It feels to me like a lot of this is dogma. If the code is broken or needs more testing, that can be solved. But it’s orthogonal: the LLM can be used to implement the unit testing and fuzz testing that would beat this library into shape, if it’s not already there. It’s not about adding a human touch, it’s about pursuing completeness. And that’s true for all new projects going from zero to one, you have to ask yourself whether the author drove it to completeness or not. That’s always been true.
You want people to hedge their projects with disclaimers that it probably sucks and isn’t production worthy. You want them to fess up to the fact that they cheated, or something. But they’re giving it away for free! You can just not use it if you don’t want to! They owe you nothing, not even a note in the readme. And you don’t deserve more or less hacker points depending on whether you used a tool to generate the code or whether you wrote it by hand, because hacker points don’t exist, because the value of all of this is (and always will be) subjective.
To the extent that the modern tools and models can’t oneshot anything, they’re going to keep improving. And it doesn’t seem to me like there’s any identifiable binary event on the horizon that would make you change your mind about this. You’re just against LLMs, and that’s the way it is, and there’s nothing that anyone can do to change your mind?
I mean this in the nicest way possible: the world is just going to move on without you.
If the community majority changes it mind then so be it. But the fight will continue for quite some time until that is decided.
I’m tempted to just start putting co-authored-by: Claude in every commit I make, even the ones that I write by hand, just to intentionally alienate people like you.
The best guardrails are linters, autoformatters, type checkers, static analyzers, fuzzers, pre-commit rules, unit tests and coverage requirements, etc. If you genuinely care about open source code quality, you should be investing in improving these tools and deploying them in the projects you rely on.
But if you can’t rephrase your criticism of a patch in terms of things flagged by tools like those, you don’t have a criticism at all. You’re just whining.
i needed this project so i made it for my use case and had to build on top of it. the only way to ensure quality is to read it all line by line.
if you give me code that you yourself have not reviewed i will not review it for you.
Not everyone buys into the inevitabilism. Why should I read code "author" didn't bother to write?
As other similar projects have pointed out, if you have a good test suite and a way for the model to validate its correctness, you can get very good results. And you can continue to iterate, optimize, code review, etc.
I, for one, am definitely not going to use this project for anything serious unless I have thoroughly reviewed the code myself. Prototyping is fine.