Roland Rosenfeld writes:
Maybe I'm too old and pessimistic, but I don't like the new workflow, where IA generates tons of code and comments, that I have to read and review. I understand that this may be the future, but the frequency that it generates code doesn't match my performance of code review.
Maybe it's also a problem, that I'm not a C developer. I can read and understand C (and write small fixes), but this usually takes much time. So it looks that the AI outclasses me, which doesn't feel good.
That said, the project needs more C developers that are able to review the AI generated stuff...
I did another round of testing chatbot generated code a few months ago. It was all still, at best, junior level programmer grade code.
Not only was the code non-portable (it wouldn't even compile on FreeBSD), but it had numerous use-after-free errors, and a variety of other bugs. All in about 500 lines of code. Personally, I find I'm still better off writing the code myself rather than asking a chatbot then having to audit the code and clean up the mess.
This isn't actually surprising - despite what far too many people believe, there is no intelligence in an "AI" chatbot. The code a chatbot generates will never be any better than the code it was trained on, and they were all trained primarily on what they scraped from GitHub. Considering how bad much of the GitHub code is, expecting an LLM trained on it to produce quality code is almost laughable.
Except this, I still ask myself what all this AI generated code means to the LICENSE/Copyright of the project. COPYING file is GPL-2, most source files are Copyright Henrik Storner <henrik@storner.dk>, but what about the code generated by AI? At least the tests reference GPL-2+, but no copyright or author is mentioned. So can this really be GPL-2+ without a copyright owner?
I'm not sure about all this...
Considering how an LLM works, there is a non-trivial chance it will generate code at times that is line for line identical to what it was trained on. Who owns the copyright on that code?
All that said, if someone finds using a chatbot to generate code helpful, and someone is willing and able to fully audit the resulting code, go for it.