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AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

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Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#181

Post by 20k »

AuthAuth wrote: post #54
zjp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call these "embarrassingly solved problems". There are plenty of examples of emulators on GitHub, therefore emulators exist in the latent spaces of LLMs. You can have them spit one out whenever you want. It's embarrassingly solved. There are no examples of what you tried to do.

Its license washing. The code is great because its already a problem solved by someone else. The AI can spit out the solution with no license and no attribution and somehow its legal. I hope American tech legislation holds that same energy once others start taking American IP and spitting it back out with no license or attribution.

This is why its astonishing to me that AI has passed any legal department. I regularly see AI output large chunks of code that are 100% plagiarised from a project - its often not hard to find the original source by just looking up snippets of it. 100s of lines of code just completely stolen

Ai doesn't actually wash licenses, it literally can't. Companies are just assuming they're above the law

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#182

Post by degamad »

creato wrote: post #153
ibeckermayer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

> Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. No one goes to prison for this. They might get sued, but even that is doubtful.

Aaron Swartz would probably disagree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#183

Post by degamad »

Guvante wrote: post #164
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

People rarely post proprietary code to GitHub. Most of it is open licenses that generally only require attribution. Some use a copy left license. Software patents are not copyright in anyway they are a completely different thing. So this isn't AI getting back at the big guys it is AI using open source code you could have used if you just followed the simple license. Copyright in regards to software is effectively "if…

> if you just followed the simple license

But there's the rub. If you found the code on Github, you would have seen the "simple licence" which required you to either give an attribution, release your code under a specific licence, seek an alternative licence, or perform some other appropriate action.

But if the LLM generates the code for you, you don't know the conditions of the "simple license" in order to follow them. So you are probably violating the conditions of the original license, but because someone can try to say "I didn't copy that code, I just generated some new code using an LLM", they try to ignore the fact that it's based on some other code in a Github somewhere.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#185

Post by satvikpendem »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #152
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

> 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

If AI training is found to be fair use, then that fact supercedes any license language.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#186

Post by afro88 »

kfarr wrote: post #18

I think it makes the annoying part less annoying? Also re: "I spent longer arguing with the agent and recovering the file than I would have spent writing the test myself." In my humble experience arguing with an LLM is a waste of time, and no-one should be spending time recovering files. Just do small changes one at a time, commit when you get something working, and discard your changes and try again if it doesn't. I…

Once you start arguing, it's time to start a new prompt with new instructions

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#187

Post by 00deadbeef »

minimaxir wrote: post #96
hyperadvanced wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I stupid or do these agents regularly not read what’s in the agents.md file?

More recent models are better at reading and obeying constraints in AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md. GPT-5.2-Codex did a bad job of obeying my more detailed AGENTS.md files but GPT-5.3-Codex very evidently follows it well.

Opus 4.5 successfully ignored the first line of my CLAUDE.md file last week

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#188

Post by Dylan16807 »

ibeckermayer wrote: post #152
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen many discussions stating patent hoarding has gone too far, and also that copyright for companies have gone way too far (even so much that Amazon can remove items from your purchase library if they lose their license to it). Then AI begins to offer a method around this over litigious system, and this becomes a core anti-AI argument. I do think it's silly to think public code (as in, code published to the pub…

1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for. 2. GPL does not allow you to take the code, compress it in your latent space, and then sell that to consumers without open sourcing your code.

> 1. Equality under the law is important in its own right. Even if a law is wrong, it isn’t right to allow particular corporations to flaunt it in a way that individuals would go to prison for.

We're talking about the users getting copyright-laundered code here. That's a pretty equal playing field. It's about the output of the AI, not the AI itself, and there are many models to choose from.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#189

Post by solumunus »

api wrote: post #110
Nition wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way it shows how poorly we have done over the years in general as programmers in making solved problems easily accessible instead of constantly reinventing the wheel. I don't know if AI is coming up with anything really novel (yet) but it's certainly a nice database of solved problems. I just hope we don't all start relying on current[1] AI so much that we lose the ability to solve novel problems ourselves. [1]…

It’s 2026 and code reuse is still hard. Our code still has terrible modularity. Systems have terrible to nonexistent composability. Attempts to fix this like pure OOP and pure FP have never caught on. To some extent AI is an entirely different approach. Screw elegance. Programmers won’t adhere to an elegant paradigm anyway. So just automate the process of generating spaghetti. The modularity and reuse is emergent fro…

> Programmers won’t adhere to an elegant paradigm anyway

It’s much easier to get an LLM to adhere, especially when you throw tooling into the loop to enforce constraints and style. Even better when you use Rust with its amazing type system, and compilation serves as proof.

Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder

#190

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

crazygringo wrote: post #141

> Reading and understanding other people's code is much harder than writing code. I keep seeing this sentiment repeated in discussions around LLM coding, and I'm baffled by it. For the kind of function that takes me a morning to research and write, it takes me probably 10 or 15 minutes to read and review. It's obviously easier to verify something is correct than come up with the correct thing in the first place. And…

Five hours ago I was reviewing some failed tests in a PR. The affected code was probably 300 lines, total source for the project ~1200 lines. Reading the code, I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on... and I wrote all the code. Why would that be failing? This all looks totally fine. There that should fix it! Fuck.

When you write code, your brain follows a logical series of steps to produce the code, based on a context you pre-loaded in your brain in order to be capable of writing it that way. The reader does not have that context pre-loaded in their brain; they have to reverse-engineer the context in order to understand the code, and that can be time-consuming, laborious, and (as in my case) erroneous.

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