alt Hacker NewsThe issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review.
A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner.
The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch author will just copy paste from an LLM, so the reviewer is essentially just coding with an LLM with more steps.
Prior to LLMs reviewing code was a mentorship experience, the patch author would likely learn a bunch afterwards. Now less so.
As a result a lot of projects are closing to external contributors.
I'm not sure what the answer is, LLM are great at speeding up coding/understanding/etc, but the valuable/expensive piece of work has shifted to reviewing.
Replies
The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle?
Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?
I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
Do all of these folks get the comped Pro Max subscriptions? If not O&A should be.
Or, at the very least, the community should be paying for them.
This is Amdahl's law in action. [1]
Until we figure out a good way to leverage humans in all of this ("Attention is all you need" applies equally to humans as it does to models) productivity gains for the system will always be limited by Amdahl's law. Gwern has an excellent post on this. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law [2] https://gwern.net/guardian-angel