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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#81

Post by btucker »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #55
thallavajhula wrote: post #27

I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences. 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 hu…

> AI is only as smart as the human handling it. 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 pr…

I've been starting to think of it like this:

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

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#82

Post by KritVutGu »

quotemstr wrote: post #13
Waterluvian wrote: post #10

I’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?”

As a project maintainer, you shouldn't make rules unenforceable rules that you and everyone else know people will flout. Doing so comes makes you seem impotent and diminishes the respect people have for rules in general. 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…

> As a project maintainer, you shouldn't make rules unenforceable rules

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#83

Post by btown »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #55
thallavajhula wrote: post #27

I’m loving today. HN’s front page is filled with some good sources today. No nonsense sensationalism or preaching AI doom, but more realistic experiences. 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 hu…

> AI is only as smart as the human handling it. 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 pr…

One of my mental models is that the notion of "effective engineer" used to mean "effective software developer" whether or not they were good at system design.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#84

Post by whatevertrevor »

oceanplexian wrote: post #67
nosignono wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. 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.

> I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. 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 sti…

I don't think throwing out the concept of code reviews and version control is the correct response to a purported rise in low-effort high-volume patches. If anything it's even more required.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#85

Post by KritVutGu »

hodgehog11 wrote: post #16

How does this not lead to a situation where no honest person can use any AI in their submissions? Surely pull requests that acknowledge AI tooling will be given significantly less attention, on the grounds that no one wants to read work that they know is written by AI.

Good point. That's the point exactly. Don't use AI for writing your patch. At all.

Why are you surprised? Do companies want to hire "honest" people whose CVs were written by some LLM?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#86

Post by KritVutGu »

estimator7292 wrote: post #15

Do I also have to disclose using tab completion? My IDE uses machine learning for completion suggestions. Do I need to disclose that I wrote a script to generate some annoying boilerplate? Or that my IDE automatically templates for loops?

> Do I also have to disclose using tab completion? My IDE uses machine learning for completion suggestions.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#87

Post by kelvinjps10 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #67
nosignono wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR. 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.

> I can generate 1,000 PRs today against an open source project using AI. 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 sti…

Why it's incorrect? And what would be the new way? AI to review the changes of AI?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#88

Post by ToucanLoucan »

KritVutGu wrote: post #65
cvoss wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter how and where a PR comes from, because reviewers are fallible and finite, so trust enters the equation inevitably. You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from. 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…

[flagged]

The sheer amount of entitlement on display by very pro-AI people genuinely boggles the mind.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#89

Post by aydyn »

btucker wrote: post #81
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is only as smart as the human handling it. 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 pr…

I've been starting to think of it like this: 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

Is there a difference between "OK" and "Mediocre"?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#90

Post by neilv »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #60
neilv wrote: post #26

There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not. 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…

> There is also IP taint when using "AI". We're just pretending that there's not. 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.

> I don't think anyone who's not monetarily incentivize to pretend there are IP/Copyright issues actually thinks there are.

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".

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