But you really should be writing those tests regardless of whether or not you or an LLM ends up writing the actual code. That helps ensure that the code actually does what you think it does, and prevents bugs or unintended changes in behavior from sneaking in later when something changes

Granted, I’ve seen one or two articles saying that AI helped find real software bugs, but what’s the ratio there, 1:500 for useful/useless AI bug reports?

It’s worth distinguishing between LLM generated bug-reports submitted by randos, and developers themselves using LLMs to look for bugs in their software.

My own experience, with my own code-bases, is that the LLM I use is extremely good at finding real flaws in my code. It’ll also nitpick a lot, but it has has become better at triaging issues than it used to be, so that kind of thing is easy to ignore.

Because of that, having an LLM take a look at my code before I push it has become another QC step, along with running tests, linters, and formatters. The end result is higher quality software

It was announced back in February, with the reason being that they spend a lot of time simply preparing releases, rather than actually working on improvements to Mint:

Releasing often is important because it means we get a lot of feedback and bug reports when we introduce changes. We follow the same process over and over again. It’s a process that works very well and it produces these incremental improvements release after release. But it takes a lot of time, and it caps our ambition when it comes to development. With a release every six months plus LMDE, we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4991

The latest blog-post suggests that their new schedule is already paying off:

Going from a 6-month release schedule to a yearly one was a tough decision to make, but we’re really starting to see it pay off. We’re taking on projects and implementing changes which would previously have been considered too large or ambitious. We’ve got time. We don’t feel rushed. Development feels solid and the OS keeps getting better. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=5086