Let’s put aside for a moment all the ethical/ecological/societal considerations […]
I sometimes feel we’re putting aside too many factors and focus on some hypothetical debate which doesn’t reflect reality.
I mean my point would be, you’ll immediately accept low-quality contributions. And those coding agents for some reason love to generously rewrite stuff and touch a million different files. So what I’ve seen is, you almost immediately end up in some maintainability nightmare which you might or might not have the capacity to deal with (properly). The broad idea by the AI companies is to then use AI to deal with AI. But I’m not sure if that’s a great idea.
I find that it stinks that we let get companies away with simply discarding ethics and existing laws.
Look, I can’t go to a party and tell people, “well, I am a robber, my day job is to mug old ladies at ATM machines and stabbing them to death, then take their money. But this is just my job, it is the economy, bro, we cannot let ancient moral rules interfere with the realities of business!”.
Why are large corporations allowed to behave like this? Like standing above the law?
Im Kapitalismus herrscht das Kapital.
Good question. I feel we here in Europe have a bit more regulation regarding companies in general. But for some reason the big tech companies get away with almost anything. They can do arbitrary evil business models. Own everybody’s private data. Do harm to society. They don’t have to pay taxes. And now we got AI and they’re allowed to steal as well. And some more.
Who do you think is making the laws and deciding which ones are enforced? Capitalists.
There’s a lot of material about this. By chance I came across this wired history video that’s kinda related https://youtu.be/4GRVWIBYvOM
I switched teams at $DAYJOB a few months ago, into a project which is developed open-source mainly by our company and with heavy use of LLMs.
And at some point, one of our devs told me that they explicitly don’t have an
AGENTS.mdfile in the repo (which would contain instructions to make the LLMs generate better results), because they don’t want LLM-generated contributions.Why? Because we would need to review that slop.
I feel like this isn’t talked about enough in these discussions. It’s faster to generate a contribution, but the end result is often considerably worse and needs a much more thorough review.
The workload for maintainers increases. And maintainers were the bottleneck even before LLMs.So, I just don’t think you generally want to allow generated contributions, not without LLMs making a massive leap still.
At best, I would allow it for select people, like the maintainers themselves or past contributors where you know they will ensure a base level of quality and have an understanding of the architecture and the project goals.I’m actually kind of glad at this point that I’ve always been to lazy to share my software projects online, not only do I not have to deal with AI contributions, but none if my code has been used to train AI.
And even better, the only code I ever did upload to Github was my shitty early work that will definitely make it worse.
I almost never use LLM code except as last resort. So, no. And less than .1% of my code are LLM. And I do have to verify, and I rather verify my own anyway.
is this small part worth the effort?
If you want to survive? Yeah. Besides AI isn’t a ego driven maniac like some devs so it’s a bonus.
would you care to explain how you need AI to survive?
Survive? It takes Slop to survive now?
It’s part of the propaganda
This is the wrong question to be asking. “Is the code good” is literally all that matters when writing software that others will use. Slop is slop no matter if it comes from a person or an LLM. A human should be reviewing all code.
“Is the code good” is literally all that matters.
Only if one ignores the ethical, environmental, and copyright concerns.
How dare you have nuance!
Those are imaginary shit made up to stop progress. AI will be used. If not then the project will be formed and the fork will get leaves better than the human slop version. Meanwhile you’ll keep coping that le AI bad with le enbyornmint. AI uses less water than growing almonds. Stop being a brainwashed cattle
AI will be used. If not then the project will be formed and the fork will get leaves better than the human slop version.
I heavily doubt this is actually the case.
But perhaps you can help out and show me some convincing real-world examples where large, mature, abd widely used FOSS projects were forked and became significantly better because use of LLM code generation?
We have these things now for at least a year and as the old saying from the dot com era goes, Internet years are dog years, meaning a three year old dog is adult, so there must be a really successful application of that LLM technology in software development?
Thing is, you can eat and process almonds further, ai slop? Not so much.
AI uses less water than growing almonds. Stop being a brainwashed cattle
Citation needed.
The issue with the almonds is that there are a bunch of dumbasses growing them in an area that, left to itself, would be a desert. They shouldn’t be doing that, either.
Irrelevant whataboutism. Nothing about the almonds justifies or is at all related the datacenter build-outs.
My point was that even if the water use of data centers is less than that of almonds, it does not justify the existence of the data centers because the water use of the almonds is also grossly inflated. You don’t waste 999 million dollars just because someone else is wasting a billion.
there are a few. i feel like this one gives the most info succintly
https://rare.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/AI-and-Water-Use-Updated.pdf
In general, it’s unwise to cite carpetbaggers who don’t account for the full systemic impacts of their data centers.
See, for example: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption
Powering data centers with renewable energy sources, like solar or wind, requires significantly less water consumption than obtaining energy from fossil fuel power plants. With approximately 56% of the electricity used to power data centers nationwide coming from fossil fuels, deploying more clean energy to power these facilities can significantly reduce water consumption. Coal plants are the most water-intensive facilities, requiring approximately 19,185 gallons of water per megawatt-hour (MWh) of power generation. Natural gas power plants consume approximately 2,800 gallons per MWh. In 2022, 40% of all total U.S. annual water withdrawals, or about 48.5 trillion gallons, were made by coal and gas power plants. Of those 48.5 trillion gallons, 962 billion gallons of water were consumed and were no longer available for direct downstream use.
No puppies for you
The problem is “slop code” and “bad code” are always the same thing. That’s why it’s called slop code.
Agreed!
Yes. I think that’s regularly the reason why I decline AI contribution/assistance. Quality just isn’t great. The coding agents just rewrite way too much code. And the reasoning in the PRs or backlog of the agent is regularly missing the bigger picture, or besides the point. It’s really hard to get good quality out of an LLM and most people (including me) don’t manage to pull it off. At least for more complex stuff. I can do one-off things with AI or cobble a website together with some Javascript included.
