Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase

Completely performative.

You build your OS atop thousands of open source packages, many of which contain AI generated code. Are you going to audit them one by one and remove offending packages? What about the ones you won't remove because the OS would be irreparably broken?

I had a PR in flight that got closed because of this. I had an issue with passwords in the network applet for the VPN and had used Claude to help me identify and then come up with a fix. I did spend a lot time handcrafting and making sure the quality was good, but I respect their decision and no hard feelings, but as someone who have struggled to find time and opportunity to contribute to open source it was a small set back.

there is an ongoing thread here on a similar topic from an AWS expert (former AWS CTO)

"Apparently, AI doesn't lead to positive results in all software development teams. Customers are asking me whether they should slow down the adoption of AI in their teams.

How do you respond to that?

Yes? No? "

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7510679...

Feels like part of it is a learning habit, getting proficient in use of the tools (AI agents) themselves, and better workflow around it, but it remains AI is not perfect yet?

I don't see how this will survive the attacker/defender gap as ls get increasingly good at cyber security and finding 0 days... but maybe it's an obscure enough is it doesn't matter?

I wonder if the issue is mostly the code or the AI written PRs and people using AI to talk to the maintainers. I personally just ban anyone doing the latter, I don't want to talk to opus more than I already do lol

Ok, this may be controversial, but LLM code tokens aren't free, and I run out of my weekly allowance pretty regularly just from doing some fairly heavy projects, so I don't understand why somebody would ever want to spend their own money to make bad PRs on purpose, and I like to assume good intentions from people unless proven otherwise, which means a near blanket ban for LLM authored code for these big open source projects just seemed a bit extreme to me, when the core issue seemed to be that review process/policy should change with the times.

For example, I was helping work on an open-source game engine earlier this year with a longstanding text rendering bug dating back to around 2021 that prevents the engine from being production ready, which the community and myself have developed extensive workaround for. So, one day I've finally said enough and got Claude to debug it. It took Claude 10 minutes to find the bug, it was 3 lines of code change in the renderer (yes, three).

So, I wrote up the regression tests, documented the bug and opened up a PR for the fix, thinking it'll get merged in like less than a week and then we can all move on. The maintainers received it fairly well on the PR, but the PR sat there for nearly 6 months, unmerged, until it finally closed from a bad squash upstream. I'm pretty sure the bug is still there too.

And as a side note, I would be ecstatic if someone wants to contribute to my Github projects with their AI.

"... many of the AI contributions were not planned and showed little understanding of the software architecture. So the team wants to "prioritize working on contributions from our own team and regular contributors.""

Sounds reasonable, even to avid LLM users, I suppose. You have to draw a line. This line is too simplistic, but it'll work, for now.