The slop will continue until morale improves!
But the emojis help, right?
RIGHT?
Rm -r /slop
bash: Rm: command not found
Ummmmm... alias Rm rm?
There’s gotta be a thread somewhere of someone asking why rm isn’t working lmao
Is thisa reference to that Tailwind PR?
No, this is about adding guidelines for tool-generated submissions to the kernel. The tailwind conversation was on making their documentations more accessible to AI tools.
Linus doesn't want to add guidelines to not fuel any side of the whole discussion, and says that adding guidelines won't solve the problem because a lot of times it's not trivial to detect whether or not a contribution was written with AI tools, after all, "documentation is for good actors", hinting that anyone contributing AI slop is not expected to respect it anyway.
Thank you for that context. I fear the day we discover something bad about Linus. In my eyes he's been very based since forever
Your going to be dissapointed then.
He's very toxic.
That being said, I still love the guy. But he is a known hot head.
That PR was quite the ride, thank you for that. Also, I feel for the maintainer guy :(
New life goal, learn coding, create AI kill code, how hard could it be... says me with the learning capability of a potato...
Just bully your LLM of choice with a "kill yourself loser" prompt, easy peasy lemon squeezy
It's really easy. Step one, fire up chatgpt.
It's a reasonable stance to take given the current climate.
Why don't we just generate documentation with AI?
Documentation will always have to be actually written by the author(s) of the code (or at least someone who understands the code really well), because only the author knows the intent behind a certain function or API endpoint, and that's what the documentation is for.
LLMs don't understand shit (sorry AI bros), they will sometimes produce accurate descriptions of the function code as written, but never the intent. Even if the LLM "wrote" the code, it doesn't "understand" the real intent behind it, because it is just a poor mashup of code taken/stolen from someone else, which statistically fits the prompt.
What LLMs could help with is generating short, human-readable descriptions of what is happening in a given function. This can potentially be helpful for debugging/modifying projects with poor documentation, naming, and function separation, so that instead of gleaning through multiple 2000-line C functions in a 100k SLOC file, you can kind of understand what it does quickly. I've used deepseek for this before, with mixed-to-positive results.
But again, this would just be to speed up surface-level digging and not a replacement for actual documentation or good practices.
If you are genuinely asking:
Because documentation should be accurate and comprehensive. LLMs can do neither.
Hell no. Programmers must not just only write code, of course they do have to write the documentation because it is their work and using LLMs only encourages laziness and potentially cause confusion. Why we had extensive business English classes asides from programming in C or Pascal for DOS.
If you're asking in general and not as a way to feed AI: it writes a ton of text unnecessarily. Ever seen generated PR descriptions? They just basically quote the diff without adding any value
When it gets to the point where it does work to produce usable documentation, without extraneous content, with no mistakes, can be checked quickly, and it is faster to generate + check than to write it, maybe. Assuming a stellar history of being correct from the tool.
As it is right now, once you reach the point where you actually need proper documentation to be written to keep things maintainable, these tools have low accuracy, lots of issues, and using them takes longer than it takes a competent person to just write/update whatever needs to be.
While it might actually be beneficial for certain cases, I think it's a slippery slope.
Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.