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Vienna-RSS project – Draft for “AI” policy
Barijaona (lead developer for the Vienna-RSS project): ““AI” Usage Policy” github.com/ViennaRSS/vienna-rss/discussions/2051
That might be something to consider for the Textpattern project as well.
(one thing I dislike, main developers seem to be given a pass when it comes to disclose “AI” usage)
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Re: Vienna-RSS project – Draft for “AI” policy
That’s a good post. We could probably craft something slightly less/more opinionated in a similar vein for Textpattern.
My primary beefs with AI code are:
- Long-term maintenance. Trying to understand another person’s code is often hard. Deciphering something machine generated that may contain superfluous elements unrelated to the goal it was trying to reach is even more of a slog.
- Quality. Machine output is learnt from the collective ideas of millions, from various sources such as Wikipedia, stack overflow, PHP documentation comments, Reddit, etc. Many of these sources post simplistic situations that do not represent code meant for production.
- Security. An extension to the above point is that many answers to questions posted online do not take adequate security measures into consideration. Sometimes the accepted answer is simplistic, and maybe a subsequent comment or different upvoted answer will negate or augment the official answer scraped and regurgitated by the LLM.
- Lowest common denominator. Many solutions may be applicable to the most prevalent online toolsets, such as WordPress, Laravel, Rust, Agile, React, Symfony, MVC patterns, and so forth. These are often incompatible with Textpattern’s goals or codebase.
- Performance. Elegance. Size. Machine-generated output does not take any of these into account. It provides a method of achieving a stated goal and does not consider whether the code fits with the project’s ethos of being nimble, powerful, and lightweight.
For all the above reasons, and more, AI code has no place in Textpattern.
And yes, I also disagree with the core developers being given a free pass to use it.
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Re: Vienna-RSS project – Draft for “AI” policy
As an adjunct to this, I had a client dabble recently with LLMs to write and implement some CSS modifications. While the rules did exactly what was intended, when it came time for me to do something else, I struggled. The overly-prescriptive rules and !important flags that the machine suggested and were implemented meant it took me 5x as long as it should, scratching my head and removing / revising them so the ‘C’ in CSS was restored.
My changes were simply ignored due to the depth of selectors that the machine had instructed the client to use, which would have meant, had I not unpicked it, employing even more wordy selectors to override the overrides and, very soon, the code becomes unwieldy.
This is a primary example of machines providing a “solution” (that works) but without regard to the context in which it’s applied, making maintenance more difficult and reducing performance by unnecessarily increasing the size of the stylesheet.
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Re: Vienna-RSS project – Draft for “AI” policy
Your misgivings certainly match my early experiences with the tool; generic php solutions which didn’t draw on Textpattern’s toolset etc.
I realised I wasn’t giving enough context in my queries, so I requested that it base its answers on Textpatterny sources only. This time it took longer (it trawled everything from the docs to GitHub to the forum to stackexchange to reddit — stefdawson.com also came up :).
I’m not experienced enough in php or the TXP way of doing things to comment on the quality of ChatGTP’s subsequent efforts, but it appears terse, logical and DRY to my eyes.
On the css side I occasionally ask it to come up with a better solution to my code; I’ve been impressed with its recommendations (terse, neatly abstracted, better than my original).
I feel ‘AI’ can be useful if you research your parameters and frame your questions carefully before hand. If you’re already an expert, its a tool which can expand horizons.
Last edited by giz (Today 16:59:45)
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