I think you're right in principle Brian. But in this case George is a programmer by my reckoning and the AI produced a reasonable (makes sense) change request which resolved a problem.
Plus there is the other side to bug fixes inflicted on programmers: bugs inflicted on users. Users just want the program to work. If there is a new way they can contribute a little labor in code generation and testing it seems likely to help more than hurt. Particularly users who are actually programmers with enough taste to know that a change is a waste of time. Looking on the bright side I think these developments may actually finally help deliver on the open source promise. The idea of everyone being empowered by having the code and the benefit to all of programmers contributing changes back. Having the code didn't used to help if you weren't knowledgeable enough about the code base which most people, including programmers are not cognizant of every platform, programming language, build system and library that goes into a working piece of software. So they weren't any better off than with commercial software because of the amount of investment required to make a fix. And if you cannot make a working fix you cannot contribute it back. The best you can do is contribute a bug report. Which you should but now you can do a bit more, and have your car back on the road in the process. All this may be moot for simple bugfixes though. As programmers integrate these tools into their own workflow there will be far fewer easy fixes for users to contribute because the programmer with his tool chain will already have found and applied them. -- John.
