Asked how AI has changed maintaining Elixir, Valim said the uptick in agent-generated pull requests is fine in itself, and that the rule above is how the project puts back-pressure on drive-by contributions. What bothers him is different: when he replies to a contributor and gets an AI answer back. "I have AI at home and it's the same AI as yours," he said. "Me teaching somebody who's just relaying an AI is a waste of my time."
I think that that's great. I've dabbled with some Elixir, I can't remember how long, maybe during the early part of the pandemic. I think it was some like doing some of the,
…come in and participate, but it feels like, and I don't want to dismiss the contributions that they're trying to make just because if they're using AI or not, but it's just like also like, what's that process? What's that look like for you? Are you getting an uptick in unsolicited PRs from people?
Yeah, we definitely got an uptick on PRs. As I said, like we have more people that they are automating like Fable or, you know, ChatGPT Sol to find bugs and send pull requests. And it's great because they are finding bugs, they are finding typos, they are finding things to improve. And I don't mind that. I think that's completely fine. I think what changed in the dynamic for me, really like the human dynamic, is that before, if somebody opened up an issue and or they opened up a pull request and there was something wrong with it, I always saw like that's an opportunity for discussion. That's potentially an opportunity for misunderstanding. It's maybe a potentially an opportunity for me to learn something because I'm missing a case. And I think that changes because so sometimes like somebody drops something and then I drop and I was like, hey, what about this? And then it comes like with an AI reply. It's where, so like my mental model broke. And at that point, it's like, I don't want an AI reply because the UI reply, like…
How when people talk about like, well, we talked to people, they're like, I think we're thinking about rewriting our application in a different language so that we can take advantage of this thing. And I'm like, can you not just bring that thing over to this language? And then that part is kind of…
Yeah. Chris McCord, the creator of Phoenix, he has like a very good line, which is, it's very similar to that. It's like, well, you know, because when you have a smaller community like Elixir, sometimes the question is going to be like, oh, you know, like, does it have a package for that? And now…
You know, you mentioned like you might prefer writing a couple hundred lines of code just for the particular API endpoint that you want to integrate with. Do you feel like that perspective is something that has evolved from some pain of having to work with packages in the past? And because I think…