Hacker News Reader

Comment by noosphr | Hacker News Reader

That's no different to on boarding any new contributor. I cringe at the code I put out when I was 18.

On top of all that every open source project has a gray hair problem.

Telling people excited about a new tech to never contribute makes sure that all projects turn into templeOS when the lead maintainer moves on.

View on HN

Onboarding a new contributor implies you’re investing time into someone you’re confident will pay off over the long run as an asset to the project. Reviewing LLM slop doesn’t grant any of that, you’re just plugging thumbs into cracks in the glass until the slop-generating contributor gets bored and moves on to another project or feels like they got what they wanted, and then moves on to another project.

I accept that some projects allow this, and if they invite it, I guess I can’t say anything other than “good luck,” but to me it feels like long odds that any one contributor who starts out eager to make others wade through enough code to generate that many comments purely as a one-sided learning exercise will continue to remain invested in this project to the point where I feel glad to have invested in this particular pedagogy.

>Onboarding a new contributor implies you’re investing time into someone you’re confident will pay off over the long run as an asset to the project.

No you don't. And if you're that entitled to people's time you will simply get no new contributors.

I’ll grant you that, but at least a new contributor who actually writes the code they contribute has offered some level of reciprocity with respect to the time it takes to review their contributions.

Trying to understand a problem and taking some time to work out a solution proves that you’re actually trying to learn and be helpful, even if you’re green. Using a LLM to generate a nearly-thousand-line PR and yeeting it at the maintainers with a note that says “I don’t really know what this does” feels less hopeful.

I feel like a better use of an LLM would be to use it for guidance on where to look when trying to see how pieces fit together, or maybe get some understanding of what something is doing, and then by one’s own efforts actually construct the solution. Then, even if one only has a partial implementation, it would feel much more reasonable to open a WIP PR and say “is this on the right track?”

Not getting thousand line AI slop PRs from resume builders who are looking for a "LLVM contributor" bullet point before moving on is a net positive. Lack of such contributors is a feature, not a bug.

And you can't go and turn this around into "but the gate keeping!" You just said that expecting someone to learn and be an asset to a project is entitlement, so by definition someone with this attitude won't stick around.

Lastly, the reason that the resume builder wants the "LLVM contributor" bullet point in the first place is precisely because that normally takes effort. If it becomes known in the industry that getting it simply requires throwing some AI PR over the wall - the value of this signal will quickly diminish.

Unrelated to my other point, I absolutely get wanting to lower barriers, but let’s not forget that templeOS was the religious vanity project of someone who could have had a lot to teach us if not for mental health issues that were extant early enough in the roots of the project as to poison the well of knowledge to be found there. And he didn’t just “move on,” he died.

While I legitimately do find templeOS to be a fascinating project, I don’t think there was anything to learn from it at a computer science level other than “oh look, an opinionated 64-bit operating environment that feels like classical computing and had a couple novel ideas”

I respect that instances like it are demonstrably few and far between, but don’t entertain its legacy far beyond that.

> While I legitimately do find templeOS to be a fascinating project, I don’t think there was anything to learn from it at a computer science level other than “oh look, an opinionated 64-bit operating environment that feels like classical computing and had a couple novel ideas”

I disagree, actually.

I think that his approach has a lot to teach aspiring architects of impossibly large and complex systems, such as "create a suitable language for your use-case if one does not exist. It need not be a whole new language, just a variation of an existing one that smooths out all the rough edges specific to your complex software".

His approach demonstrated very large gains in an unusually complicated product. I can point to projects written in modern languages that come nowhere close to being as high-velocity as his, because his approach was fine-tuned to the use-case of "high-velocity while including only the bare necessities of safety."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com