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by frb 28 days ago 

  ...the influx of contributions authored or submitted by AI is sapping the projects' maintainers of their willingness to confront the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests....
To me this seems a core issue: PR reviews for most people feel tedious and this has been the case way before AI already.

Don't get me wrong, slop is slop, no matter if AI or entirely human-fabricated. But just like AI-assisted coding can actually be helpful, why can't AI-assisted PR reviews make it less tedious?
3 comments
pferde 28 days ago
No, reviewing PRs in general is a delightful process. The tedious part is in the initial triage when the PR comes from a previously unknown submitter, and you cannot be sure what is the intention of the submitter, what is their technical level, whether they are talking out of their ass or not.

It's basically the same issue as spam in emails. It was bad before, and automation made it a zillion times worse.

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bluefirebrand 27 days ago
> No, reviewing PRs in general is a delightful process

I don't know if this is a very universal feeling. I personally find reviewing code is tedious compared to writing it

Not just the process of reading the code and understanding it, but the back and forth can be miserable if the submitter isn't meeting you part way

I dunno. Maybe I'm the odd one out for thinking reviewing PRs is more of a chore than a joy

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pferde 27 days ago
That, not being sure if the submitter is willing to meet you part way, is exactly the miserable part I am talking about. Basically, you go in risking it's just a waste of your time. After some trust is established, or when the PR is from someone you already have some trust relationship, the dynamics are very different.

Yes, it can still be a slog to review someone else's code, but you usually have the feeling of "hey, this is probably something good".

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Sharlin 28 days ago
It can, but using a technology just to work around problems caused (or at least exacerbated) by the very same technology is obviously not something we should be doing or encouraging.
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jplusequalt 27 days ago
>why can't AI-assisted PR reviews make it less tedious?

Godot is a performance critical system in the realm of a million lines of code (?).

Keeping your system both correct AND performant, requires people understand how it works. This kind of technical knowledge is slow to develop, so it's one of the most valuable skills to possess.

I don't see how you continue to understand your system when people are both generating code with AI and using AI to review it's output.

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