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Dunno. If you can't be arsed to write a description, leave it blank. It's not like we were diligent about it before AI (at least not anywhere I've worked). Don't make me do extra work checking if the generated description makes sense. I've got to review the code anyway.
If you had an AI generate it, I want to be able to tell that you, the human being, personally did at least a first pass over it, not just chuck it over the fence unseen for me to either reject or greenlight. And that does mean go through it and remove the most obvious AI-isms by hand. Not because I care about the AI-isms per se, but because I want to see that you have at least read your own submission.
If I'm to sign off on it then I want to make sure it's OK. I'm taking part of the responsibility for it after all.
It's so easy to have AI generate reams and reams and reams of text, or code, and it is not fair, I think, to have the reviewer be the first real person to read through it to see if it all makes sense. Humans aren't perfect either but at least there's a limit to their output.
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