Seems like reading the code is now the real work. AI writes PRs instantly but reviewing them still takes time. Everything flipped. Expect more projects to follow - maintainers can just use ai themselves without needing external contributions.
Understanding (not necessarily reading) always was the real work. AI makes people less productive because it's speeding up the thing that wasn't hard (generating code), while generating additional burden on the thing that was hard (understanding the code).
There are many cases in which I already understand the code before it is written. In these cases AI writing the code is pure gain. I do not need to spend 30 minutes learning how to hold the bazel rule. I do not need to spend 30 minutes to write client boilerplate. List goes on. All broad claims about AI's effects on productivity have counterexamples. It is situational. I think most competent engineers quietly using AI understand this.
The problem is, even if all that is true, it says very little about the distribution of AI-generated pull requests to GitHub projects. So far, from what I’ve seen, those are overwhelmingly not done by competent engineers, but by randos who just submit a massive pile of crap and expect you to hurry up and merge it already. It might be rational to auto-close all PRs on GitHub even if tons of engineers are quietly using AI to deliver value.
I mean we did copy/paste before this? Also create-react-app is basically that. And probably better than a stochastic AI generating it.
It makes a great code reading tool if you use it mindfully. For instance, you can check the integrity of your tests by having it fuzz the implementation and ensure the tests fail and then git checkout to get clean again.
AI makes people less productive because it’s speeding up the thing that was hard: training AI for better future AI.
The productivity gets siphoned to the AI companies owning the AI.
You'll be unsurprised how many AI poison pill projects are on GitHub
That is how the main point of the Das Kapital looks in the modern, AI, world.
In the civic tech hacknight community I'm part of, it's hard to collaborate the same now, at least when people are using AI. Mostly because now code often feels so disposable and fast. It's like the pace layers have changed
It's been proposed that we start collaborating in specs, and just keep regenerating the code like it's CI, to get back to the feeling of collaboration without holding back on the energy and speed of agent coding
> Mostly because now code often feels so disposable and fast
I really like this thought. We used to take pride in elegant solutions and architectural designs. Now, in the era of shipping fast and AI, this has been disregarded. Redundancy is everywhere, spaghetti is normalized. AI code has always been unsettling for me and I think this is why.
Think 1 <pick currency> shops, now that factories have fully taken over.
I see a future where those that survive are doing mostly architecture work, and a few druids are hired by AI companies.
Clowns will just use LLMs to post slop comments in the spec discussions.
This is probably true, and while I expect productivity to go up, I also expect "FOSS maintainer burnout" to skyrocket in the coming years.
Everyone knows reading code is one-hundredth as fun as writing it, and while we have to accept some amount of reading as the "eating your vegetables" part of the job, FOSS project maintainers are often in a precarious enough position as it is re: job satisfaction. I think having to dramatically increase the proportion of reading to writing, while knowing full well that a bunch of what they are reading was created by some bozo with a CC subscription and little understanding of what they were doing, will lead to a bunch of them walking away.
Not to worry! Microslop probably has a product in the works to replace disgruntled open-source maintainers with agreeable, high-review-throughput agentic systems.
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