Git forges [LWN.net]

Git forges

Posted Oct 17, 2025 17:59 UTC (Fri) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290)
In reply to: Git forges by marcH
Parent article: Large language models for patch review

> Only after getting tired of being repeatedly shamed by public test runs, do people get into the habit of running tests themselves. It's one of the most important lessons that CI has taught us.

That contradicts my personal experience. When some of the projects I contribute to have set up CI, I've seen developers stopping to run some of the checks and tests locally, thinking it will be caught by CI anyway.

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Git forges

Posted Oct 17, 2025 18:17 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

That happens too and it's fine as long as CI failures remain rare. "Repeatedly" was a very important keyword.

"Repeatedly" failing CI checks fall in two categories:

- Developers struggle to replicate the CI setup. Such divergence demonstrates the immaturity of the project as the whole, see https://lwn.net/Articles/1042487/
- Idiots who don't understand it's much faster to run locally. _Extremely_ rare.

One of the advanced engineering skills that is not going to be replaced by AI any time soon is determining which tests are relevant to the changes being made. It's OK to be too optimistic and cut one too many corners from time to time. If you never break anything, you're not trying hard enough.

Git forges

Posted Oct 17, 2025 18:53 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> That happens too and it's fine as long as CI failures remain rare. [...]
> One of the advanced engineering skills that is not going to be replaced by AI any time soon is determining which tests are relevant to the changes being made. It's OK to be too optimistic and cut one too many corners from time to time. If you never break anything, you're not trying hard enough.

Example: the whole test suite takes 5h to run. So before submitting, you select and run a 20 min subset only. You don't select the correct subset every time and you fail CI sometimes. But you learn and get better over time. Everything is fine, nothing's black or white.

In my experience, people who don't learn and fail CI _consistently_ are rare. If they still don't course correct after multiple reminders, then you probably want to steer them away from the project somehow.

Git forges

Posted Oct 17, 2025 20:39 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (1 responses)

> One of the advanced engineering skills that is not going to be replaced by AI any time soon is determining which tests are relevant to the changes being made.

Actually many organisations are using some kind of AI for this. Well, often really just good old-fashioned statistical analysis, but we call that AI now.

Git forges

Posted Oct 17, 2025 23:24 UTC (Fri) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

If it's based on existing QA code and processes then I'm not too worried. Garbage in, garbage out :-D