the BSDs in the AI Age

[James E Keenan]

On 4/2/26 09:14, George Rosamond wrote:
 > I want to initiate a thread on the "BSDs and AI today."
 >
 > [snip]
 >
 > There's a few layers to this discussions. Note these are discussions
 > points, not "Yes" or "No" surveys.
 >
 > * How are LLMs (big tech or otherwise) impacting $job now? Are you using
 > Claude Code or similar tools for day to day? Was it required or was it
 > your choice? Was there expectations from this tools in terms of
 > productivity, etc? This question raises the impact of AWS Bedrock/Kiro...
 >

I am no longer employed, so there's no "$job" per se.  I do, however, 
spend many hours each week working on the Perl 5 core distribution, the 
impact of changes in that distribution on Perl libraries on CPAN, etc.

Until last month I saw no impact on AI on the scope of my work (except 
for one friend who is still in the tech labor market and is preparing a 
paper on Perl and Claude for this year's Perl conference).

But in March of this year, the AI wave hit us ... from within!  By 
"within" I mean that we began to get pull requests created by bots using 
Claude under the instruction of 3 different humans, each of whom has 
been a major contributor to Perl and CPAN in the past.

* The p.r. submitted to the Perl core distribution had a diff of many 
thousands of lines of code long -- much too long for thorough code 
review.  The p.r. was challenged by one of the project leaders on the 
copyright issue which other posters to this thread have mentioned.  One 
of our best (and bluntest) C programmers dismissed the p.r. as "A.I. 
slop"; the human behind the bot conceded that he was not an expert on 
the C code found in Perl's guts and that he was relying on hundreds of 
new tests, also written by Claude, to guarantee the correctness of the code.

* Another bot pushed 15 pull requests to Perl's main testing library 
within the space of a few hours, swamping the library's maintainer's 
capacity to review them.

* Another bot published 4 new versions of another, heavily used Perl 
library on CPAN.  All of that library's tests passed, but neither the 
bot nor the human at first noticed that those changes broke 3 *other* 
CPAN libraries which depended on that first library.  The maintainer of 
one of those 3 libraries made changes in his own code to accommodate the 
new changes.  The bot published more new versions of the parent library; 
the human claimed that fixed the problems in the two dependent 
libraries, but I subsequently demonstrated that one of the two was still 
failing its tests.

What shocks me is that the people behind these bots should, IMO, have 
known better than to submit these p.r.s. before the recipients of the 
p.r.s had established policies with respect to AI and Claude.  Claude is 
proving to be very seductive to people still in the business.  I don't 
know enough about the BSDs to express an informed opinion about their 
future development *in general*, but I would say that you should be 
very, very, very skeptical of any submissions to your codebase for core 
and ports.

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan