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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#181

Post by blurbleblurble »

bootsmann wrote: post #69
oceanplexian wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Both sides will use AI and it will ultimately increase economic productivity. Citation needed, I don’t think the printing press and gpt are in any way comparable.

GPT and compilers are though.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#182

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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?”

If a maintainer asks me to jump through too many stupid hoops, I'll just not contribute to the software.

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".

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#183

Post by eschaton »

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…

You’re basically saying “if a rule can be broken, it will be, therefore rules are useless.”

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#184

Post by blurbleblurble »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #174
blurbleblurble wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. I have 20 years of dev experience and also am using these tools. I won't commit slop. I'm open to being transparent about my usage of AI but tbh right now there's so much bias and vitriol coming from people afraid of these new tools that in the haze of their fear I don't trust people will actually take the time to neutrally determine whether or not the code is actually slop. I've had manually wr…

I get it. But it’s ultimately up to the maintainer here.

Of course. I don't actually think the maintainer guidelines here are entirely unreasonable, even if I'd personally modify them to reduce reactive panic.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#185

Post by eschaton »

KritVutGu wrote: post #82
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…

> 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…

And if they’re discovered to not be keeping their word, there can be consequences imposed and mitigating actions taken. Rules can’t prevent bad actions 100% of the time, but they can substantially increase the risk of bad actions.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#186

Post by eschaton »

ineedasername wrote: post #72
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…

Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. There’s lots of details to figure, but the genie is out of the bottle. 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.

Some courts at some levels. It’s by no means settled law.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#187

Post by blurbleblurble »

gizmo686 wrote: post #173
blurbleblurble wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. I have 20 years of dev experience and also am using these tools. I won't commit slop. I'm open to being transparent about my usage of AI but tbh right now there's so much bias and vitriol coming from people afraid of these new tools that in the haze of their fear I don't trust people will actually take the time to neutrally determine whether or not the code is actually slop. I've had manually wr…

> I've had manually written, well thought through, well conceived, rough around the edges code get called "AI slop" by a colleague (who I very much respect and have a good relationship with) who admittedly hadn't had a chance to thoroughly understand the code yet. 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 ef…

We need better social norms about disclosure, 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). Normalize draft PRs and sharing big messes of code you're not quite sure about but want to start a conversation about. Normalize admitting that you don't fully understand the code you've written / are tasked with reviewing and that this is perfectly fine and doesn't reflect poorly on you at all, in fact it reflects humility and a collaborative spirit.

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.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#188

Post by tsimionescu »

fnimick wrote: post #115
falcor84 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trust is absolutely a thing. Maintaining an open source project is an unreasonably demanding and thankless job, and it would be even more so if you had to treat every single PR as if it's a high likelihood supply-chain attack.

While true, we really should be treating every single piece of external code as though it's malicious.

No, we shouldn't. We live in a society, and that level of distrust is not just unrealistic, it's disastrous. This doesn't mean you should share your house keys with every drive by PR contributor, but neither should you treat every PR as if it's coming from Jia Tan.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#189

Post by blurbleblurble »

eschaton wrote: post #170
blurbleblurble wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just not true. I have 20 years of dev experience and also am using these tools. I won't commit slop. I'm open to being transparent about my usage of AI but tbh right now there's so much bias and vitriol coming from people afraid of these new tools that in the haze of their fear I don't trust people will actually take the time to neutrally determine whether or not the code is actually slop. I've had manually wr…

You should not just be open to being transparent, you need to understand that there will be times you will be required to be transparent about the tools you’ve used and the ultimate origin of your contributions, and that trying to evade or even push back against it is a huge red flag that you cannot be trusted to abide by your commitments. If you’re unwilling to stop using slop tools, then you don’t get to contribute…

Your blanket determination that the tools themselves are slop generators is an attitude I'm definitely not interested in engaging with in collaboration.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#190

Post by yieldcrv »

so you either can’t trust the reviewers to scrutinize code on its own merit,

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?

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