I have opinions.

1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig.

2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for bootstrapping beginners. But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé, maybe we could shift the experience credentialing from “I wrote this code” to “I wrote a clear piece explaining why this code should have been merged.” I’m not 100% in love with the idea of being relegated to review-engineer, but that seems to be where the wind is blowing.

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé,

No, we're not. There are a lot of people with a very large financial stake in telling us that this is the future, but those of us who still trust our own two eyes know better.

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé

Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it? That training opportunity is exactly what the given issue in matplotlib was designed to provide, and safeguarding it was the exact reason the LLM PR was rejected.

It's funny because the whole kerfuffle is based on the disagreement over the humanity of these bots. The bot thinks he's a human, so it submits a PR. The maintainer thinks the bot it not human, so he rejects it. The bot reacts as a human, writing an angry ans emotional post about the story. The maintainer makes a big fuss because a non-human wrote a hit piece on him. Etc.

I think it could have been handled better. The maintainer could have accepted the PR while politely explaining that such PRs are intentionally kept for novice developers and that the bot, as an AI, couldn't be considered a novice- so please avoid such simple ones in the future and, in case, focus on more challenging stuff. I think everyone would have been happier as a result- including the bot.

The discourse in the Rust community is way better than that, and I believe being a toxic shit-hat in that community would lead to immediate consequences. Even when there was very serious controversy (the canceled conference talk about reflection) it was deviously phrased through reverse psychology where those on the wronged side wrote blogposts expressing their deep 'heartbreak' and 'weeping with pain and disappointment' about what had transpired. Of course, the fiction was blatant, but also effective.

> The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.”

No it was absolutely not. AIs don't have an excuse to make shit up just because it seems like someone else might have made shit up.

It's very disturbing that people are letting this AI off. And whoever is responsible for it.

> The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.”

Regrettably, yes. But I'd like not to forget that this goes both ways. I've seen many instances of maintainers hand-waving at a Code of Conduct with no clear reason besides not liking the fact that someone suggested that the software is bad at fulfilling its stated purpose.

> maybe we could shift the experience credentialing from “I wrote this code” to “I wrote a clear piece explaining why this code should have been merged.”

People should be willing to stand by the code as if they had written it themselves; they should understand it in the way that they understand their own code.

While the AI-generated PR messages typically still stick out like a sore thumb, it seems very unwise to rely on that continuing indefinitely. But then, if things do get to the point where nobody can tell, what's the harm? Just licensing issues?

> Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig.

Can you give examples? I've never heard that people started a blog to attack StackOverflow's founders just because their questions got closed.

1. In other words,

Human: Who taught you how to do this stuff?

AI: You, alright? I learned it by watching you.

This has been a PSA from the American AI Safety Council.