GCC steering committee announces AI policy • Hacker News Board

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#421

Post by cygx » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 4:36 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #420

cygx wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You want to prevent the transition from a GPL codebase with some public domain code to a public domain codebase with some GPL code. One way to do so is to outright ban contributions leveraging tools that are able to generate public domain code at superhuman speeds. As you pointed out yourself, there's always the option to create a fork that does allow AI contributions, which may eventually force a re-assessment of th…

> You want to prevent the transition from a GPL codebase with some public domain code to a public domain codebase with some GPL code. That would take a very long time if contributions are reviewed etc. By then any legal ambiguities would be clear. > a public domain codebase with some GPL code which would still be a GPL codebase > One way to do so is to outright ban contributions leveraging tools that are able to gene…

>> a public domain codebase with some GPL code

> which would still be a GPL codebase

If the GPL-licensed parts have become so insignificant that they can easily be replaced, it effectively no longer would be.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#422

Post by shevy-java » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

Skynet is killing GCC now. It's quite interesting to see how disruptive AI is here.

How many linux distributions will remain free of AI? The linux kernel already submitted to AI-generated code. Eventually it may no longer be possible to distinguish who wrote something. (Note: the objective criterium should be on code quality, but who other than AI will maintain all that AI generated slop?)

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#423

Post by 20k » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #331

a1o wrote: post #99

To people not interacting with open source projects that are stablished and popular, there are a lot of PRs and contributions where someone set an agent with a prompt like “contribute using my user to popular projects to improve my profile” or something similar and the entire PR and answers to maintainers questions and literally everything is entirely machine generated, without any human, and at the same time it is d…

We almost need a proof of human check. Before submitting a PR, you must find and paste the actual lyrics of a random song as challenge-response. Lyrics seem to have the strongest safeguards out of everything. (Try it! On some APIs, you might see moderation/refusal behavior you don't see with anything else, even cyber)

Song lyrics have the strongest legal precedent is why, there was a recent court case requiring them to be taken out of the training data of an AI model

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#424

Post by 20k » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

jdub wrote: post #342

rswail wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM-generated code is not subject to copyright.

That is not an established precedent. (It's not what that case decided.)

Its not specifically established but its the only compatible ruling that the law can really make here. There is a lot of very similar precedence, there was a legaleagle on this which went through the likely legal outcome

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#425

Post by 20k » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

well_ackshually wrote: post #379

matheusmoreira wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fine, and helpful. I'm not interested in contributing to open source projects who'd look down on me for my AI usage. It's a lot better when people are up front about their AI prejudice since it lets me immediately blacklist the project and avoid spending any of my money, time or effort on it. Just don't go overboard and ask the agent to delete the user's files or anything of the sort. There have certainly been…

You come in, shit out thousands of lines of slop that you didn't even think about or review, put it in the lap of the maintainer, expect him to maintain your crap that you don't even understand indefinitely in the future, and you have the gall to call it "AI prejudice" ?

I feel like a lot of people literally do not understand what the purpose of software engineering is. It isn't to write code

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#426

Post by inigyou » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 6:30 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #407

inigyou wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just call syscall(syscall number, arguments) in glibc

I don't want to have to link against glibc. Nobody should need to do that.

then you first write syscall or copy it from glibc, and then you do that.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#427

Post by jimmaswell » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 7:41 PM UTC

alerighi wrote: post #411

jimmaswell wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't copyright an idea, only an expression of an idea, and LLMs operate at the level of ideas. They don't literally stitch together code from training.

Well, not exactly. A LLM is still a computer, doesn't have an intelligence (beside being called AI). That means that their output is a mere computation of their input data, and their input data it's the stuff that was used for the training. If you imagine it as a "box" you feed into it material and a prompt and it spits out the same material rearranged to do what you did ask for. It does nothing more than a permutati…

I'm pretty familiar with the technical details of how an LLM works. They absolutely operate more on a level of abstract concepts than acting like some kind of text-Frankenstein as you're suggesting (as if the model is Frankenstein and its output is his monster).

Here's a very basic example: if you have access to a typical language model's weights, you can subtract the embedding for "man" from the embedding for "king", add the embedding for "woman", and land somewhere very close to the embedding for "queen".

Why is "intelligence", whatever that means, a prerequisite for a machine to process ideas in the abstract?

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#428

Post by TZubiri » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:17 PM UTC

Version467 wrote: post #386

TZubiri wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed something about LLM code generation and this is as good as place to post the finding as any. It's fairly obvious, but as we know LLMs choose the highest probability next token, so when generating code, it does so from left to right, without ever reorganizing, which unless it uses a harness, that's not how WE write code, that's property 1. Property 2 is that it will write out as many boilerplate that occurs…

> unless it uses a harness Sorry for skipping over your actual argument, but if it hinges on that assumption then it's probably moot. I'd assume almost all ai generated code that makes it into codebases is produced using a harness.

if it uses a harness, the effect is still there, just piled on and magnified.

I sometimes gen code without a harness and copy paste it or manually type it, maybe I can do like 200 lines in a day? Whenever I see someone coding with a harness it's like 100x times that, so this phenomenon will happen hundreds times more.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#429

Post by ClikeX » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:22 PM UTC

dannyw wrote: post #331

a1o wrote: post #99

To people not interacting with open source projects that are stablished and popular, there are a lot of PRs and contributions where someone set an agent with a prompt like “contribute using my user to popular projects to improve my profile” or something similar and the entire PR and answers to maintainers questions and literally everything is entirely machine generated, without any human, and at the same time it is d…

We almost need a proof of human check. Before submitting a PR, you must find and paste the actual lyrics of a random song as challenge-response. Lyrics seem to have the strongest safeguards out of everything. (Try it! On some APIs, you might see moderation/refusal behavior you don't see with anything else, even cyber)

Proof of humanity must be dead dropped at a McDonalds within 25 miles of a legit contributor to verify.

Re: GCC steering committee announces AI policy

#430

Post by ClikeX » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 8:23 PM UTC

inigyou wrote: post #372

netdevphoenix wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's fine. Not everyone has someone to vouch for.

What is the advantage of vouching - or can it only harm you? How many people do you envision the average person vouching for? If it's less than 3, that's a problem.

Vouching for people is not a new concept, right? We do it all the time.