AI code review (Claude, maybe Codex)

[Thibaut]

> Le 8 avr. 2026 à 00:51, Hauke Mehrtens <hauke at hauke-m.de> a écrit :
> 
> On 4/7/26 08:35, Thibaut wrote:
>>> Le 7 avr. 2026 à 05:57, David Lang <david at lang.hm> a écrit :
>>> 
>>> Hauke Mehrtens wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 4/6/26 19:33, JP wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>>  - these platforms are subsidised (in the extreme) by (provably society-damaging) VC-funds; any attempt at building infrastructure upon this without significant review/planning/estimation strikes me as potentially high risk
>>>> 
>>>> Isn't this good? OpenWrt can profit from these VC-funds.
>>> 
>>> exactly, where is the project risk? there is no talk of eliminateing all manual review (even if "AI" approves it, that doesn't mean that it's the right thing for real hardware, or the project overall)
>> Seeing how a lot of people (myself included) hate to have to deal with a chatbot any time they're trying to reach a human, I’d say the risk here is to put off contributors if all they get (or the first thing they get) is a chatbot review.
> 
> Currently we put off contributors by not reacting to their PR at all. There are many PRs which did not get any comment at all. On many people only add the first comment after more than a week, then the contributor is often not interested any more and this comment was useless.
> The CI is running on all PRs, it complains about too long commit titles and similar things.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally agree with all that assessment. What I’m suggesting however is that the issues will only compound: unless you plan on giving commit access to the chatbots (or let committers blindly commit chatbot-reviewed submissions - and they would still have to find time and interest to do that, two things which are often missing it seems), I suspect we’ll soon see a crop of bitrotting PR where the only interaction with the submitter will be that of a chatbot. And I don’t think this is going to improve their frustration or the project state and standing.

tl;dr: I don’t think chatbots can fill in for the humans in the loop, but maybe we disagree on that topic.

My suggestion would be at the very least to not make the chatbot review automatic: at least if there is a human chatbot-request in the PR history, for the submitter it suggests that *someone* is paying attention.

>> Besides, (and perhaps more importantly) this doesn’t really address the fact that using chatbots is actively contributing to setting the planet on fire, if that’s something that matters to the project.
> 
> Processing this mail also consumed a lot of energy.

Completely different orders of magnitude, and I’m sure you know that very well.
Last I checked, you don’t have to pay by the byte to read your mail.

> It will be scanned by at least 100 spam filters and the AI companies will use it to train their system.

*sigh*. The AI training is parasitism, it shouldn’t be taken as part of the « normal energy usage » of a mail system. And I’m sure you know that too. It looks like you’re saying is « energy is wasted anyway so it’s fine to waste more ». Is this really the best counter-argument you could come up with?

The energy footprint of the project is already pretty bad as it is, with e.g. the builders building the same bytes forever and ever (I guess as long as there are people willing to foot the bill it’s ok), but the carefree attitude is quite disheartening. It promotes the idea that it’s ok not to care about these issues, and that’s exactly what will eventually incinerate the planet. But maybe nobody cares about that and I’m the outlier here, so I’ll shut up.

T.