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Coding agents could make free software matter again

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Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#81

Post by dbetteridge »

apatheticonion wrote: post #42
jonahss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.

Me too, and I use LLMs often for personal and professional work. Knowing that colleagues are burning through $700/day worth of tokens, and a small fraction of those tokens were likely derived from my work while I get made redundant is a bit shite.

$700 a day of tokens can't possibly be sustainable right?

That's 2X the salary of a lot of the world's software developers

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#82

Post by jaggederest »

koolba wrote: post #55
jonahss wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.

Reading this I hear The Roots playing The Seed 2.0[1] in my mind. It’s a wild thought to think that of all the things that will remain on this earth after you’re gone, it’ll be your GPL contributions reconstituting themselves as an LLM’s hallucinations. [1]: https://youtu.be/ojC0mg2hJCc

If we're being clear, it's going to be a lot more than that.

Our comments here on HN are almost certainly going to live in fame/infamy forever. The twitter firehose is a pathway to 140-character immortality essentially.

You can already summon an agent to ingest essentially an entire commenter's history, correlate it across different sites based on writing style or similar nicknames, and then chat with you as that persona, even more so with a finetune or lora. I can do that with my gmail and text message history and it becomes eerily similar to me.

History is going to be much more direct and personal in the future. We can also do this with historical figures with voluminous personal correspondence, that's possible now.

It's very interesting because I think the era before mass LLM usage but also after digitalization is going to be the most intensely studied. We've lived through a thing that is going to be on the cusp of history, for better or worse.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#83

Post by phendrenad2 »

The debate in the comment section here really boils down to: upstream freedom vs downstream freedom.

Copyleft licenses like GPL/Apache mandate upstream freedom: Upstream has the "freedom" to use anything downstream, including anything written by a corporation.

Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like MIT/BSD are about downstream freedom, which is more of a philosophically utilitarian view, where anyone who receives the software is free to use it however they want, including not giving their changes back to the community, on the assumption that this maximizes the utility of this free software in the world.

If you prioritize the former goal, then coding agents are a huge problem for you. If the latter, then coding agents are the best thing ever, because they give everyone access to an effectively unlimited amount of cheap code.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#84

Post by jaynate »

“Their relationship with the software is one of pure dependency, and when the software doesn’t do what they need, they just… live with it”

Or, more likely, they churn off the product.

The SaaS platforms that will survive are busy RIGHT NOW revamping their APIs, implementing oauth, and generally reorganizing their products to be discovered and manipulated by agents. Failing in this effort will ultimately result in the demise of any given platform. This goes for larger SaaS companies, too, it’ll just take longer.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#86

Post by archagon »

apatheticonion wrote: post #21

Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…

> I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.

Personally, I want a viral (GPL-style) license that explicitly prohibits use of code for LLM training/tuning purposes — with the asterisk that while current law might view LLM training as fair use, this may not be the case forever, and blatant disregard of the terms of the license should make it easier for me to sue offenders in the future.

Alternatively, this could be expressed as: the output of any LLM trained on this code must retain this license.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#87

Post by apatheticonion »

dbetteridge wrote: post #81
apatheticonion wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me too, and I use LLMs often for personal and professional work. Knowing that colleagues are burning through $700/day worth of tokens, and a small fraction of those tokens were likely derived from my work while I get made redundant is a bit shite.

$700 a day of tokens can't possibly be sustainable right? That's 2X the salary of a lot of the world's software developers

AUD* - so $450 USD

But yes, that's very expensive and surprising to me.

Re: Coding agents could make free software matter again

#88

Post by Waterluvian »

reactordev wrote: post #78
apatheticonion wrote: post #21

Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me. The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works. I was made redu…

If you use GitHub, you’re automatically opted into having your code used for training. Private repo or not. You have to actually opt out and even then, will they honor that? No…

They’ll just keep “accidentally” resetting the option over time.
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