Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TheDong 396 days ago
Even that phrasing is kinda rude. "bridge a communication gap", presumably the gap between programmer and non-programmer, right?

He used AI as in he gave the AI the patch that regressed, asked the AI to "find the bug", and pasted that output.

This would be akin to walking up to the architect for a house, and saying "it's not my job to build buildings, but I tried to use this lego design to show you how to do your job. Look, the legos snap together, can't you do that with the house?"

Using AI to try and explain things to a subject matter expert, which you yourself do not understand, will come off like that, like you're second-guessing, belittling, and underestimating their expertise all at once.
2 comments
carols10cents 396 days ago
And the architect is a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.
link
KingOfCoders 395 days ago
And the architect tells them to submit a new blueprint of the plans otherwise they can't do anything - knowing quite well he's not an architect and can't do that ("Submit a patch").
link
axman6 394 days ago
Thats absolutely not what they asked for, no one was able to reproduce the issue, so they asked for clearer instructions on how to reproduce the issue and were met with hostility. It's not the job of OSS developers to debug someone else's scripts just to then start debugging the actual issue. This is the absolute bare minimum of any bug report, if you think there's a bug but no one else can observe it, in the first instance you have to assume it's something to do with their setup, until shown otherwise. The addition of not just wrong, but completely misleading AI summaries just makes the job of an OSS dev harder, they now have to start debugging the bug report itself to try to figure out whats parts are even facts at all (hint, most of the AI generated content was completely wrong, but sounded plausible).

Personally, the developers of both the LLVM and Mesa projects were far kinder and patient than I would have been, most OSS developers aren't just not paid to work on these projects, but are usually paid to work on other things. Taking up their time with this nonsense is very insulting to them, and the attitude that they owe the author anything at all is, as stated in the LLVM ticket, exactly what pushes many developers out of OSS development.

link