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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#121

Post by wahnfrieden »

KritVutGu wrote: post #75
wahnfrieden wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should care. If someone submits a huge PR, you’re going to waste time asking questions and comprehending their intentions if the answer is that they don’t know either. If you know it’s generated and they haven’t reviewed it themselves, you can decide to shove it back into an LLM for next steps rather than expect the contributor to be able to do anything with your review feedback. Unreviewed generated PRs can stil…

You are absolutely right. AI is just a tool to DDoS maintainers. 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?

That’s not what I said though. LLM output, even unreviewed and without understanding, can be a useful artifact. I do it all the time - generate code, try running it, and then if I see it works well, I can decide to review it and follow up with necessary refactoring before integrating it. Parts of that can be contributed too. We’re just learning new etiquettes for doing that productively, and that does includes testing the PR btw (even if the code itself is not understood or reviewed).

Example where this kind of contribution was accepted and valuable, inside this ghostty project https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1957930725996654718

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#122

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#123

Post by WhyNotHugo »

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.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#124

Post by eschaton »

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.

You ask this as if it’s a problem.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#125

Post by jedahan »

uberduper wrote: post #117

> Or a more detailed disclosure: > 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?

Helps the maintainer focus their efforts during review. If you wrote that exact sentence, a maintainer would keep "understanding of the codebase" as a place for potential sources of incorrect assumptions higher in mind than otherwise.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#126

Post by WhyNotHugo »

kazinator wrote: post #116

I think that in the FOSS environmment, it is assumed that when you submit something upstream, that you are the copyright holder. Some projects like GNU require you to sign papers legally attesting this. 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…

I know that purely AI-generated content is copyright-free, but I don't think that AI-assisted is also copyright free.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#127

Post by antirez »

I'll cover in my YouTube why this is wrong but TLDR: you need to evaluate quality not process. AI can be used in diametrically different ways and the reason why this policy could be enforced is because it will be obvious if the code is produced via a solo flight of some AI agent. For the same reason that's not a policy that will improve anything.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#128

Post by uberduper »

uberduper wrote: post #117

> Or a more detailed disclosure: > 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?

I'm not really a developer but I routinely need to go dig through codebases looking for answers and AI assistants have made this so much faster. This has been a boon for me.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#129

Post by jrflowers »

oceanplexian wrote: post #59
raincole wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When one side has much more "scalability" than the other, then the other side has very strong motivation to match up. - 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 le…

Both sides will use AI and it will ultimately increase economic productivity. 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 po…

> 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

Imagine seeing “rm -rf / is a function that returns “Hello World!” and thinking “this is the same thing as the printing press”

https://bsky.app/profile/lookitup.baby/post/3lu2bpbupqc2f

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#130

Post by uberduper »

jedahan wrote: post #125
uberduper wrote: post #117

> Or a more detailed disclosure: > 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?

Helps the maintainer focus their efforts during review. If you wrote that exact sentence, a maintainer would keep "understanding of the codebase" as a place for potential sources of incorrect assumptions higher in mind than otherwise.

In my experience, if there's one thing the AI assistants do really well, it's understanding existing code and summarizing it or pinpointing specific things I'm looking for.
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