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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

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Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#251

Hot take: if you can't spot any issues in the code review it's either good code, code that needs further changes, or review was not done properly. I don't see how "I used LLMs" fit here, because it means nothing to the quality of the code submitted. If such mention would mean increased reviewer attention, then every code review should include it.

Agreed -- this requirement feels less like an actually useful requirement and more a silly and performative one, which is trying to make some kind of commentary on AI use as a whole.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#252
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training an AI model is not the same as using an AI model.

Publishing pirated copies of books on libgen isn't the same as downloading pirated copies of books from libgen. Neither is legal.

In many places that's a fairly recent development: publishing pirated IP used to be much more of a legal problem than consuming it.

Also publishing pirated IP without any monetary gain to yourself also used to be treated more leniently.

Of course, all the rules were changed (both in law and in interpretation in practice) as file sharing became a huge deal about two decades ago.

Details depend on jurisdiction.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#253

> I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of I really appreciate this point from mitchellh. Giving thoughtful constructive feedback to help a junior developer improve is a gift. Yet it would be a waste of time if the PR submitter is just going to pass it to an AI without learning from it.

Junior developers are entering a workforce where they will never not be using AI

I don't think using AI at all is forbidden, he just doesn't want AI to do the whole PR?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#254
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. Not for a dozen lines here or there, even if it could be found and identified in a massive code base. That’s like quoting a paragraph of a book in another book, non infringing. For the second half of your comment it sounds like you’re…

What will happen when company A implements algorithm X based on AI output, company B does the same and company A claims that it is proprietary code and takes company B to court?

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#255
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You must ask "Do I trust where this came from?" And to answer that, you need to know where it come from. No you don’t. You can’t outsource trust determinations. Especially to the people you claim not to trust! You make the judgement call by looking at the code and your known history of the contributor. Nobody cares if contributors use an LLM or a magnetic needle to generate code. They care if bad code gets introduc…

You’re completely incorrect. People care a lot about where code came from. They need to be able to trust that code you’re contributing was not copied from a project under AGPLv3, if the project you’re contributing to is under a different license. Stop trying to equate LLM-generated code with indexing-based autocomplete. They’re not the same thing at all: LLM-generated code is equivalent to code copied off Stack Overf…

I’m not equating any type of code generation. I’m saying that as a maintainer you have to evaluate any submission on the merits, not on a series of yes/no questions provided by the submitter. And your own judgement is influenced by what you know about the submitter.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#256
post #171

Earlier 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…

This makes no sense. Computational geometry algorithms are computable.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#257
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

I think there are ramifications to making the argument that learning is stealing.

I don't want my children to pay a license fee to their school or their textbook publishers for what they learn in school.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#258
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Junior developers are entering a workforce where they will never not be using AI

I don't think using AI at all is forbidden, he just doesn't want AI to do the whole PR?

The requirement is explicitly

> If you are using *any kind of AI assistance* to contribute to Ghostty, it must be disclosed in the pull request.

This is sufficiently confusing that someone is asking if this applies to tab completion. They commit actually says

> trivial tab-completion doesn't need to be disclosed, so long as it is limited to single keywords or short phrases.

So if you take this literally you're going to be disclosing every yasnippet expansion that completes boilerplate.

The policy as written isn't sensible and I don't think it's entirely coming from a sensible place.

Junior developers need to learn how to code with AI because that's what coding is now. Not that he has to help them. But it does read a bit weird to toot your horn about how important it is to be helpful until it comes to helping people understand how to navigate the current environment then it's not worth your time.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one is forcing you to read it. Feel free to have your own AI judge if you should merge it or even just YOLO merge it. The end goal of people trying to get code merged is not to have you read it. It's to improve the software. Whether code improves the software or not is orthogonal to if the code was written by hand.

Re: AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

#260
post #171

Earlier 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…

LLMs aren't good at rote memorization. They can't even get quotations of humans right.

It's easier for the LLM to rewrite an idiomatic computational geometry algorithm from scratch in a language it understands well like Python. Entire computational geometry textbooks and research papers are in its knowledge base. It doesn't have to copy some proprietary implementation.

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