I'd argue that code or documentation that is so void of meaning to the human reader isn't just low quality, but also violates P3 of the AI policy.
So you shouldn't really by asking these questions here, but simply reject such contributions. They're disrespectful. What I disagree with is that issue text and comments shall be excluded. Drafting a bug report or an elaborate feature request already constitutes a contribution that may be read by humans years later to understand context and decisions. Diluting this with low quality AI generated text is going to degrade the contribution experience significantly. Especially now that the industry is changing, juniors are struggling to find jobs and meaning in this field... we should be even more obsessed with the contribution experience than ever before, so that there will still be a future generation of GHC maintainers who cares as deeply about GHC as the current roster does. On October 14, 2026 11:08:51 AM UTC, Andreas Klebinger via ghc-devs <[email protected]> wrote: >Hello Devs, > >Given the use of AI has increased recently I think this deserves discussion. > >There are certain texts that are, ultimately, transient, or read less >frequently as time moves on. >This broadly includes tickets, which generally become mostly irrelevant once >resolved. > >While reading AI tickets can be exhausting, I'm willing, within reason, to >accept them as a fact of live. > >But there are parts of the code base in which we have prose that is written >once and read >often. I'm primarily concerned with Notes, Commit messages, and to a lesser >degree code comments. > >I've noticed more people have been posting LLM generated bug fixes (fine, it's >policy) where >seemingly little work went into polishing texts other devs will read many >times. I consider this a problem. > >I think it's important for certain parts of the code base to be written >concisely. Something LLMs >are terrible at today, and even skills make it marginally better. This is just >a fact. > >I think especially with the release of Opus 5.5 this has become *more* of an >issue as the prose is >now only bad in a myriad ways that are not immediately obvious rather than >being obviously atrocious at a glance. >Which leads people to take it as-is without putting effort into writing it by >hand, or at least trimming it down after the fact. > >This is obviously bad for human consumers of these texts. But even if you are >"all in" on AI these texts >are also objectively garbage for future AI use as they are bloated with >irrelevant facts, meaningless past >history, repeating things obvious from context and generally wordy for no >benefit. > >They are simply bad. > >Is it fair to expect people to put in more effort into these? I think yes. > >Notes are *the* way to understand the code base. And making them worse >permanently >degrades the ability of newcomers to understand the codebase. Similarly commit >messages >are hugely important to be able to determine when changes where introduced, >quickly find >ranges of commits to bisect for new bugs and many more regular maintenance >tasks. > >*My plan is to aggressively request improvement of prose during MR review >going forward.* > >Accepting bad prose is worse for maintainers because they have to read texts >three times to understand what is going on. >It's worse for agents because it fills context windows with irrelevant facts >and pointless trivia that poison their >reasoning ability. > >It's just worse, and it takes little effort to fix. > >But maybe I'm alone in feeling this way. If everyone else is happy to read >Opus text output all, or at least to have opus read opus >output all day long. Then I will surrender this fight and move to another hill >to die on. > >But if people are feeling similarly then please let me know and do likewise. > >I don't think it's a big ask either. If you are prompting already just type a >draft in your commit message/note and let claude do >formatting/typo/alignment fixes. A sloppy text pushed through claude will in >most cases beat what any model today >will generate on it's own. Maybe this changes in 2 years. But it's not >changing today. > >It's not just a question of length. You can make a LLM generate shorter texts >with a skill file or otherwise. >But they are terrible at understanding what the tricky parts are, what is >worth highlighting, what can >be dropped because it is obvious from wider context. > >I think it's *easy* for every contributor who knows what is happening in their >patch to reach a reasonable standard. >But we have to ask them to do it and to set the expectation. And I hope we can >do so. > >Andreas, > >freshly back from reading some claude output. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
