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Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

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Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#101

Post by alganet »

viraptor wrote: post #84
amake wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects Still waiting to see evidence of AI-driven projects eating the lunch of "traditional" projects.

It's happening slowly all around. It's not obvious because people producing high quality stuff have no incentive at all to mark their changes as AI-generated. But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want. I'm running 3 things now just for myself that I generated from scratch instead of trying to send feature requests to existing apps I can buy. It's only goi…

Can you show these 3 things to us?

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#102

Post by luispauloml »

Aeolun wrote: post #93

This seems absolutely impossible to enforce. All my editors give me AI assisted code hints. Zed, cursor, VS code. All of them now show me autocomplete that comes from an LLM. There's absolutely no distinction between that code, and code that I've typed out myself. It's like complaining that I may have no legal right to submit my stick figure because I potentially copied it from the drawing of another stick figure. I'…

> I'm firmly convinced that these policies are only written to have plausible deniability when stuff with generated code gets inevitably submitted anyway.

Of course it is. And nobody said otherwise, because that is explicitly stated on the commit message:

    [...] More broadly there is,
    as yet, no broad consensus on the licensing implications of code
    generators trained on inputs under a wide variety of licenses
And in the patch itself:

    [...] With AI
    content generators, the copyright and license status of the output is
    ill-defined with no generally accepted, settled legal foundation.
What other commenters pointed out is that, beyond the legal issue, other problems also arise form the use of AI-generated code.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#103

Post by basilgohar »

AJ007 wrote: post #63
benlivengood wrote: post #35

Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain. In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the res…

I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally. #1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models. #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will no…

I feel like this is mostly proofless assertion. I'm aware what you hint at is happening, but the conclusions you arrive at are far from proven or even reasonable at this stage.

For what it's worth, I think AI for code will arrive at a place like how other coding tools sit – hinting, intellisense, linting, maybe even static or dynamic analysis, but I doubt NOT using AI will be a critical asset to productivity.

Someone else in the thread already mentioned it's a bit of an amplifier. If you're good, it can make you better, but if you're bad it just spreads your poor skills like a robot vacuum spreads animal waste.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#104

Post by mistrial9 »

jitl wrote: post #64
JonChesterfield wrote: post #22

Interesting. Harder line than the LLVM one found at https://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#ai-generated-cont... I'm very old man shouting at clouds about this stuff. I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand and I don't want to merge code neither of us understand.

When I use LLM for coding tasks, it's like "hey please translate this YAML to structs and extract any repeated patterns to re-used variables". It's possible to do this transform with deterministic tools, but AI will do a fine job in 30s and it's trivial to test the new output is identical to the prompt input. My high-level work is absolutely impossible to delegate to AI, but AI really helps with tedious or low-stakes…

oh agree and amplify this -- graphs are worlds unto themselves. some of the high end published research papers have astounding contents, for example..

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#105

Post by shmerl »

Aeolun wrote: post #93

This seems absolutely impossible to enforce. All my editors give me AI assisted code hints. Zed, cursor, VS code. All of them now show me autocomplete that comes from an LLM. There's absolutely no distinction between that code, and code that I've typed out myself. It's like complaining that I may have no legal right to submit my stick figure because I potentially copied it from the drawing of another stick figure. I'…

Neovim doesn't force you to use AI, unless you configure it yourself. If your editor doesn't allow you to switch it off, there must be a big problem with it.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#106

Post by sysmax »

I wish people would make distinction regarding the size/scope of the AI-generated parts. Like with video copyright laws, where a 5-second clip from a copyrighted movie is usually considered fair use and not frowned upon.

Because for projects like QEMU, current AI models can actually do mind-boggling stuff. You can give it a PDF describing an instruction set, and it will generate you wrapper classes for emulating particular instructions. Then you can give it one class like this and a few paragraphs from the datasheet, and it will spit out unit tests checking that your class works as the CPU vendor describes.

Like, you can get from 0% to 100% test coverage several orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Or refactoring, where you want to add support for a particular memory virtualization trick, and you need to update 100 instruction classes based on straight-forward, but not 100% formal rule. A human developer would be pulling their hairs out, while an LLM will do it faster than you can get a coffee.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#107

Post by recursive »

dheera wrote: post #44
JonChesterfield wrote: post #22

Interesting. Harder line than the LLVM one found at https://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#ai-generated-cont... I'm very old man shouting at clouds about this stuff. I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand and I don't want to merge code neither of us understand.

> I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand The author is me and my silicon buddy. We understand this stuff.

Of course we understand it. Just ask us!

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#108

Post by whoisthemachine »

candiddevmike wrote: post #56
andy99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight. This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.

Imagine a boring dystopia where everyone is given hallucinated tasks from LLMs that may in some crazy way be feasible but aren't, and you can't argue that they're impossible without being fired since leadership lacks critical thinking.

Unfortunately this is the most likely outcome.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#109

Post by OptionOfT »

alluro2 wrote: post #73
andy99 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had someone higher up ask about something in my area of expertise. I said I didn't think is was possible, he followed up with a chatGPT conversation he had where it "gave him some ideas that we could use as an approach", as if that was some useful insight. This is the same people that think that "learning to code" is a translation issue they don't have time for as opposed to experience they don't have.

A friend experienced a similar thing at work - he gave a well-informed assessment of why something is difficult to implement and it would take a couple of weeks, based on the knowledge of the system and experience with it - only for the manager to reply within 5 min with a screenshot of an (even surprisingly) idiotic ChatGPT reply, and a message along the lines of "here's how you can do it, I guess by the end of the…

Same here. You throw a question in a channel. Someone responds in 1 minute with a code example that either you had laying around, or would take > 5 minutes to write.

The code example was AI generated. I couldn't find a single line of code anywhere in any codebase. 0 examples on GitHub.

And of course it didn't work.

But, it sent me on a wild goose because I trusted this person to give me a valuable insight. It pisses me off so much.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#110

Post by galangalalgol »

basilgohar wrote: post #103
AJ007 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally. #1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models. #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will no…

I feel like this is mostly proofless assertion. I'm aware what you hint at is happening, but the conclusions you arrive at are far from proven or even reasonable at this stage. For what it's worth, I think AI for code will arrive at a place like how other coding tools sit – hinting, intellisense, linting, maybe even static or dynamic analysis, but I doubt NOT using AI will be a critical asset to productivity. Someone…

I think that was his point, the project full of bad developers isn't the competition. It is a peer whose skill matches yours and uses agents on top of that. By myself I am no match for myself + cline.
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