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Notes -
Recently, I have tried to use LLMs to add features to open source projects.
Making an LLM write a PR which I would be happy to attach my name to is actually hard work. Sure, the agentic loop will generate code which does the job, but then I need to check corner cases. At the moment, I am still trying to figure out if there is not a neater way to implement what I want with less overhead, after all I do not want to settle the project with more technological debt than required.
On the other hand, I could never be arsed to write tests, and this is something where I do not care too much about code quality. If two tests could be combined in one to save a couple of lines, who cares. Even if there is the odd bug in a test case, this is still no worse than no test case.
Documentation is also something the LLMs have much more patience for than I do. Though I will need to think more carefully of how to name my examples when specifying the feature because these names tend to make it into the documentation.
And of course, there is a lot of code which does not need to be optimized for being maintainable. I have seen PhD students use LLMs write utilities which would seriously impress me (given my baseline expectations) if they were hand-written.
Of course, how much maintainability matters depends a lot on one's timelines. Still, submitting PRs full of AI slop with the excuse "don't worry about tech debt, the AGI will clean up the code really soon" seems like really bad style for interacting with human-maintained projects.
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