Faith Ekstrand

Mesa is working to update our contributor guide. Can you guess why?

Did you guess AI?

Because if you did, you'd be right. I don't want to put anyone on blast here so please don't go digging to find the motivating MR and harass the contributor or anything like that.

But the situation was exactly what you might think. Someone ran ChatGPT on the code and asked it for suggestions on making it more performant. They applied a bunch of the changes against their local branch, tested it, and found that it gave maybe a 0.5-1.0% perf boost in some titles.

That's totally fine. I don't care what tools you use to find a bottleneck. I'll happily take more FPS, no matter who found the issue or how. If some AI assistant helps you find things no one else has found and lets us make drivers faster, great!

But that's not what happened.

What happened next is that they then tried to make it the Mesa project maintainers' job to sort through the shit ChatGPT spit out and decide what's useful and what's not and why the changes helped and whether or not they were correct. The contributor had no no idea and, more importantly, they had no desire to actually learn about the Mesa code-base or the hardware in question. They just wanted to run ChatGPT and send its suggestions towards upstream.

This is not useful. This is not contributing. It's just burning maintainer time sorting through AI hallucinations. We have enough mediocre code to review that comes from actual humans who are actually trying to learn about Mesa and help out. We don't need to add AI shit to the merge request pile. If you don't understand the patch well enough to be able to describe what it does and why it makes things faster, don't submit it.

So now we're making it really clear: If you submit the merge request, you're responsible for the code change as if you typed it yourself. You don't get to claim ignorance and "because the AI said so". It's your responsibility to do due diligence to make sure it's correct and to accurately describe the change in the commit message.

Some things shouldn't have to be explicitly written down but here we are... 😩

RE: https://floss.social/@collabora/116533723198138565

In case you missed, it, my blog post about memory optimization in NIR was published today.

Hey, look! I wrote another compiler.

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/41841

II complain about #freedesktop GitLab reliability sometimes but it could be worse. We could be on GitHub.

Boots up DragonAge: The Veilguard on NVK to test something.

Hunh... Since when did that run at 60 FPS?

We're making progress. 😁

Sometimes, just for fun, you have to actually use your shit and feel proud of yourself.

Other @collabora@floss.social folks are preparing for a demo at an upcoming trade show. They're going to do an NVK demo at the booth again and this year we decided to demo some games. (Last year was some WebGPU demos running in Chrome.) So I installed Jedi: Fallen Order and fired it up.

At first, it was kind janky. It was playable but you wouldn't want to play like that for hours. Then I realized it was running at 4K. At FHD, it was a buttery smooth 60 FPS. At max settings. On a laptop! Honestly, the fact that I could keep 4K above 20FPS on a laptop GPU was pretty surprising.

So, yeah, I spent a chunk of the afternoon being a Jedi. Got to make sure the demo is good and stable! 😂

Another week. Another LLM MR that makes no sense and burns maintainer time. Could we all please just stop with this?

Wow! Turns out refactoring the universe broke something. Who'd have thought. 😅