Do you understand the _____? problem/code/solution

s/Django/Plone in this blog post.

Lately, I've been feeling exactly this. I've been less inclined to respond to pull requests with wall of text descriptions that are clearly written by AI, and the author shows no understanding whatsoever of the problem, the original code, or their proposed solution. And it's not just from first-timers.

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I hear you.
This has a similar feeling as this LinkedIn post by Hynek Schlawack: "LLMs are great to prototype real fast, but dropping a diff hundreds of lines long—no matter how clean the code—on someone’s porch puts them in an uncomfortable position."

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I couldn’t agree more. I love using LLMs to build prototypes really fast. It also works well when you are working on a project alone (even if that project is complex). It also helps you to get some ideas about complex code bases (e.g. when I asked Claude to find inconsistencies in plone.restapi code base). As soon as you collaborate with others, a major problem arises. It is super easy to flood other people with requests and let others clean up the mess that you create. I saw this when I vibe-coded plone-contributor-statistics, for instance (and I had to restrict myself from pushing too much too fast and put more time into reviewing the code I produced).

LLMs have the potential to kill open-source contributions by burning out the people who build the foundations of open-source communities. Open-source maintainers are usually swamped with work and need to be protected from it. The good thing about the Plone open-source community is that it has been built on decades of trust among people. We know that when someone contributes code it it is worth the time to review this particular code. We have the structure in place to deal with those things. That being said, we need to be mindful when using LLMs to generate content, whether that content is code or a post on plone.org. :slight_smile:

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Overall the pace is higher with agent assisted coding. Even if the reports or PRs are valid and even if you tell the machine to keep the message short and on point.

I tend to fix bugs as they come along! Found a glitch in plone.whatever? Fix it and create a PR. Overall the software gets improved at a higher pace.

The valid question is if can can keep up with it.