Well, well, well…
The Linux Foundation published a new study today around the impact of generative AI on open-source software development. One key takeaway is that ~25% of new open-source software pull requests amount to AI slop.
The new Linux Foundation research study found that GenAI has the potential of cutting open-source coding time in half for increased productivity. They also found 59% of project maintainers found growing GenAI-based contributions. The 50% productivity boost was found to be across all types of open-source software development tasks. 71% of OSS maintainers agreed that GenAI reduces barriers to entry.
Very concerning though, their research found that 25% of incoming pull requests are estimated to be low-quality AI slop across open-source projects. Presumably that number will, sadly, continue to rise as more newcomers and users embrace AI/LLMs for working on patches on their behalf.
Those curious can find the Linux Foundation Research report in full via LinuxFoundation.org.
This is just a survey though, people are notoriously bad at estimating their own speed.
Several MIT studies have shown that while people feel more productive they are basically actually equal because of overhead. They have to spend more time managing the LLMs and designing prompts and reviewing output and it basically is a wash.
We could argue everything here is wrong then 😂