Live data from Hacker News

Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

github.com

201–210 of 427 posts

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#201

Oh hey, the thing I predicted in my blog titled "yes i will judge you for using AI" happened lol Basically I think open source has traditionally HEAVILY relied on hidden competency markers to judge the quality of incoming contributions. LLMs throw that entire concept on its head by presenting code that has competent markers but none of the backing experience. It is a very very jarring experience for experienced indiv…

> Basically I think open source has traditionally HEAVILY relied on hidden competency markers to judge the quality of incoming contributions.

Yep, and it's not just code. Student essays, funding applications, internal reports, fiction, art...everything that AI touches has this problem that AI outputs look superficially similar to the work of experts.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#202
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It's not obvious because people producing high quality stuff have no incentive at all to mark their changes as AI-generated I feel like we'd be hearing from business that crushed their competition by delivering faster or with fewer people. Where are those businesses? > But there are also local tools generated This is really not the same thing as the original claim ("Software projects that somehow are 100% human dev…

> I feel like we'd be hearing from business that crushed their competition by delivering faster or with fewer people. Where are those businesses?

As if tech part was the major part of getting the product to market.

Those businesses are probably everywhere. They just aren't open about admitting they're using AI to speed up their marketing/product design/programming/project management/graphics design, because a) it's not normal outside some tech startup sphere to brag about how you're improving your internal process, and b) because almost everyone else is doing that too, so it partially cancels out - that is what competition on the market means, and c) admitting to use of AI in current climate is kind of a questionable PR move.

WRT. those who fail to leverage the new tools and are destined to be outcompeted, this process takes extended time, because companies have inertia.

>> But there are also local tools generated

> This is really not the same thing as the original claim

Point is that such wins compound. You get yak shaving done faster by fashioning your own tools on the fly, and it also cuts cost and a huge burden of maintaining relationships with third parties[0]

--

[0] - Because each account you create, each subscription you take, even each online tool you kinda track and hope hope hope won't disappear on you - each such case comes with a cognitive tax of a business relationship you probably didn't want, that often costs you money directly, and that you need to keep track of.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#203
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a software is truly wide open source in the sense of “do whatever the fuck you want with this code, we don’t care”, then it has nothing to fear from AI.

Can't release someone else's proprietary source under a "do whatever the fuck you want" license and actually do whatever the fuck you want, without getting sued.

The license does exist so you can release your own software under it, however: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#204
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.

That is a very good description of the Paranoia RPG.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#205
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show these 3 things to us?

For some reason these fully functional ai generated projects that the authors vibe out while playing guitar and clipping their toenails are never open source.

Mine is. And it is awesome: https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty

The most recent release includes a MacOS build in a dmg signed by Apple: https://github.com/banagale/FileKitty/releases/tag/v0.2.3

I vibed that workflow just so more people could have access to this tool. It was a pain and it actually took time away from toenail clipping.

And while I didn't lay hands on a guitar much during this period, I did manage to build this while bouncing between playing Civil War tunes on a 3D-printed violin and generating music in Suno for a soundtrack to “Back on That Crust,” the missing and one true spiritual successor to ToeJam & Earl: https://suno.com/song/e5b6dc04-ffab-4310-b9ef-815bdf742ecb

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've started seeing this at work with coworkers using LLMs to generate code reviews. They submit comments which are way above their skill level which almost trick you in to thinking they are correct since only a very skilled developer would make these suggestions. And then ultimately you end up wasting tons of time proving how these suggestions are wrong. Spending far more time than the person pasting the suggestions…

funny enough I had coworkers who similarly had a hold of the jargon but without any substance. They would always turn out to be time sinks for others doing the useful work. AI imitating that type of drag on the workplace is kinda funny ngl.

Probabilistic patterns stringed together are something different from an end-to-end intention driven solidly linked chain of thought that is with pylons grounded in relevant context at critical points.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#207
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a software is truly wide open source in the sense of “do whatever the fuck you want with this code, we don’t care”, then it has nothing to fear from AI.

Can't release someone else's proprietary source under a "do whatever the fuck you want" license and actually do whatever the fuck you want, without getting sued.

Only more reason for OSS to embrace AI generation - once it leaks into enough widely used or critical (think cURL) dependencies and exceeds certain critical mass, any judgement on the IP aspects other than "public domain" (in the broader sense) will become infeasible, as enforcing a different judgement would be like doing open heart surgery on the global economy.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#208
post #64

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…

In my experience, AI will not do a fine job of things like this.

If the definition is past any sort of length, it will hallucinate new properties, change the names, etc. It also has a propensity to start skipping bits of the definitions by adding in comments like "/** more like this here **/"

It may work for you for small YAML files, but beware doing this for larger ones.

Worst part about all that is that it looks right to begin with because the start of the definitions will be correct, but there will be mistakes and stuff missing.

I've got a PoC hanging around where I did something similar by throwing an OpenAPI spec at an AI and telling it to generate some typescript classes because I was being lazy and couldn't be bothered to run it through a formal tool.

Took me a while to notice a lot of the definitions had subtle bugs, properties were missing and it had made a bunch of stuff up.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#209
post #196
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have AI agents that have been trained to review thousands of PRs that are produced by other, generative agents, and together they have already churned out much more software than human teams can write in a year. Was your comment tongue-in-cheek? If not, where is this huge mass of AI-generated software?

All around you, just that it doesn’t make sense for developers to reveal that a lot of their work is now about chunking and refining the specifications written by the product owner. Admitting such is like admitting you are overpaid for your job, and that a 20 USD AI-agent can do better and faster than you for 75% of the work. Is it easy to admit that you have learnt skills for 10+ years that are progressively already…

Good luck debugging

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#210
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show these 3 things to us?

For some reason these fully functional ai generated projects that the authors vibe out while playing guitar and clipping their toenails are never open source.

Going by the standard of "But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want", here's a random one of mine that's in regular use by my wife:

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/qr-code-generator

Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro (I forgot to note that down in this project), and recently modified with Claude Code because I had to test it on something.

Getting the first version of this up was literally both faster and easier than finding a QR code generator that I'm sure is not bloated, not bullshit, not loaded with trackers, that's not using shorteners or its own URL (it's always a stupid idea to use URL shorteners you don't control), not showing ads, mining bitcoin and shit, one that my wife can use in her workflow without being distracted too much. Static page, domain I own, a bit of fiddling with LLMs.

What I can't link to is half a dozen single-use tools or faux tools created on the fly as part of working on something. But this happens to me couple times a month.

To anchor another vertex in this parameter space, I found it easier and faster to ask LLM to build me a "breathing timer" (one that counts down N seconds and resets, repeatedly) with analog indicator by requesting it, because a search query to Google/Kagi would be of comparable length, and then I'd have to click on results!

EDIT: Okay, another example:

https://github.com/TeMPOraL/tampermonkey-scripts/blob/master...

It overlays a trivial UI to set up looping over a segment of any YouTube video, and automatically persists the setting by video ID. It solves the trivial annoyance of channel jingles and other bullshit at start/end of videos that I use repeatedly as background music.

This was mostly done zero-shot by Claude, with maybe two or three requests for corrections/extra features, total development time maybe 15 minutes. I use it every day all the time ever since.

You could say, "but SponsorBlock" or whatever, but per what GP wrote, I just needed a small fraction of functionality of the tools I know exist, and it was trivial to generate that with AI.

Post reply on HN