every single published study shows that AI makes developers worse.

Can’t thank you enough for this list!!! I asked anti AI folks and the best I got was a study on AI assisted essay writing with 8 people per control group. The rest were insults, mockery, shifting goalposts, so naturally, as someone who just arrived at the fence, I found myself siding with the less troll-ey side. My guess is this is more an issue of “worse than an enemy is an incompetent ally” because any single study in your list would have done it for me.

This study has some positives on AI use in coding, but I’d exercise caution due to the tabloid-ey nature of using the term “AI-slop” everywhere in a study that’s supposed to be unbiased.

you’ll see that “slop” in the survey does not refer to AI-driven PRs in general, but to specifically low-quality AI-generated PRs.

This part is actually unclear. The question posed to survey participants that allowed researchers to determine a PR was “AI slop” is left out of the report. And this line under the chart showing “25% slop etc.” is troubling:

Average estimated percentage of incoming PRs that are low-quality and/or AI-generated

How this particular question was framed is of critical importance here and without it, it’s easy to assume that all reported AI use was broadly categorized as “slop”

Sadly I could not find a way to access the full list of questions used in the survey to confirm this.

It looks like it was more of a survey and afaict, participants weren’t given an opportunity to distinguish between “AI slop” and high quality AI assisted contributions (so were all AI contributions reported as “slop”?!)

To answer your other questions, this is the relevant part:

Across the board, genAI reduces estimated task time across all six measured activities in the pooled sample, with the largest gains in code authoring (−52%) and code review & feedback (−44%), and smaller but still meaningful reductions in technical discussion (−20%) and discussion on proposals (−19%)

Productivity gains are most often reinvested in addressing technical debt [66%], adding new features [63%], and learning/upskilling [58%] … genAI productivity is invested right back into OSS projects. In other words, genAI is not shrinking the overall OSS workload so much as reallocating it toward highervalue and longer-deferred work, from debt paydown to skill-building.

It’s not all clear weather and blue skies though. My interpretation of the findings is that there definitely are challenges to address, but also that those that take the effort to address and integrate AI usage see the most in terms of net positives.

You can download the full report here.

tiring

Hate to tell you this but that’s probably a core feature here.

Someone was trying to argue here that code is less about what it actually does and more about the feelings that drove them (as distinct from thought processes or motivating logic behind them) and since AI betrays this, must AI disclosure blah blah!!!

Once arguments have entered the realm of absurdity and legitimate discourse is overshadowed by bad faith discussions of shifting goalposts and gish gallops, the only question that remains is who stands to gain the most from the english speaking world being slow to adopt AI.

Once reasonable heads have left the room and decline to discuss any topic on AI (because they expect the toxic environment devoid of reason), only agenda driven collectives and a handful of their useful idiots will steer future discourse.

What would be the point of jumping through these hoops in the first place? As OP pointed out, the disclosure requirement is itself irrelevant due to the amount of scrutiny the code goes through. So we’re forcing disclosure to… shame AI users? Discourage its use?

The quoting bit is just me teasing you and the edit was just that I said “you” when I should’ve said “they” in the first sentence. Sorry to disappoint, I guess.

Also, accusing others of deleting or editing their comments while using an account that isn’t even a month old kinda looks like projection.

Interesting interpretation of my comment. Do you often feel that people on the internet are out to get you?

You said I “argued for” open source, copyleft and how copyright should not exist at all.

I’m not OP. But I think OP has you pegged.

I get why the quoting bothers you, but ime, people with a particular style of ‘reasoning’ tend to go back and edit or delete all of their comments.

I literally never said any of those things. Do you want to engage with people or just have fictional discussions in your own echo chamber?

Also, are we forgetting that AI models were trained by stealing from a fuckton of people? How are folks ok with this? Why is the discussion solely about how well the models work? Where is everyone’s moral compass?

Also considering how often you miss the mark with it, maybe look up what psychopath actually means…

As time goes by, you just learn to understand that some people are just not worth your time.

No u

Children don’t typically express honesty with ‘fuckstick’. ‘Childish’ here is used to refer to the absence of capacity or ability to engage in constructive discussion. But feel free to keep painting ‘fuckstick’ in any shade you like. I personally prefer ‘Yo mama’ jokes when I lack the ability to win a particular argument.

Sure, but if ‘fuckstick’ is your sole ‘argument’, you can’t exactly call foul when someone declines to engage with you for being childish.

Do you have an actual counter to my original argument or are you just going to throw vague insults at anyone who disagrees with you like everywhere else you’ve commented in this post?

Sure, but calling people fuckstick isn’t used on a large scale to shut down conversation, there is a qualitative difference here.

Maybe if ‘fuckstick’ was followed by a coherent argument. But instead of providing one, OP just continues to throw insults about their reasonable perspective somehow being ‘smug’ in some way. I’d call that childish too.

90% of AI bros hide it and refuse to disclose and when they do are often extremely cagey about it

source?

Why is it that every single time you see someone trying to claim the role of ‘adult in the room’, they appear to be speaking from a perspective of being perfectly oblivious (albeit sometimes for the purpose of obfuscation)?

Did you miss the part where OP’s entire argument was ‘fuckstick’?

Yes, fuckstick. That’s the whole point to a lot of people. I swear, the level of smugness of AI true believers is totally inappropriate.

Because rules have to be enforced, and investing time and effort into detecting and punishing rule-breakers would be a pointless endeavor when, disclosure/AI or not, all code has to be reviewed anyway.

I have to say the same thing I said to the other commenter; I’m really not sure that “some people lie so nobody should care about the truth” is the argument you think it is.

Nice attempt at spin but relies too much on readers having room temperature IQ to believe that’s what my argument is. And just to be clear, by ‘Nice attempt’ I’m being sarcastic.

On the contrary, a small piece of text that says “this code deserves more review because humans may not have seen it” is absolutely necessary.

All this is doing is making it so I can hide that I didn’t touch the code.

Why are you assuming that everyone would honestly disclose AI use if it was a rule?

The honest ones that would disclose it to say “this needs more eyes, guys” can still do just that. The dishonest ones that would hide AI use will do exactly that whether it’s a rule or not.

The only difference here is there’s no punitive action to follow for non-disclosure because that would be a gigantic waste of time when, AI or not, all code needs to be reviewed anyway.

I’ve recently been pondering the future impact of AI on coding, while trying to filter out the current noise surrounding the issue (since all it does is muddy the waters). There’s a lot of amateurish supposition to follow, but since you appear to be getting fewer thought out responses than “AI-bad-kill”, take it with a pinch of salt.

There was a recent article on the open source software that props up the internet - (paraphrasing here) one of these repositories had (pre-AI) a user called Jin Yue or Jin Yin who made hundreds of useful pull requests, gained the trust of the repo maintainer and was eventually given admin privileges, only to surrepticiously merge malicious code when no one was looking (eventually discovered ~a month after the fact). I imagine that (likely) state-sponsored attempts like these will make more use of AI in the future for quicker turnaround, and that maintainers will also eventually use AI to quickly audit submitted code for security flaws.

As far as open source software channels are concerned, I imagine there will be a decent amount of low effort malicious software that makes heavy use of AI, submitted to these channels. In such an environment, whether or not users are permitted to candidly disclose AI usage without reprisal will likely make a huge difference, since honest disclosure would invite security-minded people to audit fault-prone AI-assisted code - something that malware distributers will try to avoid at all costs (thereby allowing a distinction that can be leveraged to form between the two).

Just my two cents.

Even considering rhetorical goals and context, without “I particularly dislike this guy”, it’s an enormous leap to twist those words that way.

Stop blaming the pandas.