On 10/14/2026 1:08 PM CEST Andreas Klebinger via ghc-devs <ghc-devs@haskell.org> wrote:
While reading AI tickets can be exhausting, I'm willing, within reason, to accept them as a fact of live.
I think this is absolutely a bad direction. When discussing a change, we generally link to a ticket. We do this even after the code was merged. It helps us understand the decision-making process around a change, concerns people voiced, and how they were addressed or reasons they weren't. AI making this process "exhausting" is unacceptable. From the current AI policy: "[E]very contribution must have an identifiable human author (or authors), who takes full responsibility for their entire contribution" A person (often a volunteer hoping to help!) should never, ever need to read hallucinations which lead them in the wrong direction, or waste time reading large amounts of nonsense no human has taken responsibility for. This is a violation of the (in my view very tepid) current requirements of contributing to GHC with AI. For many people (particularly professional Haskell devs), reading tickets on GitLab is their _only_ source of information about changes to GHC. Taking a page from Simon's "How to write a great research paper," think of the number of eyeballs for a GHC contribution being something like: - Tickets and discussion - 1,000 readers - Commit messages and Notes - 100 readers - Code - 10 readers - Code, in enough detail to spot slop - 3 readers
I've noticed more people have been posting LLM generated bug fixes (fine, it's policy) where seemingly little work went into polishing texts other devs will read many times. I consider this a problem.
Even "polishing" is a low bar. Again, from the policy document: "You must understand, and be able to explain, every line of code, and every sentence of documentation. Every line! It's not enough to think "this looks generally right" and expect a reviewer to then review every line."
My plan is to aggressively request improvement of prose during MR review going forward. Accepting bad prose is worse for maintainers because they have to read texts three times to understand what is going on.
I agree with this, and would hope that it would be communicated that not only does the contribution need work, but that the existing contribution was the result of inconsiderate action (to put it bluntly). Cheers, Tom P.S. This phenomenon is precisely why some of us advocate a position of "use LLMs to assist and draft all you like, but actually write the ticket/Notes/code yourself."