Valid position from the Void side AND valid crashout. I’m impressed. A distro absolutely can use policy to enforce a vision to be AI-free on the contributions, and a maintainer can quit if they don’t agree with the distro vision
I agree.
Leaving so abruptly may not be the classiest move but it’s not like one can’t leave if he so decides.
The dev will be fine and so will void. Nothing to see here for now.
Do not bring AI review tools into pull requests.
As someone who operates an internal AI code review platform for a large engineering org. Trust me, you want this.
There are countless defects that regularly slip by human review. It’s one of the few places that AI adds immediate, low-risk value.
That aside, though, this is unfortunate. And the author and maintainer of these packages is entirely within their rights to do this as a form of protest.
Absolutionist policies aren’t helpful.
Sure, maybe it’s fantastic at reviewing PRs. I could imagine that. But
Trust me, you want this.
is pretty condescending, implying those against it haven’t thought it through. I personally could list about twenty reasons for not using AI, many of them infinitely more important than code being well reviewed.
I hate AI and wish it would disappear but you’re right. The automatic PR reviewing LLM at my job genuinely catches a lot of issues that would fly under the radar normally. Obviously a human review is still needed but those downvoting clearly do not work in tech because it’s basically just a fancy SonarQube*
CircleCI (well, apparently they’re AI now but before they did that). If it’s wrong, resolve the issue with one click; if it’s right, then its beneficial?The blanket AI hate is stupid because it drowns out the valid criticisms like energy use, knowledge loss, unmaintainability, etc
edit: I said CircleCI but was thinking of SonarQube
those downvoting clearly do not work in tech
Not all turkeys voted for christmas
I don’t entirely get the point you’re making but if I’m understanding it correctly my response would be that I’m not pro AI. The issue is that the AI vs not AI conversation always lacks any nuances which means those on the fence just disregard anything being said as just two evangelical bases yelling at each other
We can appreciate the positive aspects of things in tech even if the technology as a whole is a massive problem.
Edit: my point being: can you tell me why PR reviews generated by an LLM are bad? If the discussion was actually diving into the details then I’d be interested but blanket statements are just stupid
Edit: my point being: can you tell me why PR reviews generated by an LLM are bad? If the discussion was actually diving into the details then I’d be interested but blanket statements are just stupid
If the LLM is owned by an external corporation: Because it generates a workflow dependency that will be enshittified to screw you over. The current quality of service is backed by unfathomable amounts of investment capital, and they will want to make a profit (or political gains) out of it at some point. Also, if you are dealing with any sort of valuable information, because the plagiarism company will commit plagiarism to you.
If you’re running a model locally, then it will still hallucinate, be racist, sexist, and biased in other ways (meaning it will be unnecessarily harsh to some and gullibly approving towards others). Though to be fair it might not be worse than you or your colleagues. Also, because model weights can’t be interpreted, you’re going on faith that the LLM has been trained with your best interest in mind. There is nothing stopping the LLM trainers from, for example, teaching it a pass phrase that will get it to sign off on anything. And then it’s up to your underfunded and undertrained human reviewers to catch whatever malware they’re trying to sneak into your code base.
It seems quite possible that your risk profile and tolerance for discrimination are such that it makes sense for you to run a local LLM. But the cloud-based ones are definitely going to be bad for you in the long run. Unless you’re phoning it in at work and this will help you half-ass it even more, of course.
We can appreciate the positive aspects of things in tech even if the technology as a whole is a massive problem.
See, I don’t agree with this, and that’s why I see it as “stupid” to have a discussion about the nuance of LLM use.
“Damn, the mushroom cloud coming off of that bomb is hella dope tho”, “woah, look at the speed that projectile gets fired at! I didnt even see it hit me”, “actually, those drones can carry water to put out forest fires as well as explosive devices”. etc.
Having used these at my day job I can understand the policy against them. Ours is fairly well tuned by the people who operate it, adapted to our codebase, and its comments are usually on point, but its false positive rate for my own PRs is still in the low double digit percent range (feedback that’s factually wrong, not relevant to the PR, not scoped appropriately, etc). Before all that tuning, back when we first started using it, I probably went days or weeks without seeing a well-founded suggestion from the tool. Incorrect comments still create work for the PR author (investigating, double checking, etc), they create noise for human reviewers, and ambiguity about whether a change is ready to be merged. I read that policy as being against random people pointing their own review tools at PRs for this project, which I assume would be more on the high false positive/high noise end of the spectrum (i.e., not being tuned for this specific project). I can totally see why already busy maintainers would want to spare themselves from a bunch of poorly calibrated noise.
One nice thing about them compared to human reviewers is that you can just tell them to (professionally) fuck off if they’re wrong without hurting their feelings or having an HR conversation.
I’m not saying you are wrong (not saying you are right either), but… your comment sounds a lot like “trust me, I have a conflict of interest” :)
Here the pull request and discussion:
https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/62351#issuecomment-5641804457
Changes not tested.
Sorry, but what does AI achieve that static code analysis tools don’t? Apart from maybe ridiculous environmental impact?
What if the goals of reviewing a PR in Void Linux are different from the goals of reviewing a PR in your org? Are there any possible goals you can think of, where introducing an AI tool would actually be detrimental?
It sounds like their policy is basically the same as Human Contribution Policy 2-TR. That’s awesome.
I just skimmed over the text. That’s just a lot of words for saying “no ai”.
Personally, I like debian’s approach more. They put some granularity of levels as to when and how much ai assistance can you take.
But I can totally see that void, being the profile of users and devs they got, would prefer to be way more radical.
A lot of it is very explicit definitions so there’s no ambiguity, and reasoning to explain why. None of the reasoning is quality of the code, which is what most people assume is the reason.
You know what has never benefited any of us here? Private jets and yachts.
Good riddance.
