But it goes beyond this. The whole 2020s era is about cheap ways to do anything and be able to stream it to billions of people. Yet I feel no density in the work because there was no energy spent on it.
Yeah but the thing is that someone tries to waste time of humans.
This is why I hate "interacting" with bots, scripts or AI/LLMs. It just wastes my time, again and again and again. Oddly enough not all humans understand that. About two months ago, a german developer involved with ffmpeg, spam-slopped their mailing list with AI (it was an AI proposal for some change to ffmpeg in the future). He still does not understand why that is a problem.
I think it was GZDoom where the absentee project owner suddenly came back, pushed a bunch of nonsense AI comments, so the entire actual development community just forked it again and left him to play in his sandbox? Now it's UZDoom.
Something similar happened with PolyMC to PrismLauncher but that wasn't about AI, it was an absentee owner who came back and deleted everything he said was woke.
In the history of Linux that I'm aware of (and I've been nose-deep in this stuff on and off for quite a while), these issues are almost never debugged because they're reproduced -- they're debugged because someone who actually understands the messy interactions of the code and hardware in question thinks about them.
A reproducer might not actually be useful because there is basically no way short of fancy hardware tracing to figure out what the reproducer is doing.
What will you do when the prompt was "Figure out the bug and write a report for me". Not saying it was in this particular case, but I think at least in other cases, it will be.
> What will you do when the prompt was "Figure out the bug and write a report for me".
The rational choice would be to cut your losses and stop reading at that point. Once you realize zero effort went into the prompt, there's no longer any reason to read the output. The age old truism still applies: garbage in, garbage out.
If you think it's worthwhile, close the issue with a comment: "please rework this and show your work next time". Otherwise just close it without commenting and move on.
It didn't figure out the bug: the report is largely nonsense. It merely did a bad impression of having figured out the bug, by stringing together several observations into something superficially resembling a narrative. Providing those observations without the gibberish framing might be useful.
The parent's point still stands. In many cases it will have figured out the bug. In many cases it will have produced a small, clean, deterministic reproducer.
In my daily work I see these cases. It does help that the bugs that are filed contain a test case and some analysis by the agent.
It would not help to get ten identical bug reports all saying "I asked my agent to find a bug by prompting it with "find a bug and produce a test case". It found a nasty bug and a really nice reproducer. I'm not including its output here. Good luck!"
If it's an actual bug, I hope the Linux devs will. It impacted a human, and it's a bug regardless of human or non-human touch. Of course, looking at a bug is a matter of priority, always has been.
Great way to summarize cultural "economics"
Couldn't put the words on this pattern but sometimes all I care about is that someone cared about.