Thread

1. YuechenLi · 1791063642 · focus · HN ↗

   Ok, this may be controversial, but LLM code tokens aren't free, and I run out of my weekly allowance pretty regularly just from doing some fairly heavy projects, so I don't understand why somebody would ever want to spend their own money to make bad PRs on purpose, and I like to assume good intentions from people unless proven otherwise, which means a near blanket ban for LLM authored code for these big open source projects just seemed a bit extreme to me, when the core issue seemed to be that review process/policy should change with the times.

   For example, I was helping work on an open-source game engine earlier this year with a longstanding text rendering bug dating back to around 2021 that prevents the engine from being production ready, which the community and myself have developed extensive workaround for. So, one day I've finally said enough and got Claude to debug it. It took Claude 10 minutes to find the bug, it was 3 lines of code change in the renderer (yes, three).

   So, I wrote up the regression tests, documented the bug and opened up a PR for the fix, thinking it'll get merged in like less than a week and then we can all move on. The maintainers received it fairly well on the PR, but the PR sat there for nearly 6 months, unmerged, until it finally closed from a bad squash upstream. I'm pretty sure the bug is still there too.

   And as a side note, I would be ecstatic if someone wants to contribute to my Github projects with their AI.

   1. northstar702 · 1791072644 · focus · HN ↗

      Feels like AI on autopilot running OSS projects is the dream everyone is trying to get to. Tokens will never be free. Anthropic needs to go IPO. You make an interesting point about personal spend, but bad PRs are unlikely to be on purpose. But the discipline to review/clean up the slop might not be there?

      1. YuechenLi · 1791078822 · focus · HN ↗

         True. I personally use LLMs much more ambitiously to help with my own coding projects, but I've always been very disciplined about planning ahead and task breakdown so that the LLMs can get it right the first time so there won't be any need to fix the code afterwards.

         Other people's open-sourced project is different though, so I tend to check/test the code myself much more rigorously when contributing to other people's repos than if it is my own projects.

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