this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
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Tangentially related rant: We had a new contributor open up a pull request today and I gave their changes an initial look to make sure no malicious code is included.
I couldn't see anything wrong with it. The PR was certainly a bit short, but the task they tackled was pretty much a matter of either it works or it doesn't. And I figured, if they open a PR, they'll have a working solution.
...well, I tell the CI/CD runner to get going and it immediately runs into a compile error. Not an exotic compile error, the person who submitted the PR had never even tried to compile it.
Then it dawned on me. They had included a link to a GitHub Copilot workspace, supposedly just for context.
In reality, they had asked the dumbass LLM to do the change described in the ticket and figured, it would produce a working PR right off the bat. No need to even check it, just let the maintainer do the validation.
In an attempt to give them constructive feedback, I tried to figure out, if this GitHub Copilot workspace thingamabob had a Compile-button that they just forgot to click, so I actually watched Microsoft's ad video for it.
And sure enough, I saw right then and there, who really was at fault for this abomination of a PR.
The ad showed exactly that. Just chat a bit with the LLM and then directly create a PR. Which, yes, there is a theoretical chance of this possibly making sense, like when rewording the documentation. But for any actual code changes? Fuck no.
So, most sincerely: Fuck you, Microsoft.
Surely you have to blame the idiot human here who actually has the ability to reason (in theory)
You think the decision to build this bot like that was not made by a human? Its idiot humans all the way down.
Of course but people selling/offering shitty tool options is not only expected, it's guaranteed. I certainly do not understand this tendency to blame the machine or makers of the machine and excuse the moronic developer
Nono i agree with you, people like that cant be trusted with tying their shoes.
I just wanted to point out that the system is the way it is because of "idiot human here who actually has the ability to reason"
The person who uses the shitty tool is a moron. The person who makes the shitty tool is an asshole. At least in this case where the shitty tool is actively promoting shitty PRs.
Responsibility is shared. It's not one or the other.
Many people don't know what they're doing. That's kind of expected. But a tool provider and seller should know what they're doing. Enabling people to behave in a negative way should be questioned. Maybe it's a consequence of enablement, or maybe it's bad design or marketing. Where criticism is certainly warranted.
Yes the only people ever to blame are everyone but the people who actually did a thing. That's the same reason voters aren't responsible for trump, Democrats are. /s
Well, for reasons, I happen to know that this person is a student, who has effectively no experience dealing with real-world codebases.
It's possible that the LLM produced good results for the small codebases and well-known exercises that they had to deal with so far.
I'm also guessing, they're learning what a PR is for the first time just now. And then being taught by Microsoft that you can just fire off PRs without a care in the world, like, yeah, how should they know any better?
ultimately the people responsible are the ones giving people tools that can be misused, you don't hand a gun to a child.