Wine Project's April Fools' Gag With Merit: Leveraging AI For Faster Code Review

[bug77]

I mean, code analyzer is using machine learning which is a form of AI that has existed for a long time. It is not using a LLM you mean.

Neah, I'm pretty sure it's only looking for templates or regexes.

[bug77]

Sometimes the best ideas start off as a joke.

Linux kernel is a perfect example, Linus announced his intention to create an OS in April 1991, it was supposed to be a gag.

But people believed him and encouraged him and look where we are today.

I asked my ex-girlfriend out as a joke, then broke up with her as another joke and i have to say it was one of the best ideas i ever had.

So don't dismiss this idea as a pipe dream, i can see Michael writing an article about the first release in a few years.

Personally, I'm not dismissing anything. I know AI will eventually grow into something way, way more useful than it is today*. But I also think it is being oversold atm.

*AI today is like Google was in 1999. A good idea, but still in a very, very underdeveloped shape.

[erniv2]

Personally, I'm not dismissing anything. I know AI will eventually grow into something way, way more useful than it is today*. But I also think it is being oversold atm.

*AI today is like Google was in 1999. A good idea, but still in a very, very underdeveloped shape.

Yep!

AI today is not Artificial Intelligence, it`s MI Maschine Intelligence, it can make predictions about what the user wants based on loads of data, but it cant make desicions whats realy the best course of action, thats still the domain of humans with "Intelligence", if we specify humans as a intelligent species, wich i sometimes suspect.

[anda_skoa]

No AI needed, JetBrains' code analyzer has been doing that for over a decade. I just love that thing.

What I meant is a tool that can be be deployed like a CI, automatically giving feedback to merge/pull requests.
And being capable of handling a multi-product code base. A developer tool will often only see the code of the specific product that person is working on, not the entirety of what the company or organisation is working on.

As for the "AI" aspect I would want such a tool to be very flexible in matching the new code to the old one.
This is, after all, where current "AI" excels at.

However, having that said, I do agree that existing tools for developers in this area can already be very good for explicit use on a given project

[cl333r]

I hate April's fools day, never had a funny joke/gag. When someone tells me a lie and then reminds me it's April's fool day I'm like...

[lowflyer]

Fool's jokes aside - I prefer *ANY* static code checker over even the best LLM.

First of all, it is a "Large Language Model". The emphasis is on "language". It can answer you in the best english prose - but does it understand code?
Second, any results it delivers are based on what other people wrote which it "learned" during the training phase. So, is the majority always right?

While this may be very convenient for the current woke herd mentality - it is dangerously close to “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth”

[Delgarde]

It's not a completely stupid idea. My experience of AI coding tools is mostly of CoPilot, which is a fitting name — it's not a replacement for a good developer, but it's a helpful assistant... one which does need to watched carefully, but which can save a lot of time. Our policy, when we rolled it out to the team, was that the person committing the code is responsible for it... it doesn't matter if AI wrote it for you, it's your code, and if the AI produced a load of crap that doesn't work, it's _your_ load of crap, and _your_ responsibility to fix it.

As to code review... there's a lot of benefit in automated tools for helping to find problems, but I don't think AI is mature enough to contribute as much in that space yet. A lot of work has gone into those more traditional tools over the years — static analysis, fuzz-testing, etc — and while AI techniques can in theory replicate much of that, I don't think they're yet at a point where they offer any advantage. And I'd never trust an entirely-automated review... the tools can certainly supplement a human brain, but they're no substitute.

[Vistaus]

This is very much a real thing in one of the places I am consulting for. The current capabilities are limited but it does help guide junior developers to avoid some of the common mistakes so by the time a human reviewer is looking at it, they can focus on more high level problems.

Nice extension of this April Fools joke.

[Weasel]

April fools day is to remind you that anything you read should be thought through and analyzed before believing in it. The intellectually lazy think this effort should only be needed 1 day of the year.

Couldn't have said it better.

We got a lot of party poopers here.

Anyway, this actually made me laugh, usually I just get a chuckle. Not because I think Linus' ways are bad or that AIs can't actually do a proper job (in the future), but because it's obviously exaggerated. Reminded me of the other April Fools where they made all synchronization no-op (I think it was Zebediah), which although yes it does reduce "maintenance" it also makes it wrong, and it was funny nonetheless.

[EphemeralEft]

I hate April's fools day, never had a funny joke/gag. When someone tells me a lie and then reminds me it's April's fool day I'm like...

Reddit's r/place was pretty cool. I also vaguely remember something interesting with Google Maps (or some other provider).

But yeah, straight up lies are annoying and boring. Silly projects can be fun, though.