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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   21106 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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This pr description sucks, but you're just going to say that anything I say is just complaining and nitpicking.

So it seems we're at an impasse here.

Can you take that PR and write a better description that you think would be more helpful than the AI one?

It seems like that would be the major step forward: instead of saying "it sucks", break down the problems with it and provide a superior human-generated one for the same content that we can compare it with.

Good question, here is something along the lines of what human might write. Keep in mind it may be incorrect because I don't actually know what this pr accomplishes.

We discovered a race condition in follow up actions which can cause them to fail if multiple follow ups are requested at the same time. An example of this failure can be seen on #2555. This is because the PR lock is removed before the worktree is cleaned up, allowing the second task to begin execution before the follow up is completed. Here is a timeline of the events on 2555 that shows the issue:

[timeline]

  • This change updates the order of operations to clean up the worktree before releasing the lock.
  • This change also adds a safety net fix for situations ???? <- the ai slop makes zero sense, no idea what this does.

I appreciate the followup.

It seems like the concern is that the AI PR is over-technical and doesn't explain in simple language what happened: I don't see a lot of functional difference between the two. I can see the case that going back in and looking at the AI one will be harder to pick back up on "what exactly did this do", but I think I could figure it out from what they have: the AI writes overly technically, but I could easily see a human doing the same thing.

This change also adds a safety net fix for situations ???? <- the ai slop makes zero sense, no idea what this does.

It looks like there was a situation where if the directory for a worktree was gone, 'git worktree remove' isn't actually going to remove the worktree registration (presumably because it's intended to remove the directory and the registration at the same time, and possibly the original race condition detailed in the PR created a situation where that didn't happen properly for some worktrees), so it introduced a secondary method that checks "is this worktree safe to remove" then removes that worktree registration with a different command, to clean up that situation. There's another mechanism that could remove all stale worktree registrations, but the AI goes out of its way not to run that because it would create another race condition risk.

I checked the code to confirm that, but I do think that PR note actually does make sense, and someone more familiar with the codebase and effects than me (I honestly don't know what a git worktree is) would understand it more easily than me.

the AI PR is over-technical and doesn't explain in simple language what happened

Yes a major issue with slop is that it buries the information in ... well ... slop instead of explaining it clearly. A human may write badly in a human way but would never do something like this.

There are other substantiative issues here, mainly that 2555 is simply an example of a failure in this class, and likely there are other occurrences. It also doesn't mention what situation may trigger this issue.

You can just have a more detailed PR writing skill defined that tells it to start off each note with a concise description of reason for the enhancement. It's really quite easy to set this stuff up.

No you can't. If it's so easy than surely there must be a single working example of this on the internet that actually works.

Most of the time giving it a wall of text instructions doesn't significantly increase the quality of the output, but instead makes it autistically follow the instructions without actually completing the task.

I can't link you to my internal Git PRs but they are basically fine. The idea that you can't prompt engineer text into a reasonable shape is just kind of fanciful. Out of the box you get more verbosity than is useful but you really can just describe how you want the text to be structured and what you want included and it'll definitely do that. Few do this because the number of people who give a shit about PR notes in the nation can fit on a single boeing 747 but you can do it if you want to.

I kind of buy the idea that pr notes can just be omitted, like that other guy in the thread also suggested to leave them blank.

I still believe that the slop adds more noise than signal even with prompting otherwise.

Just egotistical coping if you think this PR description sucks. Like the Reddit artists who will never admit anything made by LLM is good when they know it was made by an LLM. You know it was written by AI so you are anchored on it sucking. Thanks though for demonstrating the exact mindset I was describing in my initial post.

This was reported and had a consensus-vote of "bad," but while we would prefer you and @phailyoor not get into antagonistic slap fights like this, I don't see it as really crossing the line.

Fwiw, you are right and @phailyoor is wrong.

And I feel like I have to second the person who said you should get some kind of recognition for actually getting into an argument where Jews weren't mentioned once.

I find it disappointing that you're directly taking a side in a thread within a mod post. Or at least even though you aren't posting with red text, you're posting with mod-only information a moderation decision and understanding of the rules.

I find it disappointing that you're directly taking a side in a thread within a mod post.

Mods are allowed to have opinions about the topic of a thread and "take a side" on it.

While I don't care to litigate what does and does not count as a "mod post," there is also no requirement that we are to be dispassionately neutral while making observations as mods. A lot of people need to let go of the idea that we are customer service bots.

Since nobody is getting modded, your objection reads as petulant.

I'll second phailyoor here: the standard I'd want is "the mod hat should be on or off, per post".

If you're going to make a post that's part of your position as moderator, it shouldn't be combined with actual engagement in the discussion: people have to pay attention to moderator posts as it might be "stop it or you're getting banned", so adding Amadan-the-user commentary with it unfairly privileges Amadan-the-user's viewpoint ahead of other users. People are free to read or not read wraelk-the-user posts, and it should be the same for Amadan-the-user.

I thought there was some kind of mod-hat formatting this site had, and I'd expect the original post (as well as the one I'm responding to) to be in that formatting, with the actual engagement in the discussion moved to its own non-mod-hat post. That way users can pay attention to mod-hat formatting as conveying important mod information, and regular formatting as just being the on-equal-footing user having a regular discussion.

Whatever you say, you make the rules here. But it certainly has the appearance of a situation where you mod the people you disagree with and don't mod the people you agree with, whether or not this is true in this particular case.

If you seriously believe I didn't mod SecureSignals because I happen to agree with him about LLMs, and otherwise would have, I don't know what to say to you - you've been here too long for me to believe you actually believe that.

Well, phailyoor said that it had the appearance of such a situation, not that this was actually the case - I think the idea is that mods should avoid even the impression of impropriety, and thus, should remain neutral in "mod posts" even when their reason for modding someone in this particular case is clearly unrelated to any personal disagreement, so that it never looks as though they're modding someone for disagreeing with them. This doesn't seem crazy to me in principle. Although you guys get accused of bias so frequently anyway that I'm not sure officially adopting such niceties would move the needle in terms of public perception.

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