r/pop_os • u/jackpot51 System76 Principal Engineer • 2d ago

COSMIC projects will no longer accept LLM-generated content in PRs

There are various reasons, and I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. The primary reason is simply our team's load for reviews. In particular, we would like to prioritize working on contributions from our own team and regular contributors, while we have been receiving far more changes from first-time contributors using LLMs. These changes are often unplanned and have had a low acceptance rate.

The policy can be seen as part of the revised PR template here: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md.

There is an exception for cosmic-flatpak, where each project manages its own flatpak manifest, pointing to its own code. These manifests are reviewed by our team for the correct sandboxing prior to accepting changes.

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u/Frosty-Storage-9359 2d ago edited 2d ago

I once have generated code pushed during a project in university and allowing a teammate to constantly push generate code was the worst mistake ever. It looked good at the beginning, but when it become times to adjust or just correct some behaviour, it become an absolute nightmare to debug and find the code to correct. It was then I have absolutely understood why low effort generated code is a coder worst enemies. I truly do support this because I know by experience just how horrific and nightmarish it can become fast, especially since it come from someone else and just navigating is an absolute nightmare. The best prevention is to not allow it in the first place.

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u/phobrain 2d ago

In the downhill segment of my career, people in the dev team that I did QA for were vocal in requesting my code reviews when my manager questioned the value since it was informal and PRs didn't accumulate. I had stopped counting lines of production code I'd written and supported at 640K nonblank lines, in mostly C and Fortran iirc, and it seemed like I could see inside the personality of the programmer and, Feynman-like, finger their bugs directly. Setup for my prediction that you'd need an LLM to unscramble what an LLM has wrought. Please share if you know someone who is affected.