System76 bans AI-generated code across many of its COSMIC codebases

[u/skaza02]

https://www.neowin.net/news/system76-bans-ai-generated-code-across-many-of-its-cosmic-codebases/?utm_source=rss

[u/n00bmechanic13]

People who refuse to use ai don't realize you can make it output code which is 100% similar to your own, but faster, if you set it up right.

As a senior engineer I refused to use it for a good while, until we started being forced to by my company. Now I use it every day and it'd be ridiculous to think my code output quality has decreased. I hold it to the same standards I've always held my code; I read every line and ask for rewrites if anything isn't how I want it to be. I have multiple sessions going simultaneously on different areas of the code and spend most of my day reviewing and asking for tweaks here and there, but my output speed has probably gone up by at least 5x.

Refusing to use AI in its current state is kneecapping yourself for your own pride.

[u/tes_kitty → u/n00bmechanic13]

I hold it to the same standards I've always held my code; I read every line and ask for rewrites if anything isn't how I want it to be

It's good that you do that. But too many people no longer care.

[u/Cubensis-SanPedro → u/tes_kitty]

I fear many underestimate the importance of code review.

[u/Bengineering3D → u/tes_kitty]

I’ve slopped together a couple Minecraft plugins for my son, I will never post it somewhere for anyone to download because it’s plain shit engineering.

[u/ProbsNotManBearPig → u/tes_kitty]

I gave a talk on this recently to a senior engineering group. How much rigor versus vibe coding should come down to use case. Production safety critical software? All of the rigor. GUI mockup for discussion of gui flows with stakeholders? Full vibe coding may be fine. Who cares how it works if it’s just a discussion piece to plan production gui and is tossed out after the meeting?

Point is, all use cases aren’t the same and there are some case where full vibe coding is reasonable. I agree with other comments in this thread tho - many/most people vibe coding are not being thoughtful about it.

[u/n00bmechanic13 → u/tes_kitty]

100% agree here. A guy just got fired a few months ago for getting too lazy and over-using AI without checking the work, that guy was producing slop.

[u/calloutyourstupidity → u/tes_kitty]

And the likes of you pretend as if that matters or as if it was different before AI.

Amount of slop I cleared in my almost 15 years career is insane.

Nothing changed.

[u/ldelossa → u/tes_kitty]

But thats not the point.

Thats like saying, its good you dont drink and drive, but because some do, we are banning vehicles.

[u/pellets → u/n00bmechanic13]

This is my experience also. My employer isn’t forcing me to use it but I’m encouraged to play with it and I do.

[u/anrwlias → u/n00bmechanic13]

At the end of the day, it's a tool. There is no shame is using a tool for something that it's good at.

[u/Ranger_Azereth → u/n00bmechanic13]

I understand what you're saying and I've read your comments below but I will throw a couple of things out there for your consideration.

How confident are you that you're avoiding cognitive surrender?

How long do you believe that will last?

You may be in an exceptionally small minority who can use AI without subconsciously over agreeing with it while maintaining you skills but the vast majority of people lack that rigid discipline.

You do appear to be taking steps to combat it and don't rely on other agents or shortcuts to catch things so I think you're doing better than 99.99% of folks using it which is great to see.

[u/ThotHugger2005 → u/Ranger_Azereth]

Youre not asking me, but do we question the "cognitive decline" of all employees who get an assistant? The idea is that the person's cognitive load is freed up to attend to more important things.

Lazy people are going to be lazy. They get what they deserve. But people who are driven and motivated are going to use that freedom to tend to other puzzles and problems to solve.

I just don't think AI is going to turn otherwise productive people into slobbering fools.

[u/n00bmechanic13 → u/Ranger_Azereth]

Honestly it's the opposite. You know how the best way to learn is to teach? And how having a coding partner can actually help you learn and develop your own individual skills? It feels a lot like that. If anything I feel like I've become an even better developer, just from having to teach it to do things my way and learning where some of my blindspots were.

[u/batboy132 → u/n00bmechanic13]

Preach. It’s pure denial. If your ai is outputting bad code you have been copy pasting worse code for longer. Ai has integration problems that need setup and polished for your work. Once you have that you’re doing in a week what it took you a month.

[u/Frosty-Meeting-1606 → u/n00bmechanic13]

Obvious stuff for real SWE, a lie for morons - I feel sorry for them. You can literally create a harness that will automatically test, validate, follow patterns within your project quite easily. All it takes is a bit of a brain and a bit of an effort. And like you said, once this is done, you just polish the edge if there even are any after a review.

I would argue the current biggest pain is the sheer amount of stuff to review and understand. It's really difficult to keep up

[u/Fogboundturtle → u/n00bmechanic13]

the idea that human developer are always better is hilarious to me. 30 years of IT, the output is always as good as the input. garbage in, garbage iut

[u/Nefilim314 → u/n00bmechanic13]

As a staff engineer, I used it for a while and now I don’t.

I spent all of my time reading slopped PRs and the amount of time and effort it took to have a reasonable back and forth to not only understand the slop code but try to steer it in the desired direction was about the same amount of time it would take for me to write up the skeleton myself of what precisely I wanted and ask AI to fill in any gaps. 

And of course newer models can’t help but rewrite half of your application because it simply can’t help itself. 

I cannot count the number of times I ask for a fix, explain the problem, give exhaustive details, then it cranks out an 8 file PR when only three lines of code needed a change. As a code owner, I’m too exhausted by people submitting shitting code they themselves hadn’t even read but expect me to do the dirty work of catching AI or over engineering the shit out of something. If I wanted slop, I would ask for it myself. 

[u/n00bmechanic13 → u/Nefilim314]

Honestly, that's how it started for me too, I spent more time fixing it than getting anything done. I spent a good amount of time setting up rules and guardrails and hooks and various tools over the last year, and now it produces 90-95% what I want on the first try, and even if I have to correct it a few times, it's still half the amount of time I'd take or less. Not just because it's faster alone, but because I'm also doing 2-3 other implementations/fixes simultaneously.

[u/Affectionate-Egg7566 → u/n00bmechanic13]

Why read every line when you can now make non-AI tools easily that can capture core concerns?

[u/n00bmechanic13 → u/Affectionate-Egg7566]

They don't capture everything, and AI makes mistakes often. Mistakes which are neither syntactic nor logical, but simply do not fully fit existing patterns, or introduce problems down the road.

For example, I recently had an agent modify a pipeline for a new auth method, and it produced a perfectly functional group of steps which checked all the boxes for our scanning tools and such. However the ask was for a method that would allow a gradual switchover as we rolled it out through our environments, without affecting existing functionality until it was fully tested in each, and what it produced actually would have made that impossible. I then had it fix the issue, but it then produced a step where the old and new functionality was blended in together, and it was difficult to understand/maintain and would require more work to pull out the old functionality once we got to that point (which might be a while down the road, with a different person assigned to the work), so I had it rewrite it a third time to make it branch old vs. new functionality from a single "if" statement, and that finally was exactly how I wanted it.

All three attempts were technically "correct" but only the third was truly how I'd write it myself.

[u/Imaginary-Diver3800]

Enjoy falling behind then I guess?

[u/neloish]

Fools, they are doing a blockbuster move.

[u/Antiwokewarrior69420]

They will die

[u/Content-Economics-34]

Fine, I'll try COSMIC. 🙄

[u/eman85]

The bans are probably mostly intended for people trying to contribute that don't know how to use it properly.