I like AI, but we are still in the biplane era of development. It will take a long time before it can handle most things, let alone unsupervised.

If Shopify goes follows through with imitating Musk’s stupidity, I expect the company to end up as a case study.

I think AI will be useful, but like any nascent technology, it will have to be accessible for the public before the everyman would adopt it. IMO, we are currently at the 2nd or 3rd stage in the picture below.

I hope a traffic controller guides Elon’s jet into the tarmac.

Honestly, I would be alright with this if the AI companies paid Github so that the server infrastructure can be upgraded. Having AI that can figure out bugs and error reports could be really useful for our society. For example, your computer rebooting for no apparent reason? The AI can check the diagnostic reports, combine them with online reports, and narrow down the possibilities.

In the long run, this could also help maintainers as well. If they can have AI for testing programs, the maintainers won’t have to hope for volunteers or rely on paid QA for detecting issues.

What Github & AI companies should do, is an opt-in program for maintainers. If they allow the AI to officially make reports, Github should offer an reward of some kind to their users. Allocate to each maintainer a number of credits so that they can discuss the report with the AI in realtime, plus $10 bucks for each hour spent on resolving the issue.

Sadly, I have the feeling that malignant capitalism would demand maintainers to sacrifice their time for nothing but irritation.