. They then tried to make the point of how much money they saved cleaning up the code with AI, that AI made a mess of to begin with.
    And if you look at the merged PRs on that project, a ton of them are bug fixes... to the code the AI wrote. And that's been my personal experience too: AI creates a huge amount of churn in a codebase. Just vast amounts of PRs fixing code that the AI itself wrote.

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