> "[E]very contribution must have an identifiable human author (or authors), > who takes full responsibility for their entire contribution"
This is precisely why I advocate to "embrace the slop", that is, treat LLM-generated content as raw data, as if the content was a log, a crash message, a debug session transcript. But let me start by describing my experience with LLMs and GHC so that my position can be better understood. I'm recently posting many GHC issues with LLM-generated data and, while I hope to over time improve the way I do it, I see that their quality is much better than when I I did not use LLM for two reasons: 1. Before, I was posting huge reproducers and bright minds were spending weeks minimizing them or sometimes they could not. Now LLMs miminize all my reproducers. 2. I have no clue about GHC internals, so I could only guess if my complaint is intended and/or known behaviour, which bugs are already reported in a way that I don't recognize, which defect is just a known difficult trade-off inherent in GHC heuristics biting me occasionally and so not worth a report if I don't have a body of statistical evidence to support a heuristic overhaul proposal. Today LLMs recognize each of these scenarios for me and I'm withdrawing half of my attempted defect reports. As a bonus, when I'm reading the slop to summarize it in a sentence or two at the issues' start, I'm learning GHC internals. I'm learning in particular from the often correct root cause analysis by LLMs and from the often incorrect fix proposals. This is one reason giving me hope my future GHC LLM-assisted contributions will be higher quality. Another is GHC devs' feedback. Yet another is, I hope, LLMs getting better. Back to embracing the slop: I can't "take full responsibility" for what LLM writes, because I'm clueless. It's the same as if I was posting a transcript of a clueless debug session --- I totally can't take responsibility for my working hypotheses. Neither, when I minimize a big performance regression, I can't take responsibility for the guess that the 3% slower minimized repo represents the same mechanism that slowed down my original big program by 30% (which is the only argument why it's worth looking at). What I can take full responsibility for is my user story and the dumb raw data. "This log is from commandline X". "This gdb output is from my program interrupted at Y". "This LLM output is from Z". I hope we can improve our understanding not only what kind of LLM-generated data is helpful, but also which kind of "Z" is most honest and most helpful to all people concerned. Is it mixing LLM-content with human-content? Certainly not for me, because I'm too clueless to correct an LLM and by mixing I'm diluting the attribution and introducing errors. Should Z be the prompt? A summary in my own often misguided words clearly separated from the slop (this is what I do currently)? All the best, Mikolaj _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
