The title of this thread is needlessly divisive.
It is clearly not, or at least not anywhere near what we define as “slop” in the context of the LLM guidelines for packages registered in General. Let’s try to have a more nuanced conversation and not go down the same road of extreme AI-denialism vs AI-is-the-100x-engineer as in the recent Policies around registering AI-created packages in General? thread.
I would trust the core developers of Julia, who are all extremely accomplished and experienced software developers to be able to avoid many of the pitfalls of unsupervised AI overuse. It also seems clear to me that Julia has many rough edges that are due to limited developer resources. Agentic coding can be an enormous help in helping with at least the low-hanging fruit.
I certainly understand having reservations about LLM overuse, but denouncing entire projects just because they make use of agentic coding is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. How could they not? These reflexive responses to LLMs usage, “saying goodbye”, or forking a no-AI version of vim seem utterly misguided to me.
As for “Claude” co-authoship: that, at best, is a way of managing sandboxed access for the agent, or at worst, a fad for deflecting responsibility.
All that being said, it is of course useful for the Julia project to document development practices, including the way that agents are used by core developers. And, of course, placing scrutiny on submitted PRs that there are human authors that can stand behind the code. julia/CONTRIBUTING.md at master · JuliaLang/julia · GitHub seems to go a long way towards that, and doesn’t seem to indicate me a need for panic.