Am 01.06.26 um 11:07 schrieb Lukas-Fabian Moser:
Hi Arno,
Am 01.06.26 um 10:36 schrieb Arno Waschk via Discussions on LilyPond
development:
This seems wrong at least at two points:
1. The automatic assumption that any support of AI makes a
contributor not read his contribution, not understand his
contribution, and the whole thing ununderstandable to a degree which
can not be remedied in the same way as hand written code is
completely irrational. AI code can be bad. Manual code can be bad. I
produced both kinds. Reasonable people read their code before
submitting, or, say, try to put it in shape. Assuming people lose
their reasonable minds by using an AI summary of a local MR index
is, sorry, ridiculous.
Nowhere did I state that.
It's a fact that AI assistance makes it /possible/ to generate large
amounts of working code that the human contributor doesn't fully
understand. This was practically impossible before, so it creates a
new situation.
I can easily produce code manually, and not understand it. Or worse,
live in the illusion to understand what i am doing, but being totally
wrong in this.
This becomes a problem since a system (like with LilyPond) that relies
on human code review (together with a very small pool of active
reviewers) can easily be overwhelmed by the amount of code that can be
produced with the new technology. So we must find reasonable
guidelines how to deal with the new technology.
Currently the amount of MRs, especially when not counting those which
seem to come from what looks to me like being the core lilypond team,
which rightfully could be trusted more than MRs from outsiders,
obviously, is rather underwhelming.
(I know that this is different in other projects. One could learn from
those *before* assuming problems which either do not exist, or can be
dealt with in case they might exists at any given point)
I view Dan's question as an honest attempt do find a solution. I'm
surprised that you construed his e-mail (which also contained the
sentence "I just wouldn't want the uncertainty to last so long that a
capable contributor gets frustrated and leaves.") as an expression of
"academic AI hate" or "something personal".
I cannot separate this email from other communication which did already
happen. If "capable" was for me, nice, but then all the other explicit
and implicit pejoratives against persons and code apply to me too. And
enough details were mentioned which can only apply to me, or rather my
MR !3058
Furthermore, I also explicitly pointed out that there are various
kinds of AI assistance; so my opinion was considerably more nuanced
than you represent it here.
2. What you wrote basically means, that code can be trusted blindly
once it was written by hand. This is but a joke.
No, it doesn't; please don't misrepresent what I wrote.
On the contrary, what I wrote was this:
"This is not just a question about AI contributions: It means that
LilyPond also shouldn't contain human-written code of the "I added
that line and then the problem somehow went away, knock on wood" type.
It's of course hard to enforce this, but a thorough review where
questions can be raised and must be dealt with makes it more probable."
Lukas
If this is to mean that any code needs to be read by contributors and
reviewers, we can agree on this. But then any discussion about how much
bias is justified against code which comes with whatever support from
whatever kind of AI (which is how i understand the wordings here) is
completely obsolete.
And i hope that on can understand that it adds only to the frustration
if one spends quite some time on 20 years of silently cursing about #34
but never complaining (always thinking "i had better write code than
complain"), observing that other attempts to solve this by even the most
lilypond experienced coders did not materialize over many years,
external attempts also gave up (e. g. !3002) and one finally sees a way
to propose a solution (nota bene: not claiming a 100% one) and hands it
in, expressedly as an unfinished proposal of an idea, with some working
(!) code but with the question if before all any further investment into
this makes sense in the eyes of the core developpers and project owners,
is only met by "the git history is not perfectly clean, we won't
evaluate even the concept" or "there was some assistance by AI, so we
are to assume that he never read his code and doesn't understand it
anyway" and ptraonising personal emails about how much rude tone of
developers or reviewers one should be "conciliant" against, and
pseudo-academic meta discussions like this one, or about if creating
code is allowed to change from how it was the ideology in the 80s.
Maybe 10% of the communication was in one or the other way constructive.
Thanks to Han-Wen in this context.
Maybe this is lilypond's strategy of keeping the amount of external MRs low.
Might work.
Arno
