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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#131

Post by adastra22 »

jerf wrote: post #78
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 struggling to apply AI on any large scale at work. I was beginning to wonder if it was me. 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 wit…

It's a matter of the tools not getting there though. If there was a summarization system that could compress down the structure and history of the system you are working on in a way that could then extract out a half-filled context window of the relevant bits of the code base and architecture for the task (in other words, generate that massive prompt for you), then you might see the same results that you get with Android apps.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#132

Post by monkaiju »

rattlesnakedave wrote: post #12

In my personal projects I also require all contributors to disclose rather they’ve used an editor with any autocomplete features enabled.

Autocomplete is, for the most part, a syntactic tool. AI attempts to guide the semantics of the code generated

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#133

Post by eschaton »

jama211 wrote: post #45
andunie wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that a good thing?

What, building systems where we’re specifically incentivised not to disclose ai use?

Submitting a PR also means you’re not submitting code copied from elsewhere without calling that out and ensuring license compatibility, we don’t refer to that as incentivizing lying about the origin of submitted code.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#134

Post by eschaton »

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…

Exactly. Yet some here are saying that this just serves as an incentivize to hide AI use.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#135

Post by mattgreenrocks »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #88
KritVutGu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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

They genuinely believe their use of chatbots is equivalent to multiple years of production experience in a language. They want to erase that distinction (“democratize”) so they can have the same privileges and status without the work.

Otherwise, what’s the harm in saying AI guides you to the solution if you can attest to it being a good solution?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#136

Post by ToucanLoucan »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #135
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They genuinely believe their use of chatbots is equivalent to multiple years of production experience in a language. They want to erase that distinction (“democratize”) so they can have the same privileges and status without the work. Otherwise, what’s the harm in saying AI guides you to the solution if you can attest to it being a good solution?

I guess it's just different kinds of people. I have used Copilot to generate code I barely understand (stuff for a microcontroller project, nothing important) but I wouldn't in a thousand years say I wrote it. I broadly understand how it works, and like, if someone wanted to see it, I'd show them. But like... how can you take pride in something you didn't make?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#137

Post by nullc »

quotemstr wrote: post #33
voxl wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except you can enforce this rule some of the time. People discover that AI was used or suspect it all the time, and people admit to it after some pressure all the time. 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.

It. doesn't. matter. 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 th…

The utility of the rule is so that you can cheaply nuke non-conforming contributors from orbit when you detect their undisclosed AI use. Vs having to deal with the flood of low quality contributions on a individually reviewed basis.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#138

Post by pixl97 »

voxl wrote: post #20
quotemstr wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Except you can enforce this rule some of the time. People discover that AI was used or suspect it all the time, and people admit to it after some pressure all the time. 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.

Except the other way happens too.

You get someone that didn't use AI getting accused of using AI and eventually telling people to screw off and contributing nothing.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#139

Post by jerf »

adastra22 wrote: post #131
jerf wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been struggling to apply AI on any large scale at work. I was beginning to wonder if it was me. 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 wit…

It's a matter of the tools not getting there though. If there was a summarization system that could compress down the structure and history of the system you are working on in a way that could then extract out a half-filled context window of the relevant bits of the code base and architecture for the task (in other words, generate that massive prompt for you), then you might see the same results that you get with And…

I agree that the level of complexity of task it can do is likely to rise over time. I often talk about the "next generation" of AI that will actually be what we were promised LLMs would be, but LLMs architecturally are just not suited for. I think the time is coming when AIs "truly" (for some definition of truly) will understand architecture and systems in a way that LLMs don't and really can't, and will be able to do a lot more things than they can now, though when that will be is hard to guess. Could be next year, or AI could stall out now where it is now for the next 10. Nobody knows.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#140

Post by Octoth0rpe »

KritVutGu wrote: post #85
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?

> 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.

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