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Void Linux maintainer orphans 100+ packages over AI policy dispute (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 7 hours ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[+] -10 points 6 hours ago* (12 children)

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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 hours ago

    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?

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  • [–] 7 points 4 hours ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 33 minutes ago) (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 3 hours ago (2 children)

    those downvoting clearly do not work in tech

    Not all turkeys voted for christmas

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  • [–] 2 points 2 hours ago* (1 child)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 hour ago

    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.

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  • [–] 13 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

    Trust me, nobody trusts you.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 hours ago* (1 child)

    Do you work in tech? How often do you submit PRs? AI reviews are one of the best applications for the technology and non-LLM CI tools have existed for ages to serve a similar but less efficient purpose

    I don't like what AI has done to the software industry but we need to give credit where its due

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