[silverlake]

Hi, AI apologist here. This scenario is a problem with or without AI. You can’t drop a 13k line PR you don’t understand without prior discussion. There are many ways to use AI. Your scenario (keynote speech) is a bad way to use it. Instead, a PR where you understand every line, whether you or an AI wrote it, should be fine. It would be indistinguishable from human generated code.

AI is a tool like any other. I hire a carpenter who knows how to build furniture. Whether he uses a Japanese pullsaw or a CNC machine is irrelevant to me.

[pluc]

That's a fair answer. How do you stop people from doing it though? How do you stop it from becoming every lazy person's first reflex instead of every smart person's third?

[silverlake]

I don’t know. But at least you’ve identified the real problem: lazy people generating trash code. AI isn’t bad, people are.

[zbentley]

We have historically intervened socially (via state regulation, taboo, or censure) in areas where the likelihood of misbehavior was high or the result of misbehavior was severe enough.

For example: nuclear material possession or refinement; slavery; consumer-available systemic antibiotics; ozone-damaging coolants; dowries.

Proscriptions on those are imperfect and inconsistent worldwide, but still prevalent. Each of them is a thing which benefited many people but whose practice enabled massive harm due to human failures (like laziness).

[liamness]

I suppose the issue is that it's a multiplier for bad actors. It has become so much easier to generate plausible-looking code (or any number of things that would've previously required a knowledgeable human to make something that at least passes the sniff test, let's say legal documents as another example) and just overwhelm the limited bandwidth of good actors.

[lawlessone]

>You can’t drop a 13k line PR you don’t understand without prior discussion.

How common was that before AI coding?

[silverlake]

Enough that stacked PRs are a thing. At my job people sometimes build large features on a branch for 6 months. Then it’s a massive PR and no one can review it.

[DrammBA]

You seem to have answered the question "How common is a 13k line PR?" but that's not what the parent comment asked.