AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
1–10 of 482 posts
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#2The real question is: how long will it take to go from a sign of low quality to a sign of high quality?
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#3Shouldn't developer be responsible for every line of code he submits?
He is signing the code with his name when code is pushed.
How is it different from using every other dev tool?
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#4I fail to see how this addresses the issue of poor quality contributions or bloat. I feel that focusing on the real issue would be more productive.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#5I just submitted my first big open source contribution to the OpenAI agents SDK for JS. Every word except the issue I opened was done by AI.
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.)
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#6I just submitted my first big open source contribution to the OpenAI agents SDK for JS. Every word except the issue I opened was done by AI. 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…
if you read his note i think he gives good insight as to why he wants PRs to signal AI involvement.
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
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#7I just submitted my first big open source contribution to the OpenAI agents SDK for JS. Every word except the issue I opened was done by AI. 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…
The OP seems to be coming from the perspective of "my time as a PR reviewer is limited and valuable, so I don't want to spend it coaching an AI agent or a thin human interface to an AI agent". From that perspective, it makes perfect sense to want to know how much a human is actually in the loop for a given PR. If the PR is good enough to not need much review then whether AI wrote it is less important.
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.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#8I just submitted my first big open source contribution to the OpenAI agents SDK for JS. Every word except the issue I opened was done by AI. 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…
> And does it really matter anymore?
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.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#9I just submitted my first big open source contribution to the OpenAI agents SDK for JS. Every word except the issue I opened was done by AI. 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…
I think its simple, just don't hide it. I've had mutliple contributors try to hide the fact that they used AI (E.g removing claude as a code author - they didn't know how to do it and close the PR when it first happened.). I don't really care if someone uses AI, but most of the people who do also do not test their changes which just gives me more work. If someone:
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)
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#10I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR.
But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”