Re: Merging AI-generated program code

Hi Arno,

Am 01.06.26 um 10:36 schrieb Arno Waschk via Discussions on LilyPond 
development:
> This seems wrong at least at two points:
>
> 1. The automatic assumption that any support of AI makes a contributor 
> not read his contribution, not understand his contribution, and the 
> whole thing ununderstandable to a degree which can not be remedied in 
> the same way as hand written code is completely irrational. AI code 
> can be bad. Manual code can be bad. I produced both kinds. Reasonable 
> people read their code before submitting, or, say, try to put it in 
> shape. Assuming people lose their reasonable minds by using an AI  
> summary of a local MR index is, sorry, ridiculous.

Nowhere did I state that.

It's a fact that AI assistance makes it /possible/ to generate large 
amounts of working code that the human contributor doesn't fully 
understand. This was practically impossible before, so it creates a new 
situation.

This becomes a problem since a system (like with LilyPond) that relies 
on human code review (together with a very small pool of active 
reviewers) can easily be overwhelmed by the amount of code that can be 
produced with the new technology. So we must find reasonable guidelines 
how to deal with the new technology.

I view Dan's question as an honest attempt do find a solution. I'm 
surprised that you construed his e-mail (which also contained the 
sentence "I just wouldn't want the uncertainty to last so long that a 
capable contributor gets frustrated and leaves.") as an expression of 
"academic AI hate" or "something personal".

Furthermore, I also explicitly pointed out that there are various kinds 
of AI assistance; so my opinion was considerably more nuanced than you 
represent it here.

> 2. What you wrote basically means, that code can be trusted blindly 
> once it was written by hand. This is but a joke.

No, it doesn't; please don't misrepresent what I wrote.

On the contrary, what I wrote was this:

"This is not just a question about AI contributions: It means that 
LilyPond also shouldn't contain human-written code of the "I added that 
line and then the problem somehow went away, knock on wood" type. It's 
of course hard to enforce this, but a thorough review where questions 
can be raised and must be dealt with makes it more probable."

Lukas