Little offtop: would someone remember mitchellh's setup for working with AI tools? I remember someone posted in an AI-hate-love threads here and it's not in the his blog[1] 1: https://mitchellh.com/writing
AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
211–220 of 482 posts
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#212There 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…
Also ban StackOverflow and nearly any text book in the field. The reality is that programmers are going to see other programmers code.
> The reality is that programmers are going to see other programmers code.
You're certainly correct. It's also true that companies are going to sue over it. There's no reason to make yourself an easy lawsuit target, if it's trivial to avoid it.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#213I’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?”
Agreed. As someone who uses AI (completion and Claude Code), I'll disclose whenever asked. But I disagree that it's "common courtesy" when not explicitly asked; since many people (including myself) don't mind and probably assume some AI, and it adds distraction (another useless small indicator; vaguely like dependabot, in that it steals my attention but ultimately I don't care).
It should be.
You didn’t write generated code, why should I spend my life reading it?
If you want me to put in the effort- you have to put it in first.
Especially considering in 99% of cases even the one who generated it didn’t fully read/understand it.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#214I’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?”
It's not just about how you got there. At least in the United States according to the Copyright Office... materials produced by artificial intelligence are not eligible for copyright. So, yeah, some people want to know for licensing purposes. I don't think that's the case here, but it is yet another reason to require that kind of disclosure... since if you fail to mention that something was made by AI as part of a co…
> • The use of AI tools to assist rather than stand in for human creativity does not affect the availability of copyright protection for the output.
> • Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material
> • Human authors are entitled to copyright in their works of authorship that are perceptible in AI-generated outputs, as well as the creative selection, coordination, or arrangement of material in the outputs, or creative modifications of the outputs.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Courts (at least in the US) have already ruled that use of ingested data for training is transformative. If you have code that happens to be identical to some else's code or implements someone's proprietary algorithm, you're going to lose in court even if you claim an "AI" gave it to you. AI is training on private Github repos and coughing them up. I've had it regurgitate a very well written piece of code to do a p…
That seems a real stretch. GPT 5 just invented new math for reference. What you are saying would be equivalent to saying that this math was obviously in some paper that mathematician did not know about. Maybe true, but it's a far reach.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#216Earlier 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…
I have had similar observations to you and tried to capture them here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/alex-buie-35b488158_ai-neuros...
The gist being - language (text input) is actually the vehicle you have to transfer neural state to the engine. When you are working in a greenfield project or pure-vibe project, you can get away with most of that neural state being in the "default" probability mode. But in a legacy project, you need significantly more context to contrain the probability distributions a lot closer to the decisions which were made historically.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#217I’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?”
Agreed. As someone who uses AI (completion and Claude Code), I'll disclose whenever asked. But I disagree that it's "common courtesy" when not explicitly asked; since many people (including myself) don't mind and probably assume some AI, and it adds distraction (another useless small indicator; vaguely like dependabot, in that it steals my attention but ultimately I don't care).
If you don't disclose the use of
- books
- search engines
- stack overflow
- talking to a coworker
then it's not clear why you would have to disclose talking to an AI.
Generally speaking, when someone uses the word "slop" when talking about AI it's a signal to me that they've been sucked into a culture war and to discount what they say about AI.
It's of course the maintainer's right to take part in a culture war, but it's a useful way to filter out who's paying attention vs who's playing for a team. Like when you meet someone at a party and they bring up some politician you've barely heard of but who their team has vilified.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you are describing also seems to align with the idea that greenfield projects are well-suited for AI, whereas brownfield projects are considerably more challenging.
Brownfield projects are more challenging because of all the context and decisions that went into building things that are not directly defined in the code. I suspect that well-engineered projects with plenty of test coverage and high-quality documentation will be easier to use AI on, just like they're easier for humans to comprehend. But you need to have somebody with the big picture still who can make sure that you…
Well said - language (text input) is actually the vehicle you have to transfer neural state to the engine. When you are working in a greenfield project or pure-vibe project, you can get away with most of that neural state being in the "default" probability mode. But in a legacy project, you need significantly more context to contrain the probability distributions a lot closer to the decisions which were made historically otherwise you quickly get into spaghetti-ville as the AI tries to drag the codebase towards its natural ruts.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Training an AI model is not the same as using an AI model.
If you mean the ruling has absolutely no applicability when it comes to using the model then, no, that is incorrect:
Judge Alsup, in his ruling, specifically likened the process to reading text and then using the knowledge to write something else. That’s training and use.
Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions
#220I like the pattern of including each prompt used to make a given PR, yes, I know that LLM's aren't deterministic, but it also gives context of the steps required to get to the end state.
It's ridiculous and impractical, honestly. A single AI-generated PR would likely involve at least 10-20 prompts, interspersed with testing, manual edits to context / guideline files without which those prompts don't have the same effect, manual coding, and more. A screen recording would do better.