I agree that tickets are important for code archeology. GHC seems to think so, too. I recall the GHC project going through great difficulty to migrate to a git forge while preserving ticket numbers, so that all the important comments and Notes that point to tickets wouldn't lose their context. :)
I really like Mikolaj's framing of slop-as-log dumps. That's pretty insightful. Sure, you can generate a log dump yourself, given the right setup and instructions. And I've spent a lot of time staring at logs that are mostly useless. Writing good logs is hard for many reasons; the result is that logs are usually, you know, sloppy. So just like unfiltered LLM content, logs are voluminous and low-signal.[1] Nonetheless, attaching e.g. a 1.2MB log dump on a ticket is still generally considered useful. But if someone were to come by, open a cryptic ticket and just paste in the log dump, I'm not sure I'd have the patience to figure out what is being asked. So, as long as LLMs generate sloppy descriptions[2], I think it's wise to recommend putting a human in charge of writing tickets as well as comments and Notes. Mikolaj's approach seems like a good one. -Bryan [1]: LLMs are *very good* at trawling through messy logs and picking out the important messages. Another parallel between log slop and LLM slop... [2]: "As long as LLMs do X" is a pretty short timeframe. I wonder if ticket slop will even be a concern this time next year. On Fri, 23 Oct 2026 at 05:36, Julian Ospald via ghc-devs < [email protected]> wrote: > > It will be read for decades, whereas no one in 10 years time is going to > be reading today's tickets. > > I strongly disagree with this. > > Tickets are the main artifact for me to interact with GHC. That includes > 15 years old tickets that are still unsolved today (there are plenty). > > GHC tickets are referenced in the GHC codebase itself, in cabal and all > sorts of other places. > > I think you're looking at it from a "I'm a core GHC developer" perspective > only. And for those your assessment might be true. But there's a large > audience for whom tickets is the main source to understand what has been > done and is still missing. > > > It would be absurd to expect Mikolaj to write every word. He doesn't > know enough about GHC's internals. If I insisted on that, he just wouldn't > submit them, and that would be a shame > > This is what we call the meat proxy phenomenon: https://meatproxy.me/ > > The bug report is still valuable, but the "I asked an LLM..." is not, > unless: > > * the prompting was so complicated or time intensive that it's hard to > reproduce (well, you can share web prompts) > * the token spent was very high > * there was significant review/judgement involved (doesn't seem so) > > No one is complaining about people using AI to find reproducers. But even > here that's something a developer may as well just do themselves if all it > took was "here's a GHC ticket, try to find a minimal reproducer". > _______________________________________________ > ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >
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