We don't yet know how courts will rule on cases like Does v Github (https://githubcopilotlitigation.com/case-updates.html). LLM-based systems are not even capable of practicing clean-room design (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design). For a maintainer to accept code generated by an LLM is to put the entire community at risk, as well as to endorse a power structure that mocks consent.
This is similar to the ruling by Alsup in the Anthropic books case that the training is “exceedingly transformative”. I would expect a reinterpretation or disagreement on this front from another case to be both problematic and likely eventually overturned.
I don’t actually think provenance is a problem on the axis you suggest if Alsups ruling holds. That said I don’t think that’s the only copyright issue afoot - the copyright office writing on copyrightability of outputs from the machine essentially requires that the output fails the Feist tests for human copyrightability.
More interesting to me is how this might realign the notion of copyrightability of human works further as time goes on, moving from every trivial derivative bit of trash potentially being copyrightable to some stronger notion of, to follow the feist test, independence and creativity. Further it raises a fairly immediate question in an open source setting if many individual small patch contributions themselves actually even pass those tests - they may well not, although the general guidance is to set the bar low - but is a typo fix either? There is so far to go on this rabbit hole.
I swear the ML community is able to rapidly change their mind as to whether "training" an AI is comparable to human cognition based on whichever one is beneficial to them at any given instant.
"novel" here depends on what you mean. Could an LLM produce output that is unique that both it and no one else has seen before, possibly yes. Could that output have perceived or emotional value to people, sure. Related challenge: Is a random encryption key generated by a csprng novel?
In the case of the US copyright office, if there wasn't sufficient human involvement in the production then the output is not copyrightable and how "novel" it is does not matter - but that doesn't necessarily impact a prior production by a human that is (whether a copy or not). Novel also only matters in a subset of the many fractured areas of copyright laws affecting the space of this form of digital replication. The copyright office wrote: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell....
Where I imagine this approximately ends up is some set of tests that are oriented around how relevant to the whole the "copy" is, that is, it may not matter whether the method of production involved "copying", but may more matter if the whole works in which it is included are at large a copy, or, if the area contested as a copy, if it could be replaced with something novel, and it is a small enough piece of the whole, then it may not be able to meet some bar of material value to the whole to be relevant - that there is no harmful infringement, or similarly could cross into some notion of fair use.
I don't see much sanity in a world where small snippets become an issue. I think if models were regularly producing thousands of tokens of exactly duplicate content that's probably an issue.
I've not seen evidence of the latter outside of research that very deliberately performs active search for high probability cases (such as building suffix tree indices over training sets then searching for outputs based on guidance from the index). That's very different from arbitrary work prompts doing the same, and the models have various defensive trainings and wrappings attempting to further minimize reproductive behavior. On the one hand you have research metrics like 3.6 bits per parameter of recoverable input, on the other hand that represents a very small slice of the training set, and many such reproductions requiring strongly crafted and long prompts - meaning that for arbitrary real world interaction the chance of large scale overlap is small.
On that note, I am not sure why creators in so many industries are sitting around while they are being more or less ripped off by massive corporations, when music has got it right.
— Do you want to make a cover song? Go ahead. You can even copyright it! The original composer still gets paid.
— Do you want to make a transformative derivative work (change the composition, really alter the style, edit the lyrics)? Go ahead, just damn better make sure you license it first. …and you can copyright your derivative work, too. …and the original composer still gets credit in your copyright.
The current wave of LLM-induced AI hype really made the tech crowd bend itself in knots trying to paint this as an unsolvable problem that requires IP abuse, or not a problem because it’s all mostly “derivative bits of trash” (at least the bits they don’t like, anyway), argue in courts how it’s transformative, etc., while the most straightforward solution keeps staring them in the face. The only problem is that this solution does not scale, and if there’s anything the industry in which “Do Things That Don’t Scale” is the title of a hit essay hates then that would be doing things that don’t scale.
[0] It should be clarified that if art is considered (as I do) fundamentally a mechanism of self-expression then there is, of course, no trash and the whole point is moot.
It's not art. It's parasitism of art.
There is no such thing as a “royalty free cover”. Either it is a full on faithful cover, which you can perform as long as license fees are paid, and in which case both the performer and the original songwriter get royalties, or it is a “transformative cover” which requires negotiation with the publisher/rights owner (and in that case IP ownership will probably be split between songwriter and performer depending on their agreement).
(Not an IP lawyer myself so someone can correct me.)
Furthermore, in countries where I know how it works as a venue owner you pay the rights organization a fixed sum per month or year and you are good to go and play any track you want. It thus makes no difference to you whether you play the original or a cover.
Have you considered that it is simply singers-performers who like to sing and would like to earn a bit of money from it, but don’t have many original songs if their own?
> It's parasitism of art
If we assume covers are parasitism of art, by that logic would your comment, which is very similar to dozens I have seen on this topic in recent months, be parasitism of discourse?
Jokes aside, a significant number of covers I have heard at cafes over years are actually quite decent, and I would certainly not call that parasitic in any way.
Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP, insert itself as a middleman and arbiter for information access, devalue art for profit, etc., I am not sure they are even close in terms of the scale of parasitism.
Or, maybe you start to pay attention?
They are selling their songs cheaper for TV, radio or ads.
> Even pretending they were, if you compare between artists specialising in covers and big tech trying to expropriate IP
They're literally working for spotify.
I guess that somehow refutes the points I made, I just can’t see how.
Radio stations, like the aforementioned venue owners, pay the rights organizations a flat annual fee. TV programs do need to license these songs (as unlike simple cover here the use is substantially transformative), but again: 1) it does not rip off songwriters (holder of songwriter rights for a song gets royalties for performance of its covers, songwriter has a say in any such licensing agreement), and 2) often a cover is a specifically considered and selected choice: it can be miles better fitting for a scene than the original (just remember Motion Picture Soundtrack in that Westworld scene), and unlike the original it does not tend to make the scene all about itself so much. It feels like you are yet to demonstrate how it is particularly parasitic.
Edit: I mean honest covers; modifying a song a little bit and passing it as original should be very sueable by the rights holder and I would be very surprised if Spotify decided to do that even if they fired their entire legal department and replaced it with one LLM chatbot.
A restaurant / cafe may pay a fixed fee and get access to a specific catalog of songs (performances). The fee depends on what the catalog contains. As you can imagine, paying for the right to only play instrumental versions of songs (no singers, no lyrics) is significantly cheaper. Or, having performances of songs by unknown people.
1. The lyrics
2. The composition
3. The recording
These can all be owned by different people or the same person. The "royalty free covers" you mention are people abusing the rights of one of those. They're not avoiding royalties, they just havn't been caught yet.
Regarding what you described, I don’t think I encountered this in the wild enough to remember. IANAL but if not cleared/registered properly as a cover it doesn’t seem to be a workaround or abuse, but would probably be found straight up illegal if the rights holder or relevant rights organization cares to sue. In this case, all I can say is “yes, some people do illegal stuff”. The system largely works.
We don't need all this (seemingly pretty good) analysis. We already know what everyone thinks: no relevant AI company has had their codebase or other IP scraped by AI bots they don't control, and there's no way they'd allow that to happen, because they don't want an AI bot they don't control to reproduce their IP without constraint. But they'll turn right around and be like, "for the sake of the future, we have to ingest all data... except no one can ingest our data, of course". :rolleyes:
> Contributed Code
> In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches. If you would like to suggest a change and you include a patch as a proof-of-concept, that would be great. However, please do not be offended if we rewrite your patch from scratch.
An LLM trained on the Internet-at-large is also presumably suitable for a clean room design if it can be shown that its training completed prior to the existence of the work being duplicated, and thus could not have been contaminated.
This doesn't detract from the core of your point, that LLM output may be copyright-contaminated by LLM training data. Yes, but that doesn't necessarily mean that an LLM output cannot be a valid clean-room reverse engineer.
This is assuming that you are only concerned with a particular work when you need to be sure that you are not copying any work that might be copyrighted without making sure to have a valid license that you are abiding by.
The clean room has to do with licenses and trade secrets, not copyright.
We didn't have this whole issue 20 years ago because nobody gave a shit. If your code was public, and on the internet, it was free for everyone to use by definition.
If someone came to you and said "good news: I memorized the code of all the open source projects in this space, and can regurgitate it on command", you would be smart to ban them from working on code at your company.
But with "AI", we make up a bunch of rationalizations. ("I'm doing AI agentic generative AI workflow boilerplate 10x gettin it done AI did I say AI yet!")
And we pretend the person never said that they're just loosely laundering GPL and other code in a way that rightly would be existentially toxic to an IP-based company.
Sure it’s a big hill to climb in rethinking IP laws to align with a societal desire that generating IP continue to be a viable economic work product, but that is what’s necessary.
Yes, the training of the model itself is (or should be) a transformative act so you can train a model on whatever you have legal access to view.
However, that doesn't mean that the output of the model is automatically not infringing. If the model is prompted to create a copy of some copyrighted work, that is (or should be) still a violation.
Just like memorizing a book isn't infringment but reproducing a book from memory is.
If MS were compelled to reveal how these completions are generated, there’s at least a possibility that they directly use public repositories to source text chunks that their “model” suggested were relevant (quoted as it could be more than just a model, like vector or search databases or some other orchestration across multiple workloads).
The only thing it suggests is that they recognize that a subset of users worry about it. Whether or not GitHub worries about it any further isn’t suggested.
Don’t think about it from an actual “rights” perspective. Think about the entire copyright issue as a “too big to fail” issue.
I don't see why a company which has been waging a multi decade war against GPL and users' rights would stop at _public_ repositories.
This is far from settled law. Let's not mischaracterize it.
Even so, an AI regurgitating proprietary code that's licensed in some other way is a very real risk.
So. Yes, technically possible. But impossible by accident. Furthermore when you make this argument you reveal that you don't understand how these models work. They do not simply compress all the data they were trained on into a tiny storable version. They are effectively multiplication matrices that allow math to be done to predict the most likely next token (read: 2-3 Unicode characters) given some input.
So the model does not "contain" code. It "contains" a way of doing calculations for predicting what text comes next.
Finally, let's say that it is possible that the model does spit out not entire works, but a handful of lines of code that appear in some codebase.
This does not constitute copyright infringement, as the lines in question a) represent a tiny portion of the whole work (and copyright only protecst against the reduplication of whole works or siginficant portions of the work), and B) there are a limited number of ways to accomplish a certain function and it is not only possible but inevitable that two devs working independently could arrive at the same implementation. Therefore using an identical implementation (which is what this case would be) of a part of a work is no more illegal than the use of a certain chord progression or melodic phrasing or drum rhythm. Courts have ruled about this thoroughly.
Like this?
Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book - https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44972296 - 67 days ago (313 comments)
I comprehend it just fine, I was adding context for those who may not comprehend.
How complex does a mechanical transformation have to be to not be considered plagiarism, copyright infringement or parasitism?
If somebody writes a GPL-licensed program, is it enough to change all variable and function names to get rid of those pesky users' rights? Do you have to change the order of functions? Do you have to convert it to a different language? Surely nobody would claim c2rust is transformative even though the resulting code can be wildly different if you apply enough mechanical transformations.
All LLMs do is make the mechanical transformations 1) probabilistic 2) opaque 3) all at once 4) using multiple projects as a source.
Legally speaking, this depends from domain to domain. But consider for example extracting facts from several biology textbooks, and then delivering those facts to the user in the characteristic ChatGPT tone that is distinguishable from the style of each source textbook. You can then be quite assured that courts will not find that you have infringed on copyright.
Well, AI can perhaps solve the problem it created here: generated IP with AI is much cheaper than with humans, so it will be viable even at lower payoffs.
Less cynical: you can use trade secrets to protect your IP. You can host your software and only let customers interact with it remotely, like what Google (mostly) does.
Of course, this is a very software-centric view. You can't 'protect' eg books or music in this way.
https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_artificial_intellig...
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Forcing something on people from a position of power is never in their favor.
As a user of Reddit, I think it’s cool, and also raises some concerns.
I think most sites that handle user data are going to have rough edges. Making money off of user content is never without issues.
The nature of network effects is such that once a site gets as big as reddit (or facebook or tiktok or whichever), it's nearly impossible for competition to take over in the same design space.
Many communities (both small and large) are only present on specific platforms (sometimes only one) and if you want to participate you have to accept their terms or exclude yourself socially.
Most communities on Reddit that I’d care to be a part of have additional places to gather, but I do take your point that there are few good alternatives to r/jailbreak, for example.
The host always sets its own rules. How else could anything actually get done? The coordination problem is hard enough as it is. It’s a wonder that social media exists at all.
Gatekeepers will always exist adjacent to the point of entry, otherwise every site turns extremist and becomes overrun with scammers and spammers.
If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you.
AI is training on private Github repos and coughing them up. I've had it regurgitate a very well written piece of code to do a particular computational geometry algorithm. It presented perfect, idiomatic Python with perfect tests that caught all the degenerate cases. That was obviously proprietary code--no amount of searching came up with anything even remotely close (it's why I asked the AI, after all).
Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing.
For the second half of your comment it sounds like you’re saying you got results that were too good to be AI- that’s a bit “no true Scotsman”, at least without more detail. But implementing an algorithm, even a complex one, is very much something an LLM can do. Algorithms are much better defined and scoped natural language, and LLMs do a reasonable job of translating to languages. An algorithm is a narrow subset of that task type with better defined context and syntax.
It's potentially non-infringing in a book if you quote it in a plausible way, and properly.
If you copy&paste a paragraph from another book into yours, it's infringing, and a career-ending scandal. There's plenty of precedent on that.
Just like if you manually copied a function out of some GPL code and pasted it into your own.
Or if you had an LLM do it for you.
Advertising autocomplete as AI was a genius move because people start humanizing it and look for human-centric patterns.
Thinking A"I" can do anything on its own is like seeing faces in rocks on Mars.
It's easier for the LLM to rewrite an idiomatic computational geometry algorithm from scratch in a language it understands well like Python. Entire computational geometry textbooks and research papers are in its knowledge base. It doesn't have to copy some proprietary implementation.
(I find the example of the computational geometry algorithm being a clear case of direct memorization not very compelling, in any case.)
Obviously not ChatGPT. But ChatGPT isn't the sharpest stick on the block by a significant margin. It is a mistake to judge what AIs can do based on what ChatGPT does.
There is an entire research field of scientific discovery using LLMs together with sub-disciplines for the various specialization. LLMs routinely discover new things.
LLMs do not have an internal model for manipulating mathematical objects. They cannot, by design, come up with new algorithms unless they are very nearly the same as some other algorithm. I'm a computer science researcher and have not heard of a single algorithm created by LLM.
And it's not an accident that significant percentage (40%?) of all papers being published in top journals involve application of AIs.
The AI coming up with it? When Google claimed their Wizard of Oz show at the Las Vegas Sphere was AI-generated, a ton of VFX artists spoke up to say they'd spent months of human labor working on it. Forgive me for not giving the benefit of the doubt to a company that has a vested interest in making their AI seem more powerful, and a track record of lying to do so.
It is strange that you think the law is settled when I don't think even this "societal desire" is completely settled just yet.
This doesn’t seem like a disputable statement to me. For anyone who thinks actors’ likenesses, authors’ words, all of it- that all and everything should be up for grabs once written or put anywhere in public, that is not a widely held opinion.
Once that’s established, it all comes down to implementation details.
Coders don't get paid every single time their code runs. Why bundle different rights together?
They do if they code the API correctly.
> Why bundle different rights together?
Why are mineral rights sold separately to most land deeds?
Because the population does not rebel against the politicians that made these laws.
Judge Alsup, in his ruling, specifically likened the process to reading text and then using the knowledge to write something else. That’s training and use.
Also publishing pirated IP without any monetary gain to yourself also used to be treated more leniently.
Of course, all the rules were changed (both in law and in interpretation in practice) as file sharing became a huge deal about two decades ago.
Details depend on jurisdiction.
Seems to me the training of AI is not radically different than compression algorithms building up a dictionary and compressing data.
Yet nobody calls JPEG compression “transformative”.
Could one do lossy compression over billions of copyrighted images to “train” a dictionary?
(not legal advice)
Transformative works are necessarily derivative, but that transformation allows for a legal claim to "fair use" regardless of making a derived work.
An llm is looking at the shape of words and ideas over scale and using that to provide answers.
The only difference, really, is we know how a JPEG algorithm works. If I wanted to, I could painstakingly make a jpeg by hand. We don't know how LLMs work.
The reality is that programmers are going to see other programmers code.
Content on StackOverflow is under CC-by-sa, version depends on the date it was submitted: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing . (It's really unfortunate that they didn't pick license compatible with code; at one point they started to move to the MIT license for code, but then didn't follow through on it.)
So, for the specific case of material contributed to StackOverflow on or after 2018-05-02, it's possible to use it under GPLv3 (including appropriate attribution), so any project compatible with GPLv3 can copy it with attribution. Any material before that point is not safe to copy.
You're certainly correct. It's also true that companies are going to sue over it. There's no reason to make yourself an easy lawsuit target, if it's trivial to avoid it.
LLMs are interesting because they can combine things they learn from multiple projects into a new language that doesn't feature in any of them, and pick up details from your request.
Unless you're schizophrenic enough to insist that you never even see other code it's just not a realistic problem
Honestly I've had big arguments about this IP stuff before and unless you actually have a lawyer specifically go after something or very obviously violate the GPL it's just a tactic for people to slow people they don't like down. People find a way to invent HR departments fractally.
If you find a human that did that send them my way, I'll hire them.
I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are. Luckily everyone is for the most part just ignoring them and the legal system is working well and not allowing them an inch to stop progress.
Why do you think that about people who disagree with you? You're responding directly to someone who's said they think there's issues, and not pretending. Do you think they're lying? Did you not read what they said?
And AFAICT a lot of other people think similarly to me.
The perverse incentives to rationalize are on the side of the people looking to exploit the confusion, not the people who are saying "wait a minute, what you're actually doing is..."
So a gold rush person claiming opponents must be pretending because of incentives... seems like the category of "every accusation is a confession".
They can have a moral view that AI is "stealing" but they are claiming there is actually a legal issue at play.
I don't want my children to pay a license fee to their school or their textbook publishers for what they learn in school.
The amount of IP risk caused by USING (not training) AI models to produce code, especially wholesale commercial code that competes with code that was contained in the training data, is poorly understood.
I really appreciate this point from mitchellh. Giving thoughtful constructive feedback to help a junior developer improve is a gift. Yet it would be a waste of time if the PR submitter is just going to pass it to an AI without learning from it.
This remark seems very US-centric to me. In my observation, many people are much more skeptical concerning whether AI is actually useful beyond some gimmicky applications.
> If you are using *any kind of AI assistance* to contribute to Ghostty, it must be disclosed in the pull request.
This is sufficiently confusing that someone is asking if this applies to tab completion. They commit actually says
> trivial tab-completion doesn't need to be disclosed, so long as it is limited to single keywords or short phrases.
So if you take this literally you're going to be disclosing every yasnippet expansion that completes boilerplate.
The policy as written isn't sensible and I don't think it's entirely coming from a sensible place.
Junior developers need to learn how to code with AI because that's what coding is now. Not that he has to help them. But it does read a bit weird to toot your horn about how important it is to be helpful until it comes to helping people understand how to navigate the current environment then it's not worth your time.
Rather: this is what coding is now in some Silicon Valley bubbles.
I’ve completely turned off AI assist on my personal computer and only use AI assist sparingly on my work computer. It is so bad at compound work. AI assist is great at atomic work. The rest should be handled by humans and use AI wisely. It all boils down back to human intelligence. AI is only as smart as the human handling it. That’s the bottom line.
I think I'm slowly coming around to this viewpoint too. I really just couldn't understand how so many people were having widely different experiences. AI isn't magic; how could I have expected all the people I've worked with who struggle to explain stuff to team members, who have near perfect context, to manage to get anything valuable across to an AI?
I was original pretty optimistic that AI would allow most engineers to operate at a higher level but it really seems like instead it's going to massively exacerbate the difference between an ok engineer and a great engineer. Not really sure how I feel about that yet but at-least I understand now why some people think the stuff is useless.
Now, an "effective engineer" can be a less battle-tested software developer, but they must be good at system design.
(And by system design, I don't just mean architecture diagrams: it's a personal culture of constantly questioning and innovating around "let's think critically to see what might go wrong when all these assumptions collide, and if one of them ends up being incorrect." Because AI will only suggest those things for cut-and-dry situations where a bug is apparent from a few files' context, and no ambitious idea is fully that cut-and-dry.)
The set of effective engineers is thus shifting - and it's not at all a valid assumption that every formerly good developer will see their productivity skyrocket.
I don't think that it lowers the bar there, if anything the bar is far harsher.
If I'm doing normal coding I make X choices per time period, with Y impacts.
With AI X will go up and the Y / X ratio may ALSO go up, so making more decisions of higher leverage!
Great Engineer + AI = Great Engineer++ (Where a great engineer isn't just someone who is a great coder, they also are a great communicator & collaborator, and love to learn)
Good Engineer + AI = Good Engineer
OK Engineer + AI = Mediocre Engineer
He took a couple days doing this, which was shocking to me. Such a waste of time that would have been better spent reading the code and improving any missing documentation - and most importantly asking teammates about necessary context that couldn't just be inferred from the code.
Now I could believe an intern would do such a thing. I’ve seen a structural engineer intern spend four weeks creating a finite element model of a single concrete vault. he could have treated the top deck as a concrete beam used conservative assumptions about the loading and solved it with pen and paper in 30 minutes.
If an OK engineer is still actively trying to learn, making mistakes, memorizing essentials, etc. then there is no issue.
On the other hand, if they're surrendering 100% of their judgment to AI, then they will be mediocre.
Thats the reason for high valuation of AI companies.
The people deciding how much OpenAI is worth would probably struggle to run first-time setup on an iPad.
However, that way of working can be exasperating for those who prefer a more deterministic approach, and who may feel frustrated by the sheer amount of slightly incorrect stuff being generated by the machine.
Nassim Taleb is the prophet of our times and he doesn't get enough credit.
But then my wife sort of handed me a project that previously I would have just said no to, a particular Android app for the family. I have instances of all the various Android technologies under my belt, that is, I've used GUI toolkits, I've used general purpose programming languages, I've used databases, etc, but with the possible exception of SQLite (which even that is accessed through an ORM), I don't know any of the specific technologies involved with Android now. I have never used Kotlin; I've got enough experience that I can pretty much piece it together when I'm reading it but I can't write it. Never used the Android UI toolkit, services, permissions, media APIs, ORMs, build system, etc.
I know from many previous experiences that A: I could definitely learn how to do this but B: it would be a many-week project and in the end I wouldn't really be able to leverage any of the Android knowledge I would get for much else.
So I figured this was a good chance to take this stuff for a spin in a really hard way.
I'm about eight hours in and nearly done enough for the family; I need about another 2 hours to hit that mark, maybe 4 to really polish it. Probably another 8-12 hours and I'd have it brushed up to a rough commercial product level for a simple, single-purpose app. It's really impressive.
And I'm now convinced it's not just that I'm too old a fogey to pick it up, which is, you know, a bit of a relief.
It's just that it works really well in some domains, and not so much in others. My current work project is working through decades of organically-grown cruft owned by 5 different teams, most of which don't even have a person on them that understands the cruft in question, and trying to pull it all together into one system where it belongs. I've been able to use AI here and there for some stuff that is still pretty impressive, like translating some stuff into psuedocode for my reference, and AI-powered autocomplete is definitely impressive when it correctly guesses the next 10 lines I was going to type effectively letter-for-letter. But I haven't gotten that large-scale win where I just type a tiny prompt in and see the outsized results from it.
I think that's because I'm working in a domain where the code I'm writing is already roughly the size of the prompt I'd have to give, at least in terms of the "payload" of the work I'm trying to do, because of the level of detail and maturity of the code base. There's no single sentence I can type that an AI can essentially decompress into 250 lines of code, pulling in the correct 4 new libraries, and adding it all to the build system the way that Gemini in Android Studio could decompress "I would like to store user settings with a UI to set the user's name, and then display it on the home page".
I think I recommend this approach to anyone who wants to give this approach a fair shake - try it in a language and environment you know nothing about and so aren't tempted to keep taking the wheel. The AI is almost the only tool I have in that environment, certainly the only one for writing code, so I'm forced to really exercise the AI.
That's a good insights. Its almost like to use AI tools effectively, one needs to stop caring about the little things you'd get caught up in if you were already familiar and proficient in a stack. Style guidelines, a certain idiomatic way to do things, naming conventions, etc.
A lot like how I've stopped organizing digital files into folders, sub folders etc (along with other content) and now I just just rely on search. Everything is a flat structure, I don't care where its stored or how it's organized as long as I can just search for it, that's what the computer is for, to keep track for me so I don't have to waste time organizing it myself.
Like wise for the code Generative AI produces. I don't need to care about the code itself. As long as its correct, not insecure, and performant, it's fine.
It's not 100% there yet, I still do have to go in and touch the code, but ideally I shouldn't have to, nor should I have to care what the actual code looks like, just the result of it. Let the computer manage that, not me. My role should be the system design and specification, not writing the code.
This makes me a little sad. Part of the joy of writing software is expressing yourself through caring about these little things. Stylistic coherence, adhering to consistent naming conventions, aligning code blocks, consistently applying patterns, respecting the way the language and platform's APIs work together rather than fighting it... heck, even tiny things like alphabetizing header declarations. None of these things make the finished product better/faster/more reliable, but all of these demonstrate something about the author: What he believes in. That he is willing to sand, polish and beautify the back of the cabinet that nobody is going to see. As Steve Jobs said:
"Even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
I suspect that well-engineered projects with plenty of test coverage and high-quality documentation will be easier to use AI on, just like they're easier for humans to comprehend. But you need to have somebody with the big picture still who can make sure that you don't just turn things into a giant mess once less disciplined people start using AI on a project.
The reason being that the boilerplate Android stuff is effectively given for free and not part of the context as it is so heavily represented in the training set, whereas the unique details of your work project is not. But finding a way to provide that context, or better yet fine-tune the model on your codebase, would put you in the same situation and there's no reason for it to not deliver the same results.
That it is not working for you now at your complex work projects is a limitation of tooling, not something fundamental about how AI works.
Aside: Your recommendation is right on. It clicked for me when I took a project that I had spent months of full-time work creating in C++, and rewrote it in idiomatic Go, a language I had never used and knew nothing about. It took only a weekend, and at the end of the project I had reviewed and understood every line of generated code & was now competent enough to write my own simple Go projects without AI help. I went from skeptic to convert right then and there.
However, the information-theoretic limitation of expressing what you want and how anyone, AI or otherwise, could turn that into commits, is going to be quite the barrier, because that's fundamental to communication itself. I don't think the skill of "having a very, very precise and detailed understanding of the actual problem" is going anywhere any time soon.
(1) The process of creating "a very, very precise and detailed understanding of the actual problem" is something AI is really good at, when partnered with a human. My use of AI tools got immensely better when I figured out that I should be prompting the AI to turn my vague short request into a detailed prompt, and then I spend a few iteration cycles fixing up before asking the agent to do it.
(2) The other problem of managing context is a search and indexing problem, which we are really, really good at and have lots of tools for, but AI is just so new that these tools haven't been adapted or seen wide use yet. If the limitation of the AI was its internal reasoning or training or something, I would be more skeptical. But the limitation seems to be managing, indexing, compressing, searching, and distilling appropriate context. Which is firmly in the domain of solvable, albeit nontrivial problems.
I don't see the information theoretic barrier you refer to. The amount of information an AI can keep in its context window far exceeds what I have easily accessible to my working memory.
But then I suppose I should learn from my own experiences and not try to make information theoretic arguments on HN, since it is in that most terrible state where everyone thinks they understand it because they use "bits" all the time, but in fact the average HN denizen knows less than nothing about it because even their definition of "bit" actively misleads them and that's about all they know.
There are so many unusual or one off use cases that would have normally required me to spend several hours locating and reading API documentation that I now just hand off to the AI. I am a big believer in their value. I’m getting more done than ever.
The gist being - language (text input) is actually the vehicle you have to transfer neural state to the engine. When you are working in a greenfield project or pure-vibe project, you can get away with most of that neural state being in the "default" probability mode. But in a legacy project, you need significantly more context to contrain the probability distributions a lot closer to the decisions which were made historically.
Using search engines is a skill
> Net on Bullets - Position Unchanged
> So we come back to fundamentals. Complexity is the business we are in, and complexity is what limits us. R. L. Glass, writing in 1988, accurately summarizes my 1995 views:
>> So what, in retrospect, have Parnas and Brooks said to us? That software development is a conceptually tough business. That magic solutions are not just around the corner. That it is time for the practitioner to examine evolutionary improvements rather than to wait—or hope—for revolutionary ones.
>> Some in the software field find this to be a discouraging picture. They are the ones who still thought breakthroughs were near at hand.
>> But some of us—those of us crusty enough to think that we are realists—see this as a breath of fresh air. At last, we can focus on something a little more viable than pie in the sky. Now, perhaps, we can get on with the incremental improvements to software productivity that are possible, rather than waiting for the breakthroughs that are not likely to ever come.[1]
[0]: Brooks, Frederick P.,Jr, The mythical man-month: essays on software engineering (1995), p. 226
[1]: Glass, R. L., "Glass"(column), System Development, (January 1988), pp. 4-5.
An interesting stance.
Plenty of posts in the style of "I wrote this cool library with AI in a day" were written by really smart devs who are known for shipping good quality library very quickly.
It might just be my point of view, but I feel like there's been a sudden paradigm shift back to solid ML from the deluge of chatbot hype nonsense.
What's a key decision and what's a dot to connect varies by app and by domain, but the upside is that generally most code by volume is dot connecting (and in some cases it's like 80-90% of the code), so if you draw the lines correctly, huge productivity boosts can be found with little downside.
But if you draw the lines wrong, such that AI is making key decisions, you will have a bad time. In that case, you are usually better off deleting everything it produced and starting again rather than spending time to understand and fix its mistakes.
Things that are typically key decisions:
- database table layout and indexes
- core types
- important dependencies (don't let the AI choose dependencies unless it's low consequence)
- system design—caches, queues, etc.
- infrastructure design—VPC layout, networking permissions, secrets management
- what all the UI screens are and what they contain, user flows, etc.
- color scheme, typography, visual hierarchy
- what to test and not to test (AI will overdo it with unnecessary tests and test complexity if you let it)
- code organization: directory layout, component boundaries, when to DRY
Things that are typically dot connecting:
- database access methods for crud
- API handlers
- client-side code to make API requests
- helpers that restructure data, translate between types, etc.
- deploy scripts/CI and CD
- dev environment setup
- test harness
- test implementation (vs. deciding what to test)
- UI component implementation (once client-side types and data model are in place)
- styling code
- one-off scripts for data cleanup, analytics, etc.
That's not exhaustive on either side, but you get the idea.
AI can be helpful for making the key decisions too, in terms of research, ideation, exploring alternatives, poking holes, etc., but imo the human needs to make the final choices and write the code that corresponds to these decisions either manually or with very close supervision.
> As a small exception, trivial tab-completion doesn't need to be disclosed, so long as it is limited to single keywords or short phrases.
RTFA (RTFPR in this case)
Some of the AI policy statements I have seen come across more as ideology statements. This is much better, saying the reasons for the requirement and offering a path forward. I'd like to see more of this and less "No droids allowed"
But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”
If trust didn't matter, there wouldn't have been a need for the Linux Kernel team to ban the University of Minnesota for attempting to intentionally smuggle bugs through the PR process as part of an unauthorized social experiment. As it stands, if you / your PRs can't be trusted, they should not even be admitted to the review process.
In an open source project I think you have to start with a baseline assumption of "trust nobody." Exceptions possibly if you know the contributors personally, or have built up trust over years of collaboration.
I wouldn't reject or decline to review a PR just because I don't trust the contributor.
Presumably if a contributor repeatedly made bad PRs that didn't do what they said, introduced bugs, scribbled pointlessly on the codebase, and when you tried to coach or clarify at best they later forgot everything you said and at worst outright gaslit and lied to you about their PRs... you would reject or decline to review their PRs, right? You'd presumably ban the outright.
Well that's exactly what commercial LLM products, with the aid of less sophisticated users, have already done to the maintainers of many large open source projects. It's not that they're not trusted-- they should be distrusted with ample cause.
So what if the above banned contributor kept getting other people to mindlessly submit their work and even proxy communication through -- evading your well earned distrust and bans? Asking people to at least disclose that they were acting on behalf of the distrusted contributor would be the least you would do, I hope? Or even asking them to disclose if and to what extent their work was a collaboration with a distrusted contributor?
That's a pretty nice offer from one of the most famous and accomplished free software maintainers in the world. He's promising not to take a short-cut reviewing your PR, in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place.
This “short cut” language suggests that the quality of the submission is going to be objectively worse by way of its provenance.
Yet, can one reliably distinguish working and tested code generated by a person vs a machine? We’re well past passing Turing tests at this point.
IMO when people declare that LLMs "pass" at a particular skill, it's a sign that they don't have the taste or experience to judge that skill themselves. Or - when it's CEOs - they have an interest in devaluing it.
So yes if you're trying to fool an experienced open source maintainer with unrefined LLM-generated code, good luck (especially one who's said he doesn't want that).
Would you like to take the Pepsi challenge? Happy to put random code snippets in front of you and see whether you can accurately determine whether it was written by a human or an LLM.
Otherwise, what’s the harm in saying AI guides you to the solution if you can attest to it being a good solution?
For one: it threatens to make an entire generation of programmers lazy and stupid. They stop exercising their creative muscle. Writing and reviewing are different activities; both should be done continuously.
This is perfectly observable with a foreign language. If you stop actively using a foreign language after learning it really well, your ability to speak it fades pretty quickly, while your ability to understand it fades too, but less quickly.
I don’t get it at all. Feels like modernity is often times just inventing pale shadows of things with more addictive hooks to induce needlessly dependent behavior.
Thanks for putting it so well.
That is what hurts. A lot. Taking pride out of work, especially creative work, makes the world a worse place; it makes life less worth living.
> inventing pale shadows of things
Yes.
If I just vibe-coded something and haven't looked at the code myself, that seems like a necessary thing to disclose. But beyond that, if the code is well understood and solid, I feel that I'd be clouding the conversation by unnecessarily bringing the tools I used into it. If I understand the code and feel confident in it, whether I used AI or not seems irrelevant and distracting.
This policy is just shoving the real problem under the rug. Generative AI is going to require us to come up with better curation/filtering/selection tooling, in general. This heuristic of "whether or not someone self-disclosed using LLMs" just doesn't seem very useful in the long run. Maybe it's a piece of the puzzle but I'm pretty sure there are more useful ways to sift through PRs than that. Line count differences, for example. Whether it was a person with an LLM or a 10x coder without one, a PR that adds 15000 lines is just not likely to be it.
This is the core problem with AI that makes so many people upset. In the old days, if you get a substantial submission, you know a substantial amount of effort went into it. You know that someone at some point had a mental model of what the submission was. Even if they didn't translate that perfectly, you can still try to figure out what they meant and we're thinking. You know the submitter put forth significant effort. That is a real signal that they are both willing and able to do so to address going forward to address issues you raise.
The existence of AI slop fundamentally breaks these assumptions. That is why we need enforced social norms around disclosure.
10x engineers create so many bugs without AI, and vibe coding could multiply that to 100x. But let's not distract from the source of that, which is rewarding the false confidence it takes to pretend we understand stuff that we actually don't.
The only reason one may not want disclosure is if one can’t write anything by themselves, thus they will have to label all code as AI generated and everyone will see their real skill level.
Such behaviors can only be normalized in a classroom / ramp-up / mentorship-like setting. Which is very valid, BUT:
- Your reviewers are always overloaded, so they need some official mandate / approval to mentor newcomers. This is super important, and should be done everywhere.
- Even with the above in place: because you're being mentored with great attention to detail, you owe it to your reviewer not to drown them in AI slop. You must honor them by writing every single line that you ask them to spend their attention on yourself. Ultimately, their educative efforts are invested IN YOU, not (only) in the code that may finally be merged. I absolutely refuse to review or otherwise correct AI slop, while at the same time I'm 100% committed to transfer whatever knowledge I may have to another human.
Fuck AI.
but maybe those don't need to be about "whether or not you used LLMs" and might have more to do
with "how well you understand the code you are opening a PR for" (or are reviewing, for that matter)
If they had used AI, their PRs might have been more understandable / less buggy, and ultimately I would have preferred that.
If they had used AI, their PRs might have been more understandable / less buggy, and ultimately I would have preferred that.
To address your claim about AI slop improving the output of these mythical 10x coders: doubtful. LLMs can only approximate meaningful output if they've already indexed the solution. If your vaunted 10x coders are working on already solved problems you're likely wasting their time. If they're working on something novel LLMs are of little use. For instance: I've had the pleasure of working with a notoriously poorly documented crate that's also got a reputation for frequently making breaking changes. I used DDG and Google to see if I could track down someone with a similar use case. If I forgot to append "-ai" to the query I'd get back absolutely asinine results typically along the line of "here's an answer with rust and one of the words in your query". At best first sentence would explain something entirely unrelated about the crate.
Potentially LLMs could be improved by ingesting more and more data, but that's an arms race they're destined to lose. People are already turning to Cloudflare and Anubis en masse to avoid being billed for training LLMs. If Altman and co. had to pay market rate for their training data nobody could afford to use these AI doodads.
Exactly! The code used double as "proof of work". Well-formed language used to double as "proof of thinking". And that's what AI breaks: it speaks, but doesn't think. And my core point is that language that does not originate from well-reasoned human effort (i.e., from either writing the language directly, or from writing such code manually that generates the language deterministically, and for known reasons/intents), does not deserve human attention. Even if the "observable behavior" of such language (when executed as code) looks "alright".
And because I further think that no code should be accepted without human review (which excludes both not reviewing AI-generated code at all and having some other AI review the AI-generated code), I conclude that AI-generated code can never be accepted.
My little essay up there is more so a response to the heated "LLM people vs pure people" comments I'm reading all over this discussion. Some of this stuff just seems entirely misguided and fear driven.
If you’re unwilling to stop using slop tools, then you don’t get to contribute to some projects, and you need to be accept that.
https://youtu.be/klW65MWJ1PY?t=1320
X sucks and should not be allowed to proceed with what they're doing in Memphis. Nor should Meta be allowed to proceed with multiple Manhattan sized data centers.
It seems a bit like saying you can’t trust a legal document because it was written on a computer with spellcheck, rather than by a $10 an hour temp with a typewriter.
No you don’t. You can’t outsource trust determinations. Especially to the people you claim not to trust!
You make the judgement call by looking at the code and your known history of the contributor.
Nobody cares if contributors use an LLM or a magnetic needle to generate code. They care if bad code gets introduced or bad patches waste reviewers’ time.
Stop trying to equate LLM-generated code with indexing-based autocomplete. They’re not the same thing at all: LLM-generated code is equivalent to code copied off Stack Overflow, which is also something you’d better not be attempting to fraudulently pass off as your own work.
For example, you either make your contributors attest that their changes are original or that they have the right to contribute their changes—or you assume this of them and consider it implicit in their submission.
What you (probably) don’t do is welcome contributions that the contributors do not have the right to make.
Assuring you didn’t include any AGPLv3 code in your contribution is exactly the same kind of assurance. It also doesn’t provide any provenance.
Conflating assurance with provenance is bogus because the former is about making a representation that, if false, exposes the person making it to liability. For most situations that’s sufficient that provenance isn’t needed.
That’s exactly opposite of what the author is saying. He mentions that [if the code is not good, or you are a beginner] he will help you get to finish line, but if it’s LLM code, he shouldn’t be putting effort because there’s no human on the other side.
It makes sense to me.
That's the false equivalence right there
I think you just haven't gotten the hang of it yet, which is fine... the tooling is very immature and hard to get consistent results with. But this isn't a given. Some people do get good, steerable LLM coding setups.
The PR effectively ends up being an extremely high-latency conversation with an LLM, via another human who doesn't have the full context/understanding of the problem.
LLMs are trained to be steerable at inference time via context/prompting. Fine tuning is also possible and often used. Both count as "feedback" in my book, and my point is that both can be effective at "changing the LLM" in terms of its behavior at inference time.
The person driving the LLM is a teachable human who can learn what's what's going on and learn to improve the code. It's simply not true that there's no person on the other side of the PR.
The idea that we should be comparing "teaching a human" to "teaching an LLM" is yet another instance of this false equivalence.
It's not inherently pointless to provide feedback on a PR with code written using an LLM, that feedback goes to the person using the LLM tools.
People are swallowing this b.s. marketing mystification of "LLMs as non human entities". But really they're fancy compilers that we have a lot to learn about.
IF they disclose what they've done, provided the prompts, etc. then other contributors can help them get better results from the tools. But the feedback is very different than the feedback you'd give a human that actually wrote the code in question, that latter feedback is unlikely to be of much value (and even less likely to persist).
I've done things like share a ChatGPT account with a junior dev to steer them toward better prompts, actually, and that had some merit.
I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. I think you do care, you are only thinking about the happy path where someone uses a little AI to draft a well constructed PR.
There's a lot ways AI can be used to quickly overwhelm a project maintainer.
Then perhaps the way you contribute, review, and accept code is fundamentally wrong and needs to change with the times.
It may be that technologies like Github PRs and other VCS patterns are literally obsolete. We've done this before throughout many cycles of technology, and these are the questions we need to ask ourselves as engineers, not stick our heads in the sand and pretend it's 2019.
Before PR's existed we passed around code changes via email. Before containers we installed software on bare metal servers. And before search engines we used message boards. It's not unfathomable that the whole idea of how we contribute and collaborate changes as well. Actually that is likely going to be the /least/ shocking thing in the next few years if acceleration happens (i.e. The entire OS is an LLM that renders pixels, for example)
--
[1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
[2] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
> • Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material
> • Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
"In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author,” which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans." "In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” 24 The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work.25 This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry." "If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it."
The office has been quite consistent that works containing both human-made and AI-made elements will be registerable only to the extent that they contain human-made elements.
The source you linked says the opposite of that: "the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole"
That is, it suggests that even if there are elements of human-generated content in a larger machine-generated work, the combined work as a whole is not eligible for copyright protection. Printed page iii of that PDF talks a bit more about that:
* Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements.
* Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis.Just to be sure that I wasn't misremembering, I went through part 2 of the report and back to the original memorandum[1] that was sent out before the full report issued. I've included a few choice quotes to illustrate my point:
"These are no longer hypothetical questions, as the Office is already receiving and examining applications for registration that claim copyright in AI-generated material. For example, in 2018 the Office received an application for a visual work that the applicant described as “autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine.” 7 The application was denied because, based on the applicant’s representations in the application, the examiner found that the work contained no human authorship. After a series of administrative appeals, the Office’s Review Board issued a final determination affirming that the work could not be registered because it was made “without any creative contribution from a human actor.”"
"More recently, the Office reviewed a registration for a work containing human-authored elements combined with AI-generated images. In February 2023, the Office concluded that a graphic novel comprised of human-authored text combined with images generated by the AI service Midjourney constituted a copyrightable work, but that the individual images themselves could not be protected by copyright. "
"In the Office’s view, it is well-established that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term “author,” which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans."
"In the case of works containing AI-generated material, the Office will consider whether the AI contributions are the result of “mechanical reproduction” or instead of an author’s “own original mental conception, to which [the author] gave visible form.” The answer will depend on the circumstances, particularly how the AI tool operates and how it was used to create the final work. This is necessarily a case-by-case inquiry."
"If a work’s traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it."[1], pgs 2-4
---
On the odd chance that somehow the Copyright Office had reversed itself I then went back to part 2 of the report:
"As the Office affirmed in the Guidance, copyright protection in the United States requires human authorship. This foundational principle is based on the Copyright Clause in the Constitution and the language of the Copyright Act as interpreted by the courts. The Copyright Clause grants Congress the authority to “secur[e] for limited times to authors . . . the exclusive right to their . . . writings.” As the Supreme Court has explained, “the author [of a copyrighted work] is . . . the person who translates an idea into a fixed, tangible expression entitled to copyright protection.”
"No court has recognized copyright in material created by non-humans, and those that have spoken on this issue have rejected the possibility. "
"In most cases, however, humans will be involved in the creation process, and the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship." -- [2], pgs 15-16
---
TL;DR If you make something with the assistance of AI, you still have to be personally involved and contribute more than just a prompt in order to receive copyright, and then you will receive protection only over such elements of originality and authorship that you are responsible for, not those elements which the AI is responsible for.
--- [1] https://copyright.gov/ai/ai_policy_guidance.pdf [2] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
Unreviewed generated PRs can still be helpful starting points for further LLM work if they achieve desired results. But close reading with consideration of authorial intent, giving detailed comments, and asking questions from someone who didn't write or read the code is a waste of your time.
That's why we need to know if a contribution was generated or not.
Any contributor who was shown to post provably untested patches used to lose credibility. And now we're talking about accommodating people who don't even understand how the patch is supposed to work?
Example where this kind of contribution was accepted and valuable, inside this ghostty project https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1957930725996654718
It takes attempts, verifying the result behaves as desired, and iterative prompting to adjust. And it takes a lot of time to wait on agents in between those steps (this work isn’t a one shot response). You’re being reductive.
I have no clue in ghostty but I've seen plenty of stuff that doesn't compile much less pass tests. And I assert there is nothing but negative value in such "contributions".
If real effort went into it, then maybe there is value-- though it's not clear to me: When a project regular does the same work then at least they know the process. Like if there is some big PR moving things around at least the author knows that it's unlikely to slip in a backdoor. Once the change is reduced to some huge diff, it's much harder to gain this confidence.
In some projects direct PRs for programmatic mass renames and such have been prohibited in favor of requiring submission of the script that produces the change, because its easier to review the script carefully. The same may be necessary for AI.
Having the original prompts (in sequence and across potentially multiple models) can be valuable but is not necessarily useful in replicating the results because of the slot machine nature of it
Sure though I believe few commenters care much about ghostty specifically and are primarily discussing the policy abstractly!
> because of the slot machine nature of it
One could use deterministically sampled LLMs with exact integer arithmetic... There is nothing fundamental preventing it from being completely reproducible.
Besides, the output of an LLM is not really any more trustworthy (even if reproducible) than the contribution of an anonymous actor. Both require review of outputs. Reproducibility of output from prompt doesn't mean that the output followed a traceable logic such that you can skip a full manual code review as with your mass renaming example. LLMs produce antagonistic output from innocuous prompting from time to time, too.
It would be nice if they did, in fact, say they didn't know. But more often they just waste your time making their chatbot argue with you. And the chatbots are outrageous gaslighters.
All big OSS projects have had the occasional bullshitter/gaslighter show up. But LLMs have increased the incidence level of these sorts of contributors by many orders of magnitude-- I consider it an open question if open-public-contribution opensource is viable in the world post LLM.
Everyone promoting LLMs, especially on HN, claim that they're expertly using them by using artisanal prompts and carefully examining the output but.. I'm honestly skeptical. Sure, some people are doing that (I do it from time to time). But I've seen enough slop to think that more people are throwing around code that they barely understand than these advocates care to admit .
Those same people will swear that they did due diligence, but why would they admit otherwise? And do they even know what proper due diligence is? And would they still be getting their mythical 30%-50% productivity boost if they were actually doing what they claimed they were doing?
And that is a problem. I cannot have a productive code review with someone that does not even understand what their code is actually doing, much less trade offs that were made in an implementation (because they did not consider any trade offs at all and just took what the LLM produced). If they can't have a conversation about the code at all because they didn't bother to read or understand anything about it, then theres nothing I can do except close the PR and tell them to actually do the work this time.
If it's exactly the same as what you'd have written manually, and you are confident it works, then what's the point of disclosure?
An LLM is regurgitating things from outside that space, where you have no idea of the provenance of what it’s putting into your code.
It doesn’t just matter that the code you’re contributing to a project is correct, it matters quite a lot if it’s actually something you’re allowed to contribute.
- You can’t contribute code that your employer owns to a project if they don’t want you to. - You can’t contribute code under a license that the project doesn’t want you to use. - And you can’t contribute code written by someone else and claim it’s your intellectual property without some sort of contract in place to grant that.
If you use an LLM to generate code that you’re contributing, you have both of the latter two problems. And all of those apply *even if* the code you’re contributing is identical to what you’d have written by hand off the top of your head.
When you contribute to a project, you’re not just sending that project a set of bits, you’re making attestations about how those bits were created.
Why does this seem so difficult for some supposed tech professionals to understand? The entire industry is intellectual property, and this is basic “IP 101” stuff.
Maybe because 99% of people that complain about this complain about problems that never occur in 99% of the cases they cite. My employer isn’t going to give a shit that code that I’ve written for their internal CRUD app gets more or less directly copied into my own. There’s only one way to do that, it was already in my head before I wrote it for them, and it’ll still be in after. As long as I’m not directly competing with their interests, what the hell do they care.
> When you contribute to a project, you’re not just sending that project a set of bits, you’re making attestations about how those bits were created.
You are really not. You are only doing that if the project requires some attestation of provenance. I can tell you that none of mine do.
If you want me to put in the effort- you have to put it in first.
Especially considering in 99% of cases even the one who generated it didn’t fully read/understand it.
Whether it's prose or code, when informed something is entirely or partially AI generated, it completely changes the way I read it. I have to question every part of it now, no matter how intuitive or "no one could get this wrong"ish it might seem. And when I do, I usually find a multitude of minor or major problems. Doesn't matter how "state of the art" the LLM that shat it out was. They're still there. The only thing that ever changed in my experience is that problems become trickier to spot. Because these things are bullshit generators. All they're getting better at is disguising the bullshit.
I'm sure I'll gets lots of responses trying to nitpick my comment apart. "You're holding it wrong", bla bla bla. I really don't care anymore. Don't waste your time. I won't engage with any of it.
I used to think it was undeserved that we programmers called ourselved "engineers" and "architects" even before LLMs. At this point, it's completely farcical.
"Gee, why would I volunteer that my work came from a bullshit generator? How is that relevant to anything?" What a world.
So fail to disclose at your own peril.
- books
- search engines
- stack overflow
- talking to a coworker
then it's not clear why you would have to disclose talking to an AI.
Generally speaking, when someone uses the word "slop" when talking about AI it's a signal to me that they've been sucked into a culture war and to discount what they say about AI.
It's of course the maintainer's right to take part in a culture war, but it's a useful way to filter out who's paying attention vs who's playing for a team. Like when you meet someone at a party and they bring up some politician you've barely heard of but who their team has vilified.
It’s explained right there in the PR:
> The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
That is not true of books, search engines, stack overflow, or talking to a worker, because in all those cases you still had to do the work yourself of comprehending, preparing, and submitting the patch. This is also why they ask for a disclosure of “the extent to which AI assistance was used”. What about that isn’t clear to you?
On the one hand, it's lowered the barrier to entry for certain types of contributions. But on the other hand getting a vibe-coded 1k LOC diff from someone that has absolutely no idea how the project even works is a serious problem because the iteration cycle of getting feedback + correctly implementing it is far worse in this case.
Also, the types of errors introduced tend to be quite different between humans and AI tools.
It's a small ask but a useful one to disclose how AI was used.
- People use AI to write cover letters. If the companies don't filter out them automatically, they're screwed.
- Companies use AI to interview candidates. No one wants to spend their personal time talking to a robot. So the candidates start using AI to take interviews for them.
etc.
If you don't at least tell yourself that you don't allow AI PRs (even just as a white lie) you'll one day use AI to review PRs.
Imagine living before the invention of the printing press, and then lamenting that we should ban them because it makes it "too easy" to distribute information and will enable "low quality" publications to have more reach. Actually, this exact thing happened, but the end result was it massively disrupted the world and economy in extremely positive ways.
Citation needed, I don’t think the printing press and gpt are in any way comparable.
Imagine seeing “rm -rf / is a function that returns “Hello World!” and thinking “this is the same thing as the printing press”
In some cases sure but it can also create the situation where people just waste time for nothing (think AI interviewing other AIs - this might generate GDP by people purchasing those services but I think we can all agree that this scenario is just wasting time and resource without improving society).
That said, requiring adequate disclosure of AI is just fair. It also suggests that the other side is willing to accept AI-supported contributions (without being willing to review endless AI slop that they could have generated themselves if they had the time to read it).
I would expect such a maintainer to respond fairly to "I first vibecoded it. I then made manual changes, vibecoded a test, cursorily reviewed the code, checked that the tests provide good coverage, ran both existing and new tests, and manually tested the code."
That fair response might be a thorough review, or a request that I do the thorough review before they put in the time, but I'd expect it to be more than a blatant "nope, AI touched this, go away".
If, in the dystopian future, a justice court you're subjected to decides that Claude was trained on Oracle's code, and all Claude users are possibly in breach of copyright, it's easier to nuke from orbit all disclosed AI contributions.
or say "fork you."
You might argue that by making rules, even futile ones, you at least establish expectations and take a moral stance. Well, you can make a statement without dressing it up as a rule. But you don't get to be sanctimonious that way I guess.
Not every time, but sometimes. The threat of being caught isn't meaningless. You can decide not to play in someone else's walled garden if you want but the least you can do is respect their rules, bare minimum of human decency.
The only legitimate reason to make a rule is to produce some outcome. If your rule does not result in that outcome, of what use is the rule?
Will this rule result in people disclosing "AI" (whatever that means) contributions? Will it mitigate some kind of risk to the project? Will it lighten maintainer load?
No. It can't. People are going to use the tools anyway. You can't tell. You can't stop them. The only outcome you'll get out of a rule like this is making people incrementally less honest.
If someone really wants to commit fraud they’re going to commit fraud. (For example, by not disclosing AI use when a repository requires it.) But if their fraud is discovered, they can still be punished for it, and mitigating actions taken. That’s not nothing, and does actually do a lot to prevent people from engaging in such fraud in the first place.
If this rule discourages low quality PRs or allows reviewers to save time by prioritizing some non-AI-generated PRs, then it certainly seems useful in my opinion.
Yes that is the stated purpose, did you read the linked GitHub comment? The author lays out their points pretty well, you sound unreasonably upset about this. Are you submitting a lot of AI slop PRs or something?
P.S Talking. Like. This. Is. Really. Ineffective. It. Makes. Me. Just. Want. To. Disregard. Your. Point. Out. Of. Hand.
Total bullshit. It's totally fine to declare intent.
You are already incapable of verifying / enforcing that a contributor is legally permitted to submit a piece of code as their own creation (Signed-off-by), and do so under the project's license. You won't embark on looking for prior art, for the "actual origin" of the code, whatever. You just make them promise, and then take their word for it.
Programming languages were a nice abstraction to accommodate our inability to comprehend complexity - current day LLMs do not have the same limitations as us.
The uncomfortable part will be what happens to PRs and other human-in-the-loop checks. It’s worthwhile to consider that not too far into the future, we might not be debugging code anymore - we’ll be debugging the AI itself. That’s a whole different problem space that will need an entirely new class of solutions and tools.
Natural language can be specific, but it requires far too many words. `map (+ 1) xs` is far shorter to write than "return a list of elements by applying a function that adds one to its argument to each element of xs and collecting the results in a separate list", or similar.
I believe it won’t be long before we have exceptional “programmers” who have mastered the art of vibe coding. If that does become the de facto standard for 80% programming done, then it’s not a long stretch from there that we might skip programming languages altogether. I’m simply suggesting that if you’re not going to examine the code, perhaps someone will eliminate that additional layer or step altogether, and we might be pleasantly surprised by the final result.
Make a knowledgeable reply and give no reference to the AI you used- comment is celebrated.
We are already barreling full speed down the "hide your AI use" path.
If the PR has issues and requires more than superficial re-work to be acceptable, the authors don't want to spend time debugging code spit out by an AI tool. They're more willing to spend a cycle or two if the benefit is you learning (either generally as a dev or becoming more familiar with the project). If you can make clear that you created or understand the code end to end, then they're more likely to be willing to take these extra steps.
Seems pretty straightforward to me and thoughtful by the maintainers here.
If that were the case, why would this rule be necessary, if it indeed is the substance that matters? AI generated anything has a heavy slop stigma right now, even if the content is solid.
This would make for an interesting experiment to submit a PR that was absolute gold but with the disclaimer it was generated with help of ChatGPT. I would almost guarantee it would be received with skepticism and dismissals.
If you make a PR where you just used AI, it seems to work, but didn't go further then the maintainers can go "well I had a look, it looks bad, you didn't put effort in, I'm not going to coach you through this". But if you make a PR where you go "I used AI to learn about X then tried to implement X myself with AI writing some of it" then the maintainers can go "well this PR doesn't look good quality but looks like you tried, we can give some good feedback but still reject it".
In a world without AI, if they were getting a lot of PRs from people who obviously didn't spend any time on their PRs then maybe they would have a "tell us how long this change took you" disclosure as well.
> While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
If it's bad code from a person he'll help them get it fixed. If it's bad code from an AI why bother?
Fraud and misrepresentation are always options for contributors, at some point one needs to trust that they’re adhering to the rules that they agreed to adhere to.
What you’re saying is essentially the code equivalent of “I found this image via Google search so of course it’s OK to put into a presentation, it’s on the web so that means I can use it.” This may not be looked at too hard for an investor presentation, but if you’re doing a high profile event like Apple’s WWDC you’ll learn quickly that all assets require clearance and “I found it on the web” won’t cut it—you’ll be made to use a different image or, if you actually present with the unlicensed image, you could be disciplined or outright fired for causing the company liability.
It’s amazing how many people in this industry think it’s OK to just wing this shit and even commit outright fraud just because it’s convenient.
You can talk about how we should act and be all high and mighty all you like, but it’s just burying your head in the sand about the reality of how code is written.
Also, technically, I never said this made it perfectly ok. It’s just that it’s the reality we live in and if we got rid of everyone doing it we’d have to fire 99% of programmers.
Look around. Do you see the majority of programmers getting fired for copying a line from stackoverflow or using AI?
You must either work in an ultra high security area or are so removed from the groundwork of most programming jobs that you don’t know how people do anything anymore. I’m not surprised you mentioned 30+ years, because that likely puts you squarely out of the trenches where the development is actually done.
Outside of like, the military or airplane software, companies really don’t care about provenance most of the time, their lack of processes to avoid looking into any of that are absolute PROOF of that. It’s don’t ask don’t tell out there.
You can be delusional all you like, it doesn’t change the reality of how most development is done.
Again, I didn’t say it’s a good thing, it’s just that it is reality.
Why are you surprised? Do companies want to hire "honest" people whose CVs were written by some LLM?
Yes, some companies do want to hire such people, the justification given is something along the lines of "we need devs who are using the latest tools/up to date on the latest trends! They will help bring in those techniques and make all of our current devs more productive!". This isn't a bad set of motivations or assumptions IMO.
Setting aside what companies _want_, they almost certainly are already hiring devs with llm-edited CVs, whether they want it or not. Such CVs/resumes are more likely to make it through HR filters.
> Do companies want to hire "honest" people whose CVs were written by some LLM?
Unfortunately yes, they very much seem to. Since many are using LLMs to assess CVs, those which use LLMs to help write their CV have a measured advantage.
> I consulted ChatGPT to understand the codebase but the solution was fully authored manually by myself.
What's the reasoning for needing to disclose this?
And if contributions are that unwelcome, then it's better not to contribute. There has to be some baseline level of trust that the contributor is trying to do the right thing; I get enough spying from the corporations in my life.
If not, why would it exist for VSCode + a variety of CLI tools + AI? Anyhow, saving the exact prompt isn't super useful; the response is stochastic.
... and then I think about all the weights only "open" AI projects and walk off in disgust.
But anyway what I mean is that code is us speaking like a computer, LLMs are the other way around, you can see a lot from how someone interacts with the machine.
I think if everyone goes into it knowing that it'll be part of what they publish it would be less of an issue.
I mean, unless you're all a bunch of freaks who have instructed your LLM to cosplay as Slave Leia and can't work otherwise, in which case your issues are beyond my pay grade. :P
So if the code is integrated, the license of the project lies about parts of the code.
The contributor is the human that chose to run the LLM, not the “AI” itself - so the real question is, why isn’t the human’s code copyrightable, and why can’t the human sign a contributor agreement?
Besides, this stuff is not what the author is concerned about:
> I think the major issue is inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code … I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort.
They want to coach aspiring contributors based on code they’ve written themselves, not based on how they prompt their AI.
It’s a matter of how they enjoy spending their time.
Your question makes sense. See U.S. Copyright Office publication:
> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it.
> For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user...
> For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style. But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.
> When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship. As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
> In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”
> Or an artist may modify material originally generated by AI technology to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection. In these cases, copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work, which are “independent of” and do “not affect” the copyright status of the AI-generated material itself.
> This policy does not mean that technological tools cannot be part of the creative process. Authors have long used such tools to create their works or to recast, transform, or adapt their expressive authorship. For example, a visual artist who uses Adobe Photoshop to edit an image remains the author of the modified image, and a musical artist may use effects such as guitar pedals when creating a sound recording. In each case, what matters is the extent to which the human had creative control over the work's expression and “actually formed” the traditional elements of authorship.
> https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
In any but a pathological case, a real contribution code to a real project has sufficient human authorship to be copyrightable.
> the license of the project lies about parts of the code
That was a concern pre-AI too! E.g. copy-past from StackOverflow. Projects require contributors to sign CLAs, which doesn't guarantee compliance, but strengthens the legal position. Usually something like:
"You represent that your contribution is either your original creation or you have sufficient rights to submit it."
And with a better and more useful response. Instead of wasting time on the technical details, you can give feedback like "this isn't the sort of change that AI is likely to be helpful with, though if you want to keep trying make at least sure your PRs pass the tests." or "If you'd like to share your prompts we might be able to make some suggestions, we've found on this project it's useful to include <X>".
Do I need to disclose that I wrote a script to generate some annoying boilerplate? Or that my IDE automatically templates for loops?
Edit: Also, it's always good to provide maximal context to reviewers. For example, when I use code from StackOverflow I link the relevant answer in a comment so the reviewer doesn't have to re-tread the same ground I covered looking for that solution. It also gives reviewers some clues about my understanding of the problem. How is AI different in this regard?
Yes, you have to disclose it.
> Do I need to disclose that I wrote a script to generate some annoying boilerplate?
You absolutely need to disclose it.
> Or that my IDE automatically templates for loops?
That's probably worth disclosing too.
https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/full-line-code-completio...
Github provides a profile but it’s not meant to make this kind of assessment. Basically a trust badge/metrics of some sort you could check before engaging with someone’s PR.
1. The world has fundamentally changed due to LLMs. You don't know where a code submission falls between "written thoroughly with eternal vigilance" vs "completely vibe-coded" since it's now trivially to generate the later. There's no going back. And a lot of comments here seem stuck on this point.
2. The maintainer naively or stubbornly imagines that he can get everyone to pre-sort their code between the two buckets through self-reporting.
But that's futile.
It's like asking someone if they're a good person on a date because you don't want to waste your time with bad people. Unfortunately, that shortcut doesn't exist.
Now, maybe going forward we will be forced to come up with real solutions to the general problem of vetting people. But TFA feels like more of a stunt than a serious pitch.
People want to feel agency and will react to mainstream pressures. And make up whatever excuses along the way to justify what theyre feeling.
"AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
I think, at this stage of AI, it is a common courtesy to disclose this.
In a perfect world, AI assistance would produce equal or higher quality work than any human. That isn't the world we live in today, and in many cases it's generating slop. I say this despite being a fan of and using them successfully myself (with heavy supervision)! I think the major issue is inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code. As a result, they're pull requesting code that I'm sure they would be ashamed of if they knew how bad it was.
The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
I'm a fan of AI assistance and use AI tooling myself. But, we need to be responsible about what we're using it for and respectful to the humans on the other side that may have to review or maintain this code."
The background is that many higher profile open source projects are getting deluged by low quality AI slop "contributions", not just crappy code but when you ask questions about it you sometimes get an argumentative chatbot lying to you about what the PR does.
And this latest turn has happened on top of other trends in 'social' open source development that already had many developers considering adopting far less inclusive practice. RETURN TO CATHEDRAL, if you will.
The problem isn't limited to open source, it's also inundating discussion forums.
I think we all grant that LLM slop is inundating everything. But a checkbox that says "I am human" is more of a performative stunt (which I think they are referring to when they say it's reactionary) than anything practical.
Cloudflare's "I am human" checkbox doesn't just take your word for it, and imagine if it did.
---
People who write good, thoughtful code and also use an LLM have no reason to disclose it just because the idea offends someone, just like I don't disclose when I do an amphetamine bender to catch up in work; I don't want to deal with any prejudices someone might have, but I know I do good work and that's what matters. I pressed tab so the LLM could autocomplete the unit test for me because it's similar to the other 20 unit tests, and then I vetted the completion. I'm not going to roleplay with anyone that I did something bad or dishonest or sloppy here; I'm too experienced to know better.
People who write slop that they can't even bother to read themselves aren't going to bother to read your rules either. Yet that's the group OP is pretending he's going to stop. Once you get past the "rah-rah LLM sux0rs amirite fellow HNers?" commentary, there's nothing here.
The monekeys paw closes a finger and now you need a formal certification, professional license, and liability insurance to publish software or source code.
# if this PR looks like it was produced with AI, be snotty and dismissive when you write the reply to this PR
NB: This posting was created with Natural Intelligence (not necessarily very intelligent Intelligence). ;-)
What about Co-Authored-By, which already exists?
(Whether the human or the agent is the "co" author is left as a matter of judgement.)
On the flip side, I’m preparing to open source a project I made for a serializable state machine with runtime hooks. But that’s blood sweat and tears labor. AI is writing a lot of the unit tests and the code, but it’s entirely by my architectural design.
There’s a continuum here. It’s not binary. How can we communicate what role AI played?
And does it really matter anymore?
(Disclaimer: autocorrect corrected my spelling mistakes. Sent from iPhone.)
1.) Didn't try to hide the fact that they used AI
2.) Tested their changes
I would not care at all. The main issue is this is usually not the case, most people submitting PRs that are 90% AI do not bother testing (Usually they don't even bother running the automated tests)
Well, if you had read what was linked, you would find these...
> I think the major issue is inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code. As a result, they're pull requesting code that I'm sure they would be ashamed of if they knew how bad it was.
> The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
> I'm a fan of AI assistance and use AI tooling myself. But, we need to be responsible about what we're using it for and respectful to the humans on the other side that may have to review or maintain this code.
I don't know specifically what PR's this person is seeing. I do know it's been a rumble around the open source community that inexperienced devs are trying to get accepted PRs for open source projects because they look good on a resume. This predated AI in fact, with it being a commonly cited method to get attention in a competitive recruiting market.
As always, folks trying to get work have my sympathies. However ultimately these folks are demanding time and work from others, for free, to improve their career prospects while putting in the absolute bare minimum of effort one could conceivably put in (having Copilot rewrite whatever part of an open source project and shove it into a PR with an explanation of what it did) and I don't blame them for being annoyed at the number of low-quality submissions.
I have never once criticized a developer for being inexperienced. It is what it is, we all started somewhere. However if a dev generated shit code and shoved it into my project and demanded a headpat for it so he could get work elsewhere, I'd tell him to get bent too.
An angle not mentioned in the OP is copyright - depending on your jurisdiction, AI-generated text can't be copyrighted, which could call into question whether you can enforce your open source license anymore if the majority of the codebase was AI-generated with little human intervention.
What about just telling exactly what role AI played? You can say it generated the tests for you for instance.
Are you kidding?
- For ages now, people have used "broad test coverage" and "CI" as excuses for superficial reviews, as excuses for negligent coding and verification.
- And now people foist even writing the test suite off on AI.
Don't you see that this way you have no reasoned examination of the code?
> ... and the code, but it’s entirely by my architectural design.
This is fucking bullshit. The devil is in the details, always. The most care and the closest supervision must be precisely where the rubber meets the road. I wouldn't want to drive a car that you "architecturally designed", and a statistical language model manufactured.
that being said i feel like this is an intermediate step - it's really hard to review PRs that are AI slop because it's so easy for those who don't know how to use AI to create a multi-hundred/thousand line diff. but when AI is used well, it really saves time and often creates high quality work
Because of the perception that anything touched by AI must be uncreative slop made without effort. In the case of this article, why else are they asking for disclosure if not to filter and dismiss such contributions?
>I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
Yes.
>but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't
This is very much in line with my comment about doing it to filter and dismiss. The author didn't say "So I can reach out and see if their clear eagerness to contribute extends to learning to code in more detail".
For example, the GNU project has certain norms, and those dissuade a lot of people from contributing (e.g. I prefer working on projects with simpler, non-viral licenses). The limited volunteer labor pool is allocated according to people's interests towards other projects, and maybe GNU projects suffer for less attention on them.
Not every software project needs to attempt to maximize productivity. Not every software project is a business. Some are just created by people who enjoy programming. By hand. It's OK to set that as a culture. I guess I get it.
I don't mind AI tools, I use them judiciously, but sometimes I just want to do some coding - for me it's a genuinely relaxing and mentally satisfying activity to write some good code -, and I'm happy there's still others around me who do as well. Gardening context prompts and what not just isn't nearly as fun as just doing it, and not every project has to be economical. This one is yet another terminal emulator; it's not going to be the next unicorn. But I bet it's fun to hack on.
This project was literally born from a place of "because I want to".
It's ironically in rather a contrast in tone to some of the anti-AI comments in the thread here that seem to be responding to tired arguments from three years ago rather than the OP linked.
Blaming it on the tool, and not the person's misusing it trying to get his name on a big os project, is like blaming the new automatic in the kitchen and not the chef for getting a raw pizza on the table.
The intention here seems to be to filter out low quality submissions for which the only purpose is to only pimp Github resume for having contributions in highly starred repo. Not sure if the people doing that will be disclosing use of AI anyway.
That is a fair way to see it, and I agree that it is a losing battle if your battle is enforcing this rule.
However, from a different perspective - if one sees it more as a gentlemen agreement (which it de facto is) - it fosters an environment where like-minded folks can cooperate better.
The disclosure assists the reviewer in finding common issues in AI generated code, the specificity of the disclosure even more so.
For example, a submitter sends a PR where they disclose a substantial amount of the code was AI assisted but all tests were manually written. The disclosure allows the reviewer to first look at the tests to gauge how well the submitter understands and constrained the solution to their requirements, the next step being to then look at the solution from a high-level perspective before going into the details. It respects the reviewer time, not necessarily because the reviewer is above AI usage, but because without disclosure the whole collaborative process falls apart.
Not sure how long this can work though, it's still easy to distinguish bad code written by a human from AI slop. In the first case your review and assistance is an investment into the collaborative process, in the latter it's just some unread text included in the next prompt.
It would be a lie to sign those papers for something you vibe coded.
It's not just courtesy; you are committing fraud if you put your copyright notice on something you didn't create and publishing that to the world.
I don't just want that disclosed; I cannot merge it if it is disclosed, period.
If I use iOS's spellchecker which "learns" from one's habit (i.e.: AI, the really polished kind), I don't lose copyright over the text which I've written.
If AI told you have a missing semicolon and it regenerated an almost exact copy of your code, with only the added semicolon being different, then the case is very strong that the fixed code is a derived work of only your code. (Moreover, side point: you could burn that session, keeping the fix, and nobody would ever suspect.)
If it's purely generated, then there is no question it's a derived work of unknown works used without permission.
Those are the extreme endpoints. I think that the bulk of the intermediate area between steers toward infringment; the contribution from AI has to be very low or trivial to have a clear case that the work is still clean.
This is because a small amount of illegal material taints the whole work; it's not a linear interpolation whereby if you wrote 90% of it, it's 90% in the clear. E.g. one GPL-ed source file in a work with 50,000 source files requires the whole thing to be GPLed, or else that file removed.
This seems very noisy/unhelpful.
The extent here is very important. There's a massive difference between vibe-coding a PR, using LLMs selectively to generate code in files in-editor, and edit prediction like copilot.
It says actually later that tab-completion needn't be disclosed.
The irony of this, when talking about AI.
or they want a reason to summarily dismiss code, which also means you can’t trust the reviewed to scrutinize code by its own merit
seems well intentioned and out of touch, to me
is there more context about what they are reacting to?
I dont use it personally. I think there should be a tight code review or disallow large auto completes altogether.
I would guess that many (if not most) of the people attempting to contribute AI generated code are legitimately trying to help.
People who are genuinely trying to be helpful can often become deeply offended if you reject their help, especially if you admonish them. They will feel like the reprimand is unwarranted, considering the public shaming to be an injury to their reputation and pride. This is most especially the case when they feel they have followed the rules.
For this reason, if one is to accept help, the rules must be clearly laid out from the beginning. If the ghostty team wants to call out "slop", then it must make it clear that contributing "slop" may result in a reprimand. Then the bothersome want-to-be helpful contributors cannot claim injury.
This appears to me to be good governance.
Open source is supposed to be primarily a labor of love, scratching your own itch, done for pride and a sense of accomplishment of having done it right.
Using an AI chatbot achieves none of that. It's an admission that you don't have the skills, and you're not wanting to learn them. Using AI to contribute to an open source project makes NO sense whatsoever. It's an admission of incompetence, which should be profoundly embarrassing to you.
I realize I'm screaming into the void here on HN, where so many people have bought into the "AI is just a tool" bullshit. But I know I'm not alone, even here. And I know that e.g. Linus Torvalds sees right through the bullshit as well.
If such mention would mean increased reviewer attention, then every code review should include it.
Two weeks ago someone asked me to review a PR, which I did pointing out some architectural concerns. The code was not necessarily bad, but it added boilerplate to a point it required some restructuring to keep the codebase maintainable. I couldn't care less if it was written by AI or not in this case, it was not necessarily simple but was straightforward.
It took considerable effort to conjure a thoughtful and approachable description of the problem and the possible solutions. Keep in mind this is a project with considerable traction and a high amount of contributions are from enthusiasts. So having a clear, maintainable and approachable codebase is sometimes the most important requirement.
They asked for a second pass but it took two weeks for me to get around it, in the meantime they sent 3 different PRs, one closed after the other. I found it a bit strange, then I put some effort to review the last iteration. It had half baked solutions where for example there would be state cleanup functions but state was never written in the first place, something that would never go through normally, I gave the benefit of the doubt and pointed it out. I suspected it was AI generated most likely.
Then they showed me another variation of the PR where they implement a whole different architecture, some incredibly overengineered fluent interface to resolve a simple problem with many layers of indirection that reflects complete indifference to the more nuanced considerations relevant to the domain and project, that I tried to impair. The code might work, but even if it does it's obvious that the change is a net negative to the project.
What I suspected indeed was the case, as they finally disclosed the use of AI, but that is not necessarily the problem, as I hope to convey. The problem is that I was unable to gauge the submitters commitment to perform the humble job of _understanding_ what I proposed. The proposal, in the end, just becoming mere tokens for inclusion into a prompt. Disclosure wouldn't necessarily have caused me to not take the PR seriously, instead I would invested my time in the more productive effort of orienting the submitter on the tractability of achieving their goal.
I would rather have known they didn't intend or gauged their capacity beforehand. It would have been better for both of us: they would have had their initial iteration merged (which was fine, I would just have shrugged the refactor for another occasion) and I wouldn't have lost time.
And of course there is everything in between.
I know their intent is to push the project forward and well-meaning, I don't care about whether they are vibe-coding. I care about knowing they are vibe-coding so I can assist them to vibe-code in a way they can actually achieve their goal, or help them realize early that they lack the capacity to contribute (not of their own fault necessarily, maybe they just require orientation on how to reason about problems and solutions or their use of the tools).
Because lying about your usage of AI is a good way to get completely kicked out of the open source community once caught. That's like asking 'why should you bother with anti-cheating measures for speedruns'. Why should we have any guidelines or regulations if people are going to bypass them? The answer I hope should be very obvious.
> high quality PRs with AI will get the "AI slop" label. At this point, why even disclose if the AI-assisted high-quality PR is indistinguishable from having been manually written (which it should be)? No point.
Then obviously the repository in question doesn't want people using AI and you should go elsewhere. They're not even against LLM tooling for this repo but people are freaking out because how dare you ask me to disclose what tools I'm using.
Doesn't anyone see that this can't be policed or everyone becomes a criminal? That AI will bring the end of copyrights and patents as we know them when literally everything becomes a derivative work? When children produce better solutions than industry veterans so we punish them rather than questioning the divine right of corporations to rule over us? What happened to standing on the shoulders of giants?
I wonder if a lot of you are as humbled as I am by the arrival of AI. Whenever I use it, I'm in awe of what it comes up with when provided almost no context, coming in cold to something that I've been mulling over for hours. And it's only getting better. In 3-5 years, it will leave all of us behind. I'm saying that as someone who's done this for decades and has been down rabbit holes that most people have no frame of reference for.
My prediction is that like with everything, we'll bungle this. Those of you with big egos and large hoards of wealth that you thought you earned because you are clever will do everything you can to micromanage and sabotage what could have been the first viable path to liberation from labor in human history. Just like with the chilling effects of the Grand Upright Music ruling and the DMCA and HBO suing BitTorrent users (edit: I meant the MPAA and RIAA, HBO "only" got people's internet shut off), we have to remain eternally vigilant or the powers that be will take away all the fun:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_issues_with_BitTorrent#C...
So no, I won't even entertain the notion of demanding proof of origin for ideas. I'm not going down this slippery slope of suing every open source project that gives away its code for free, just because a PR put pieces together in a new way but someone thought of the same idea in private and thinks they're special.
Respectfully, Mr. Redis, sir, that's what's going on. I don't see any reason to make a video about it. From the PR that's TFA:
"In a perfect world, AI assistance would produce equal or higher quality work than any human. That isn't the world we live in today, and in many cases it's generating slop. I say this despite being a fan of and using them successfully myself (with heavy supervision)! I think the major issue is inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code. As a result, they're pull requesting code that I'm sure they would be ashamed of if they knew how bad it was.
The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.
I'm a fan of AI assistance and use AI tooling myself. But, we need to be responsible about what we're using it for and respectful to the humans on the other side that may have to review or maintain this code."
If research continues over the next few decades, these LLMs (and other code-generation robots) may well be able retrain themselves in real-time. However, right now, retraining is expensive (in many ways) and slow. For the foreseeable future, investing your time in providing feedback and coaching intended to develop a human programmer into a better human programmer to an LLM is a colossal waste of one's time.