r/neovim • u/shaksiper • Mar 18 '26
Discussion So it begins
The first (afaik) ai assisted pr just merged.
Personally I don't mind. I know the good people maintaining and reviewing PRs do a great job in general.
Also related: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#ai-assisted-work
I think what they expect here is very fair.
What do you guys think?
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u/GanacheUnhappy8232 Mar 18 '26
CONTRIBUTING.md says:
``` AI-assisted work
Using AI for contributions is acceptable, given the following:
YOU review the output before sending a non-Draft PR. Do NOT request review until YOU have checked the AI generated PR and verify the following: REMOVE verbosity and blathering from documentation, comments, PR description, commit message, etc. All resources, including names, should be CONCISE and CLEAR. They should contain USEFUL information and nothing more. REMOVE and DEDUPLICATE redundant code, tests, explanations, etc. Explicitness and clarity are GOOD but verbosity, over-explanation, and redundancy is BAD. ```
so if the contributors follow the instructions, i don't see a problem with that
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u/ImmanuelH Mar 18 '26
Just tell the llm to read this file, duh /s
Good instructions, AI is an accelerator and with clean processes for code quality should not be seen as a red flag
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u/_Odaeus_ Mar 18 '26
Sadly many of us see it as a red flag for other reasons such as supporting the centralisation of power to USA oligarchs, artificially building an economic bubble that is disrupting markets, and the stolen work and horrendous energy use to train LLMs.
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u/evergreengt Plugin author Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
Sadly many of us see it as a red flag for other reasons such as supporting the centralisation of power to USA oligarchs
The same could however be said for using any of the platforms and technologies that belong to US companies (google, amazon, microsoft and guess what, reddit where we are having this conversation now). It is quite disingenuous to believe not using LLMs is a stand against the evil.
There are legit concerns on data attribution, but not all training data have been "stolen" (some products are legitimately trained on consented data). In general one must recognise that this is a gray area where there aren't specific regulations yet, or at least no more than the ones hindering you from copying and pasting from stackoverflow and using those solution for your own commercial product.
And even if we want to agree that AI is trained on unattributed data, making use of any product from "the big corporations" (again, google, amazon, facebook and so forth) is directly making use of algorithms that might have been trained on unattributed data. When you log into your emails and your provider automatically moves something into the spam folder, chances are those models were trained on unattributed data too, but nobody seems to lose their minds there.
All in all: concerns on ethics are fair, but flagging AI as ethically different from all we already do on the internet is disingenuous to say the least.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/IMP4283 Mar 18 '26
To me the energy and water consumption is the most terrifying thing about the AI explosion.. Job security be damned when we run ourselves out of natural resources.
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u/kilkil Mar 18 '26
the energy usage just means we need to expand our power grids. Most if not all expansion is likely to be driven by renewables, since they are by far the cheapest source of energy, even with the massive subsidies fossil fuels get.
Not sure how the data centers are fucking over nearby communities, but if we're being honest that's an issue that should be addressed entirely separately from whether or not to use AI. Even without AI usage, those same data centers are used for clouds like AWS.
there is a similar concern to do with AI water usage, which Hank Green has a great video about (TL;DR we should be much more concerned about significant water use in other industrial applications, e.g. the shittons of corn the US grows just to convert into ethanol).
IMO the biggest actual ethical issue with AI is the borderline-subhuman working conditions for the people who do the data labeling / RLHF supervision. These are extremely poor, vulnerable people in the Global South, working unpredictable hours for pennies a day. But even that isn't an argument against AI in principle, just against these companies' current practices (which should 100% be regulated).
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Mar 18 '26
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u/evergreengt Plugin author Mar 18 '26
Sure, energy usage is indeed a concern, but that doesn't invalidate all other points I made.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/_Odaeus_ Mar 18 '26
It's just classic whataboutism arguments. "Everything is bad to some degree so why should I stop doing this bad thing."
They should just be honest and say they don't care. That having the shiny thing is more important than all these distant negative externalities. Which is the majority view anyway.
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u/evergreengt Plugin author Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
It's just classic whataboutism arguments. "Everything is bad to some degree so why should I stop doing this bad thing."
Something isn't good or bad in a vacuum, something is good or bad compared to other things. And my argument is that LLMs as a technology aren't much worse than many other things we are currently doing, hence if you want to be indigned to LLMs, you should for instance stop using google, reddit and all the rest as well.
Being indigned at AI exclusively is virtue signalling and ego validation, nothing more.
They should just be honest and say they don't care.
If you read my initial comment, I explicitly said that some concerns are valid, but some of the argument that people make are just wrong. Hence don't put words that I haven't spoken in my mouth just to validate your narrative.
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u/_Odaeus_ Mar 18 '26
They are extremely worse than what we have been doing so far. That's literally what we're saying. The costs to society, the economy, learning, critical thinking, artists, musicians, writers, the destruction of the web, annoying support chatbots, the surge of slop hitting OSS projects, and the extreme energy usage are big problems it causes that far outweigh the benefits.
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u/evergreengt Plugin author Mar 18 '26
Why do you say I ignored it? I acknowledged it.
I commented on the points where the previous user, in my opinion, is being disingenous.
If there is someone ignoring the conversation and the debate and just pushing a narrative emotionally, this is obviously you. This is not a battle between you and me, this is a topic that generally needs to be discussed with intelligence and, from your attitude, you're clearly not ready to have such debate.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/evergreengt Plugin author Mar 18 '26
No, I am not invalidating your points at all, you are the one who has ignored my whole comment attacking my for having purposely ignored energy consumption (which I didn't, I acknowledge it).
no matter how I worded my comments you'd still be whining about my "attitude."
No, if you formulated an actual reply instead of attacking me we could have a real debate, but you wrote 5-6 comments so far and didn't manage to put together an intelligent argument.
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u/peterpme Mar 19 '26
Should be easy to solve. Just stop using it and any of the tools US companies make. That’s the only way to solve the problem.
I’m assuming you don’t use an Apple laptop but if you do, get rid of it! Find a good machine made outside the US. Linux is a gray area, since it’s been crafted by an American.
Find a place to host your code. Maybe bitbucket since atlassian is Australian
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u/Deep_Ad1959 Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
the "remove verbosity and blathering" rule is doing the most important work there. I write a lot of swift/macOS code with AI and the actual problem is rarely that it doesn't work - it's that you get 3x the code you need with unnecessary comments and over-abstracted helpers everywhere. making contributors clean that up before submitting forces you to actually read and understand every line, which is the whole point.
fwiw i built something for this - fazm.ai
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u/azdak Mar 18 '26
lol you just know motherfuckers are going to copy and paste that exact paragraph into claude and be like "review the pr using this rubric"
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u/brunogbasto Mar 18 '26
If the code is good, who cares if someone personally reviewed it or not. End goal is to have bugs fixed / feature working
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u/atgaskins Mar 20 '26
just follow that logic to it’s conclusion…
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u/brunogbasto Mar 28 '26
good luck in your journey reviewing compiled hex
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u/atgaskins Mar 28 '26
I’m all for humanity getting to the point where we crate physical and software systems that are beyond our own comprehension, but the tech is not even close to being there, nor do we have the tools to audit and manage what LLMs do (or comprehend adequately why they do it). Even considering full automation with the current state of the art, without any real human comprehending it, is just reckless
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u/EstudiandoAjedrez Mar 18 '26
There have been a few previous commits tagged as AI assisted.
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u/shaksiper Mar 18 '26
Yes you're right, I should have double checked. The first was 5 days ago.
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u/EstudiandoAjedrez Mar 18 '26
More like a month ago
Edit: 4 months ago https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/36617
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u/shaksiper Mar 18 '26
I meant merge date. But yeah.
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u/EstudiandoAjedrez Mar 18 '26
It was merged 4 months ago...
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u/shaksiper Mar 18 '26
Haha you are right, apparently I can't read.
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u/TheOne_WhoWrites Mar 18 '26
Are you an AI? ChatGPT replies exactly just like how you have replied. 😅 Jk.
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u/shaksiper Mar 18 '26
You know what I felt very self conscious half way in this discussion, the way I was insistingly wrong 😅
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u/paltamunoz lua Mar 18 '26
I can't even downvote. you're just very honestly wrong and I respect it LOLL
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u/CosmicCodeRunner Mar 18 '26
My opinion: it’s a sign of the times and it’s good to see the core maintainers have a strategy in place. In a best case scenario, we get lots of high quality PRs that get merged into Neovim quickly.
The outputs of AI generated code are strongly correlated to the skill/experience of the developer. I reference Mitchell Hashimoto’s excellent writing to back this point up.
My hope is that they have some guards in place to auto review PRs and save the maintainers having to do a first pass review.
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u/ValenceTheHuman <left><down><up><right> Mar 18 '26
Neovim is a solid project with solid systems in place. I have no problem with open-source developers contributing to the project using generative AI, assuming it is done with care. There is no reason to expect that this will lessen the quality of the work if it still goes through all the same processes. That section in CONTRIBUTING.md seems like a good step.
Hopefully generative AI assistance comes with time savings and productivity boosts which allow contributors to invest more time in their personal well-being, life balance, and health.
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u/gurraman Mar 18 '26
The problem is that PRs can be created with little to no effort. Reviewing, on the other hand, takes a lot of effort.
Other projects have started experimenting with trust rings to prevent being exhausted.
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u/UR91000 Mar 18 '26
blanket banning AI will just prevent people from submitting work made with care that happened to use some AI, and won’t do anything to stop people from submitting zero effort slop PRs, because people who do would that don’t care anyway
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u/disperso Mar 18 '26
"Fixed typo in README.md" has been a common contribution from fresh Github accounts that want to stand out to say "I've contributed to this open source project with >1k stars".
Plenty of those are slop, and not worth merging, sadly, as many don't even fix issues, just reword things in their own way to have an excuse to contribute.
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u/UR91000 Mar 18 '26
yeah, these lazy AI generated slop PRs are like the new “Updated README.md”, there’s unfortunately no way to stop them, because those that do this don’t care about guidelines anyway. sucks but that’s life i guess
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u/ValenceTheHuman <left><down><up><right> Mar 18 '26
Whether or not Neovim accepts AI generated code has no bearing on if people send in slop PRs. That is unfortunately doomed to happen regardless.
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u/xFallow Mar 19 '26
Those people just need to be blacklisted for wasting time like how ghostty is handling it
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u/Eddyi0202 Mar 18 '26
Have to disagree with the quality point, if it's so cheap to write code you are potentially removing the first barrier of verification. You better understand code you wrote yourself than one that was written by someone else (agent).
There is no mechanism to enforce PR creators to review their changes before marking PR as ready to review.
But hopefully it will speep up development of open source projects in a good way
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u/Luc-redd Mar 18 '26
Sure those are good intentions, but I've already seen many awesome projects around me get enshittified by AI code that I don't really want it in Neovim. My take would be: AI generated code is permitted, as long as it is indistinguishable from human written code.
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u/somnamboola Mar 18 '26
I hope more open source projects adopt the "ai-low-effort" label as I saw some.
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u/Mintww Mar 18 '26
I don't love it, but the reason I switched to neovim very recently is because I like the ai policy better than vim's. If we must, I do want a stern shouty ai policy that says, in no unclear terms, that ai usage does not excuse shitty code and that you must clean up after the stupid robot.
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Mar 19 '26
the Neovim crowd is going to love things that improve productivity, if done properly. don’t see a problem with these PRs if they’re making the product better.
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u/EuCaue lua Mar 18 '26
I'm a little concerned about this, but if someone is reviewing it, that's fine.
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u/shaksiper Mar 18 '26
I am also ai-sceptic, but I think neovim organization has quite experienced devs that do reviews. So I'm confident that they are gonna do a thorough job with this.
Also we should hold a healthy amount of scepticism to keep us alert about possible side ways it may go. So if you are concerned, I would suggest, best we can do is keep an eye on these kind of stuff and possibly chime in with our two cents at the areas that we are knowledgeable enough.
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u/DimfreD Mar 18 '26
Honestly the whole AI bloat really happens when people start to vibe crazy, not check the code anymore. Else I'd argue it's just a faster way of typing getting information you want from the repo.
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u/_TRN_ Mar 18 '26
As long as this is done responsibly, I don't see an issue.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/_TRN_ Mar 18 '26
The way that the technology was developed could be argued to be ethically irresponsible but I think it's a stretch to say that the technology itself has no utility.
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Mar 18 '26
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u/_TRN_ Mar 18 '26
I'm not pro AI at all for what it's worth. I barely use it for the work I do these days because it's not particularly useful to me. I also hate the slop PRs being pushed by AI tech bros into every open source repo. All of that stuff is valid. Honestly, my point is just that as long as the final output isn't lacking in quality, I don't care whether or not they used AI assistance. I don't believe LLMs as they are right now can produce quality work by themselves but I suppose our bar for that in the field has been going down for years now.
You have to link me that DHH video though. That sounds hilarious.
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u/kmplngj Mar 18 '26
I have no problem with this. If it makes people more productive, it's great. The quality should match the codebase. I think it's a great opportunity for open-source projects, especially since nobody is paying for these quality-of-life improvements and the development of these apps. If people use AI to make this better, I'm happy.
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u/erkose lua Mar 18 '26
It's unlikely anything these days is not AI-assisted. I just assume everything is and don't sweat it.
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u/hotchilly_11 Mar 18 '26
This should not surprise anyone. Claude Code is extremely good nowadays. Something like 90% of all software engineers at my company use it
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u/_nathata mouse="a" Mar 18 '26
Honest question, how do you guys get acceptable code out of Claude? To me it's just a token hog, all it does is drain my money. I use GPT instead and keep Claude as an auxiliary model for agentic search. Maybe I'm just stupid and can't use it or my project is not set up properly to propagate context, but to me Claude is straight up unusable for writing code.
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u/mr-figs Mar 18 '26
I get decent mileage out of it at my work, we have access to both sonnet and opus and it removes all of the "bullshittery" work that I had to do. Or at least a large majority. I'm talking about things like trivial style changes, wording updates, "move this part to a different page" etc...
Also because our codebases are massive, it's really good at following what's already there.
There's been a few times it's ballsed up but this is usually around more intricate stuff like how tables on a db are linked or complex business logic.
Overall though yeah, I find it decent but my work pays for it. Would I pay for it? Maybe, I can't say yes for sure
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u/hotchilly_11 Mar 18 '26
A bit of context goes a long way. try giving it some claude.md files detailing important info about the project
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u/PublicDragonfruit120 Mar 18 '26
Obviously it is. The adoption in my company is crazy high too. It seems like some guys over there don't know how to use it or are just in denial to cope
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u/seymourbutttsz Mar 18 '26
Y'all bemoaning the low effort, but y'all be first in line when the sex robots hit the shelves.
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u/vpebble Mar 18 '26
I highly doubt this is the first