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No AI Slop: A Manifesto

46 points bankombinator 57 minutes ago 14 comments

courtcircuits 50 minutes ago | parent

> Improving the system over patching the output

This really connect with the latest conversations I had with coworkers regarding how can we review gigantic PR generated by AI. One way could be to ask the submitter to give their prompt as part of their contribution. This way it's easier for the reviewer to understand what was the thought process of the contributor and if this very process is sound. Not saying that this way to review is a silver bullet, but at least it removes some weight.

viklove 31 minutes ago | parent

Do most people generate PRs from a one-shot prompt? I have a whole pipeline of prompts, tests and evals, which loop back and potentially restart if the result is inadequate. How would I include that in the PR?

jurgenburgen 21 minutes ago | parent

How does reviewing the long discussion the author had with the LLM prove the code is correct?

dude250711 18 minutes ago | parent

If a PR is gigantic it means the team lead screwed up slicing the work.

grey-area 13 minutes ago | parent

Just ban large prs. They can always be split up, and usually as well as helping review it makes them less risky and easier to find bugs and roll back if there was a problem.

The discipline of splitting them up helps in almost every dimension.

tracerbulletx 12 minutes ago | parent

So what do you think of Discord rewriting in rust, and AWS shipping an emulator that was ai generated? Do you think those were done with small prs? Do you think that it's bad they did those things?

forbiddenvoid 7 minutes ago | parent

Please add your own thoughts to the conversation rather than aggressively asking rhetorical questions. "Counterexamples exist" is hardly a valid criticism of another human's perspective.

mschuster91 23 minutes ago | parent

> Slop is asymmetric. The cost of producing a thousand-line PR or a ten-page doc is approaching zero, while the cost of reviewing it remains constant.

I'd say the cost actually grows as people get laid off left and right, and on top of that, a 1000 line PR from a good human, give me a case of beer and I'll make me some sense of it, but if it's AI slop, get ready to hand me a crate of homemade Slivo or I won't touch that...

smy20011 8 minutes ago | parent

I signed, very balanced take.