Doesn’t look like goal-post moving to me. GP argued that AI isn’t making a difference, because if it was, we’d see amazing AI-generated open source projects. (Edit: taking a second look, that’s not exactly what GP said, but that’s what I took away from it. Obviously individuals create open source projects all the time.)
You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated.
GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that contributions don’t indicate quality, and thus wasn’t sufficient to qualify as “amazing AI-generated open source projects.”
Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is not sufficient to demonstrate “amazing AI-generated open-source projects.” To demonstrate that, you’d need to point to specific projects that were largely generated by AI.
The only big AI-generated projects I’ve heard of are Steve Yegge’s GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall it. (Just hearsay. I haven’t looked into them myself.)
So at this point, I’d say the burden of proof is on you, as the original goalposts have not been met.
Edit: Or, at least, I don’t think 4% is enough to demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for.
It has been argued for a very long time, lines of code is largely meaningless as a metric. But now that AI is writing those lines... it seems to be meaningful again? I continue to be optimistically skeptical.
It's not a great ask. Who's going to quantify what is 'amazing open source work'?
4% for a single tool used in a particular way (many are out there using AI tools in a way that doesn't make it clear the code was AI authored) is an incredible amount. Don't see how you can look at that and see 'not enough'.
The vast majority of people using these tools aren't announcing it to the world. Why would they ? They use it, it works and that's that.
So we're suddenly going back into measuring lines of code as a useful metric?
Just because people are shitting out endless slop code that they never bothered to throw a 2nd glance at doesn't mean it'sgood or that it's leading to better projects or tools, it literally just means people are pushing code out haphazardly . If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing billions of lines of code added! But none of it is useful in any way.
Same with AI, sure we're generating endless piles of code, but how much of it is actually leading to better software?
It's not the be all end all and there are obviously issues with using it alone, but it's rather silly going the other extreme and pretending it isn't a major factor.
>If I made a python script that everyone started using and all it did was create a repo, commit a README and push it every 5 seconds we'd be seeing
1. Well you can't do that
2. Something like that won't register as Claude Code (or any other AI tool) usage anyway
3. Something like that won't come anywhere near 4%
But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases? At least the end result is basically the same, like that Clawdbot or whatever name they've decided to try ride the coattails of guy who has 70k commits in the last few months that I saw being touted as an impressive feat on HN the other day. How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands of times?
Now whatever, if it's people pushing slop into their own codebase that they own, more power to them, my issue stems from OSS projects being inundated with endless spam MR/PRs from AI hypesters. It's just making maintainer's lives more difficult, and the most annoying part of it all is that they have to put up with people who don't see the effort disparity between them prompting their chatbot to write up some broken bullshit vs the effort required for maintainers to keep up with the spam. It hurts the maintainers, it hurts genuine beginners who would like to learn and contribute to projects, it hurts the projects themselves since they have to waste what precious little time and resources they already have digging through crap, it hurts quite literally everyone who has to deal with it other than the selfish AI-using morons who just take a huge dump over everyone and spouts shit like "Well 4% of all code on Github is now AI-generated!" as if more of that is somehow a good thing.
>But that's what these tools are doing, in a large number of cases?
I mean No not really. I'm not sure why you think that.
>How much broken, unusable code exists within those 70k commits that ultimately would've had the same effect as if he had just pushed a `--allow-empty` commit thousands of times?
How much stable usable code exists within those 70k commits ?
This is pretty much exactly why I said the original question was not a great ask. You have your biases. Show an example and the default response for some almost like a stochastic parrot is, 'Must be slop!". How do you know ? Did you examine it? No, you didn't. That's just what you want to believe so it must be true. It makes for a very frustrating conversation.
You rebutted by claiming 4% of open source contributions are AI generated.
GP countered (somewhat indirectly) by arguing that contributions don’t indicate quality, and thus wasn’t sufficient to qualify as “amazing AI-generated open source projects.”
Personally, I agree. The presence of AI contributions is not sufficient to demonstrate “amazing AI-generated open-source projects.” To demonstrate that, you’d need to point to specific projects that were largely generated by AI.
The only big AI-generated projects I’ve heard of are Steve Yegge’s GasTown and Beads, and by all accounts those are complete slop, to the point that Beads has a community dedicated to teaching people how to uninstall it. (Just hearsay. I haven’t looked into them myself.)
So at this point, I’d say the burden of proof is on you, as the original goalposts have not been met.
Edit: Or, at least, I don’t think 4% is enough to demonstrate the level of productivity GP was asking for.