Re: [PATCH v2 4/4] convert: use size_t for text statistics and ident counts

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Nov 2, 2026, 20:16 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqzevrgfb0.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <auhvUm4VwXyWNhsE@pks.im>

Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

>> You're completely right. I used AI tooling to help draft that commit
>> message, and it definitely shows. Fair cop.
>> 
>> To clarify my involvement: I review the code, check the cases, run the
>> tests, and take full responsibility for what gets submitted. But the
>> wording here missed the mark. For v3 I rewrote the message myself,
>> keeping it much shorter, focusing on a single example (lone LFs), and
>> dropping the heavy-handed explanations.
>
> Sorry, but is this reply to my ask to proof read what AI generates and
> make it sound less AI generated repeating the _exact same thing_ that I
> just asked you to change?

[*]

Show 8 quoted lines

> To put it bluntly: behaviour like this is what will make me ignore your
> patch series altogether going forward. It is frustrating to me, and I
> only have limited time to spend on reviews. So I will much rather spend
> my own time on patches where I don't feel like I'm talking to a meat
> proxy, because I'm a (somewhat) social creature that prefers to talk to
> humans.
>
> So please reevaluate what you are doing here.

Sorry to interject but recognising the name as a rather long-time contributor from the pre-AI era, I am not sure what answer from Elia would have pleased you. Instead of saying that the initial work was done by AI, and that the human involvement was to sanity-check the product of the machine and tweak the messaging to reduce the machine-generated look, what do you want to see in contributors who work with AI?

My question is not specifically about Elia's recent topics, but would apply more widely.

Also, I had hard time to parse and understand [*] above. Did you mean "I asked you to proofread what AI generates so it sounds less AI-generated, and yet this very e-mail reply of yours is doing the exact same thing I just asked you to change", meaning "the message I am replying still sounds AI generated", or something?

Thinking aloud and letting my thoughts wander a bit.

A contributor lets a machine generate a solution. Then he reads and understands every bit of it, writes a description of the solution as a commit log message from scratch without looking at the machine output, and from that message writes the code change from scratch. It is more like using the machine output as mere inspiration for his own iteration. I would imagine you do not have an issue with that.

Now, which part would we find problematic in the above sequence if the contributor "cheats"? Perhaps he scans the machine output and, without understanding the most crucial bits, can still describe the outline of the solution from a superficial reading. He passes the code along as-is, together with the description he wrote with only a superficial understanding of the problem area. When the patch gets submitted, it would not look any different from the work of the earlier contributor who used the machine output as inspiration to write his own solution. However, if we later ask deeper questions when problems arise from the change, the latter contributor may not be able to provide as useful an answer as the former one who understood it deeply himself.

But that is something we cannot easily tell just by looking at the submission, so ...