I’m vastly in favor of changing our AI policy to just disallow it. CONTROLLING that is going to be an honor-system, but it needs to be done anyway, it is harmful to everyone.
I am one of the largest-by-most-metric reviewers on Clang. We’ve seen a bunch of reviews, and frankly, it has resulted in us being less welcome to newbies. Historically, if I got a review that the person didn’t have a sufficient understanding of what they were doing, I’d be able to ‘hand hold’ a reasonable amount. I typically did this since:
1- It was ‘less’ often
2- the people ‘learned’ quickly and thus could participate/get better over time.
3- The mistakes were likely results of copy/paste, and it often identified issues elsehere.
4- The individuals were very respectful/receptive to the changes, and asked reasonable/productive followup/pushback questions.
HOWEVER, ones that I suspect are AI contributors fail at all of these;
1- We are getting these more often. This makes my workload (for something I don’t get paid to do!) that much greater. This means SOMETHING has to give, and usually, it is ‘reviews that are furthest from completion’, typically new contributors/AI contributions.
2- In my experience, folks using AI do a much worse job at understanding their patch, and thus a much worse job at getting better over time. The amount of effort to make these contributors start making better contributions is so much more as to not be worth it anymore.
3- we get no such benefit.
4- Thanks in part to 2, and worse, folks using AI to generate responses to me, they are much worse at asking productive followups/pushbacks.
As a result, the first group (just new contributors using their brains) are getting thrown in with the latter group (used AI), and are getting ignored/MUCH worse reviews, and thus don’t get the benefits of review. (A bit of ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’ unfortunately).
As the original post said; we have to do 1 of 2 things:
1- Stop accepting AI contributions like this
2- Accept that new contributors are just not going to get review bandwidth, and likely won’t get their contributions accepted.
IMO, AI has shown very little value in the FE, and new contributors writing their own code has shown LARGE value in the FE. So I think it is pretty clear which side we should go with.