Discussion
How AI has suddenly become much more useful to open-source developers
ozlikethewizard: How many year's end have to pass?
MithrilTuxedo: I'm thinking of Debian and how much effort it takes to maintain stability and security over time.I can't imagine we'll really be able to trust AI without it's use in open source software where we can see how reliable it is.
supernes: TLDR: Greg Kroah-Hartman says that last month something magical happened and AI output is no longer "slop".
georgemcbay: IMO around December of last year LLM output (for coding at least, not for everything) went from "almost 100% certainly slop" to "probably not slop, if you asked for the right thing while being aware of context limitations".A lot of people seem stuck with their older (correct at the time) views of them still always producing slop.FWIW I am more of an AI doomer (in the sense that I think the economic results from them will be disastrous given our political realities) than booster, but in terms of utility to get work done they did pass a clear inflection point quite recently.
bluefirebrand: > if you asked for the right thing while being aware of context limitationsSo, still pretty likely to produce slop in a large majority of casesIf the most useful place for them is where you've already specced things out to that degree of precision then they aren't that useful?Speccing things to that precision is the time consuming and difficult work anyways, after all.
georgemcbay: I think LLMs currently need to be used by someone who knows what they are doing to produce value, but the jump they made from being endless slop machines to useful tools in the right hands is enough for me to assume it is only a matter of time until they will be useful tools in the hands of even the untrained masses.I wish this wasn't true because I think it will economically upend the industry in which I have a career, but sadly the universe doesn't care what I wish.
beastman82: gotta love a site that hijacks your back button and makes you hit it 3 times.
throwaway2027: I noticed it last December.
ramesh31: >TLDR: Greg Kroah-Hartman says that last month something magical happened and AI output is no longer "slop".Opus 4.6 has been a step change. It's simply never wrong anymore. You may need to continue giving it further clarification as to what you want, but it never makes mistakes with what it intends to do now.
binarymax: It’s wrong. It made large mistakes on my code literally yesterday.
brcmthrowaway: Wrong context
binarymax: No. Aside from just making an algorithm that didn’t even run, it refused to use an MCP that it had registered in the same context session.
mjr00: > assume it is only a matter of time until they will be useful tools in the hands of even the untrained masses.IMO this vastly overestimates how good the "untrained masses" are at thinking in a logical, mathematical way. Apparently something as basic as Calculus II has a fail rate of ~50% in most universities.
xyzelement: Who cares? People know what they want and need and AI is increasingly able to take it from there.
