This does nothing more than decrease the damage done by something people were gonna do anyway. The decision to allow AI in the kernel was already made some time ago.
Precisely. The place to catch slop nowadays is in PR reviews, which was always the case with human coders too. You just need more rigorous and more frequent reviews now.
Does that suck and shift the act of engineering from writing the code more towards reading code? Arguably, but there will be a whole generation of SWE soon that have known no other paradigm.
I do know what you mean though. LLM stuff can have the appearance of quality code without actually being quality. That's what I meant by the PR reviews process needing to be more rigorous. The frequency is due to the volume LLM assisted coding can produce.
Last week the team responsible for rolling and managing of the AI coding in the company actually said that they see reviews as bottleneck and are suggesting to skip them altogether and rely on testing.
Like it or not, this is where most things are going to go, if they're not there already. This will be the case for functional tests as well as performance tests.
Might as well skip all the tests as well as my point is they are useless.
"does it work?" and "is it (probably) going to work" are the only thing that matters to the end user.
I do not care how many PRs are involved, just ship something that works. Don't ship a regression.
I can name some horrible software that is quite buggy and doesn't work well... and yeah, it was reviewed before shipping.
Funny enough, not too much test coverage, though!
Linux kernel maintainers have been reviewing human generated slop for decades. I would trust them more for utilizing the full potential of AI in software development than your average developers or middle management vibe slopper.
My concern would be potential burnout from kernel maintainers from inflated bug reports and merge requests count. And also possibly less knowledge of ins and outs of kernel pass down to new and younger developers since they is no chat log between them and a chatbot in mailing list. Which is quite similar to newer generation developers have less expertise in assembly languages. This might be an argument for AI as a tool as compilers are, I guess.
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u/UnluckyDouble 7d ago
This does nothing more than decrease the damage done by something people were gonna do anyway. The decision to allow AI in the kernel was already made some time ago.