Makes sense to me. Agreed
At this point, this is the only reasonable way forward. I actually have no idea how “the community” feels about LLMs in Nixpkgs, besides that it’s very controversial. There also isn’t a real “official” thread on the topic, which might be a reason why the PR linked (which I will call the PR for the rest of this post) has 99 comments (before anyone points it out, I realize that I am a part of the “problem” there). Also, as @djacu points out, none of the discussions have had super clear guidelines/definitions, which leaves us with an archive of the opinions of several prominent and/or vocal figures in the community, but little guidance on what it should mean for the future of the project. We could just keep discussing it and hope that a solar flare will make it all pointless.
There was: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/514587
3 Likes
It might be that there needs to be another one because that PR was merged and the thread seems stale, but there are clearly lots of unanswered questions beyond establishing the initial policy. In line with discussions had in My experience of contributing to Nixpkgs, having this debate in a “regular” (while still relevant) PR probably isn’t a great look from an outsider’s perspective.
PRs are where work actually happens, but also worth noting that the PR was at least publicized to this discourse concurrently at
A coworker shared this sentiment that I think perfectly captures my own:
I am not free from opinions but I refrain from commenting.
2 Likes
We already know your opinions since you shared them on your PR (linked above, twice) that invites in more extractive PRs 
You don’t have to pretend that you’re keeping silent.
11 Likes
I’ve been curious about what is the amount of assistance that already landed into nixpkgs. I compiled a table, which you can find here
5 Likes
What’s more intersting to me would be the number of commits denied. I wonder if there’s a pattern there?
It’s also simply demeaning to see people I formerly held in very high esteem and looked up to, go full in and changing from people you can talk to to being indistinguishable from actual, real life cult members.
Yeah, this has been my experience with a lot of anti-AI people too
It seems to me that as LLMs are improved and become more useful to programmers, the angrier, more desperate, and absolute the opposition becomes in trying to dissuade their use.
I don’t like the article itself very much, but its title is on point: AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy
5 Likes
It seems to me that as LLMs are improved and become more useful to programmers, the angrier, more desperate, and absolute the opposition becomes in trying to dissuade their use.
I think this is a really poor attempt at framing others just because you dont agree with them, which is just not a proper way to have a discussion. It very pushing and i urge you to stop this kind of comments.
15 Likes
As a reviewer, I’d be unhappy with this consequence.
The social contract is that when I spend time reviewing someone’s PR, I’m not just investing in making that PR better; I’m also investing in making that contributor better. If that contributor is secretly an LLM, one that only gets better when its company releases a new version, I’m wasting that time. I would much rather spend time on human contributors who could then become human maintainers than on PRs from contributors who will only ever be LLM operators. Consequently, I would rather have an easier time distinguishing between the two.
This is my personal stance and I’m not necessarily against other people spending their time however they want, in support of or against LLM replacements for thoughtful, human programming. I’m just objecting to the notion that getting all LLM-generated PRs up to acceptable quality is the only point a reviewer has in mind when considering this whole question.
21 Likes
There’s a bit of irony telling me I”m “pushing a bad-faith framing” and trying to “discredit others” when the person I replied to literally wrote about people being “indistinguishable from actual, real life cult members”. There’s not much good faith to be found to begin with.
But no, I’m not commenting here in bad-faith. You might disagree with my comment, but that does not mean I wrote it in bad-faith.
I meant what I wrote: the more LLMs are improved and the more useful they become to programmers, the angrier, more desperate, and absolute the opposition to them becomes. That’s my genuine takeaway from a lot of the “discourse” online around LLMs over the past year, including here in this forum.
You might disagree, but don’t try to dismiss my comment as some sort of bad faith trolling or whatever.
5 Likes
“the angrier, more desperate, and absolute the opposition” just frame people you dont agree with as the bad actors. It’s incredibly wrong.
3 Likes
Nah, a person is not a “bad actor” just because they are angry, desperate, and absolute in their opposition to LLMs. I actually think that’s a very normal reaction for a person to have to a technology, cultural shift, or some other “force” that they have a strong distaste for, but is steadily gaining ground despite their opposition to it. I certainly went through my own period of that with LLMs.
Please stop accusing me of participating in bad-faith or framing people as bad actors or all this other meta-commentary stuff.
3 Likes
Given the discussion about whether people want to review them (or not) and the fact that we already require commit trailers, I am becoming more in favor of an automatic PR label. That way people who dislike them can filter them out (github allows you to negative-filter labels, IIRC).
14 Likes
Last I heard, @ethancedwards is on top of this. 
1 Like
It seems to me that as LLMs are improved and become more useful to programmers, the angrier, more desperate, and absolute the opposition becomes in trying to dissuade their use.
It seems to me that as more people want to protect themselves from AI getting everywhere, the angrier, more desperate, and absolute the opposition becomes in trying to push their slop.
…see?
3 Likes
Those are both fair takes. What am I supposed to see here?
2 Likes
@Sigmanificient, @ile-du-fantome:
Can we accept both of the following and be done with it?
- It’s not uncommon that people are called out as ‘angry’ as a tactic for dismissing their point of view — they shouldn’t be taken seriously, they’re too emotional to think rationally, etc. This isn’t good, and we should be sensitive to it, and in particular when people object along these lines it is kind to make some effort to accommodate them.
- Not every instance of ‘people get angry when X is happening’ is meant as an example of the above, and it is kind to assume good faith and chalk up any misunderstandings to cultural differences (of which we have many in this international community!).
20 Likes