Source (Mastodon)

Transcript

Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?

Did you guess AI?

Because if you did, you’d be right. I don’t want to put anyone on blast here so please don’t go digging to find the motivating MR and harass the contributor or anything like that.

But the situation was exactly what you might think. Someone ran ChatGPT on the code and asked it for suggestions on making it more performant. They applied a bunch of the changes against their local branch, tested it, and found that it gave maybe a 0.5-1.0% perf boost in some titles.

That’s totally fine. I don’t care what tools you use to find a bottleneck. I’ll happily take more FPS, no matter who found the issue or how. If some AI assistant helps you find things no one else has found and lets us make drivers faster, great!

But that’s not what happened.

What happened next is that they then tried to make it the Mesa project maintainers’ job to sort through the shit ChatGPT spit out and decide what’s useful and what’s not and why the changes helped and whether or not they were correct. The contributor had no no idea and, more importantly, they had no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base or the hardware in question. They just wanted to run ChatGPT and send its suggestions towards upstream.

This is not useful. This is not contributing. It’s just burning maintainer time sorting through AI hallucinations. We have enough mediocre code to review that comes from actual humans who are actually trying to learn about Mesa and help out. We don’t need to add AI shit to the merge request pile. If you don’t understand the patch well enough to be able to describe what it does and why it makes things faster, don’t submit it.

So now we’re making it really clear: If you submit the merge request, you’re responsible for the code change as if you typed it yourself. You don’t get to claim ignorance and “because the AI said so”. It’s your responsibility to do due diligence to make sure it’s correct and to accurately describe the change in the commit message.

Some things shouldn’t have to be explicitly written down but here we are… :::

  • lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
    9·
    11 hours ago

    Brodie Robertson made a video about that incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d8jLfa5Mx8

    The Mesa developers had been extremely patient throughout the process, but that guy really didn’t get it. In his mind, creating an RFC with a bunch of AI-generated garbage was part of the normal development process.

    Also, the claimed “performance improvements” are within margin of error and his code was even slower in some instances, as the Mesa devs pointed out.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      9·
      9 hours ago

      Yeah, didn’t ban AI outright, just saying you need to be able to be responsible and understand the code you submit… Very reasonable.

      The fact the some vibe coding ai bros can only spew nonsense is obnoxious. But the tools do have utility, but they tend to vomit out a lot of garbage that must be culled and the remainder generally needs rework. Sometimes you just have to recognize that the results are garbage and just have to throw the whole thing out instead of trying to fix it.

      It’s interesting because even when it is useful and saves time, it’s annoying as hell to babysit and exhausting because you really can’t let your guard down because it will screw up important details that you still have to micro manage.