At the moment I have 20 subagents fixing stuff throughout my own codebase.
But I've never had the gall to let my AI agent do stuff on other people's projects without my direct oversight.
AI Usage Policy
211–220 of 293 posts
Re: AI Usage Policy
#212"Pull requests created by AI must have been fully verified with human use." should always be a bare minimum requirement.
AI is so smart these days that I typically just ask Claude to verify the code for me. This sort of request may have made sense in the old days but as the quality of generated code rapidly increases, so does the necessity of human intervention decrease.
If you're going to put something on someone else's desk, you're going to have to own it.
If you don't check it yourself, then you're going to own whatever your tooling misses, and also own the amount of others' time you waste through what the project has decided to categorize as negligence, which will make you look worse than if you simply made an honest mistake.
Re: AI Usage Policy
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
TBH Im not sure if this is a "growing up in a good area" vibe. But over the last decade or so I have had to slowly learn the people around me have no sense of shame. This wasnt their fault, but mine. Society has changed and if you don't adapt you'll end up confused and abused. I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.
The adaption is going to be that competent, knowledgeable people will begin forming informal and formal networks of people they know are skilled and intelligent and begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent. They will be less willing to work with people who don't have a proven record of competence. This results in greater stratification and harder for people who aren't already part of the in…
> skilled and intelligent [people] begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent
That has NEVER led to a positive result in the whole of human history, especially that the second group is much larger than the first.
Re: AI Usage Policy
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate…
In a functioning society the primary mechanism to deal with violation of social norms is (temporary or permanent) social exclusion and in consequence the loss of future cooperative benefits. To demand public humiliation doesn’t just put you on the same level as our medieval ancestors, who responded to violations of social norms with the pillory - it’s actually even worse: the contemporary internet pillory never forge…
You think exile is a better first step than shame? That's certainly a take. On the internet, that does manifest as my suggested way of dealing with people where shame doesn't work, a curated space where offenders are banned -- but I would still advocate for attempting lesser corrective behaviour first before exclusion. Moreover, exclusion only works if you have a means to viably exclude people. Shame is something peers can do; exclusion requires authority.
Shame is also not the same thing as "public humiliation". They are publicly humiliating themselves. Pointing out that what they publicly chose to do themselves is bad is in no way the same as coercing them into being humiliated, which is what "public humiliation as a medieval punishment" entails. For example, the medieval practice of dragging a woman through the streets nude in order to humiliate her is indeed abhorrent, but you can hardly complain if you march through the streets nude of your own volition, against other people's desires, and are then publicly shamed for it.
Re: AI Usage Policy
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain. Tit for tat
It is well supported that TFT with a delayed mirroring component and Generous Tit for Tat where you sometimes still cooperate after defection are pretty succesful. What is written in the Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance or generosity. It's more like a Grim Trigger strategy than Tit for Tat.
You can't have 1,000,000 abusers and be nuanced and generous to all of them all the time. At some point either you either choose to knowingly enable the abuse or you draw a line in the sand, drop the hammer, send a message, whatever you want to call the process of setting boundaries in anger. Getting a hammer dropped on them isn't going to feel fair to the individuals it falls on, but it's also unrealistic to expect that a mob-like group can trample with impunity because of the fear of being rude or unjust to an individual member of that mob.
It is understanding of these dynamics that lead to us to our current system of law: punitive justice, but forgiveness through pardons.
Re: AI Usage Policy
#216The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…
Shamelessness is very definitely in vogue at the moment. It will pass, let's hope for more than ruins.
To put this another way, shame is only effective if it's coupled with other repercussions with long standing effects.
An example I have of this is from high school where there were guys that were utterly shameless in asking girls for sex. The thing is it worked for them. Regardless of how many people turned them down they got enough of a hit rate it was an effective strategy. Simply put there was no other social mechanism that provided enough disincentive to stop them.
And to take the position as devil's advocate, why should they feel shame? Shame is typically a moral construct of the culture you're raised in and what to be ashamed for can vary widely.
For example, if your raised in the culture of Abrahamic religions it's very likely you're told to be ashamed for being gay. Whereas non-religious upbringing is more likely to say why the hell would you be ashamed for being gay.
TL:DR, shame is not an effective mechanism on the internet because you're dealing with far too many cultures that have wildly different views on shame, and any particular viewpoint on shame is apt to have millions to billions of people that don't believe the same.
Re: AI Usage Policy
#217"Pull requests created by AI must have been fully verified with human use." should always be a bare minimum requirement.
AI is so smart these days that I typically just ask Claude to verify the code for me. This sort of request may have made sense in the old days but as the quality of generated code rapidly increases, so does the necessity of human intervention decrease.
I literally just scrolled past a thread discussing the psychology of shamelessness and undeserved self-confidence that creates all this drive-by AI pull request slop wasting everyone else’s time and see this comment…
Re: AI Usage Policy
#218The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroug…
TBH Im not sure if this is a "growing up in a good area" vibe. But over the last decade or so I have had to slowly learn the people around me have no sense of shame. This wasnt their fault, but mine. Society has changed and if you don't adapt you'll end up confused and abused. I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.
Lack of shame, and antisocial behavior in general are also directly economically rewarded nowadays thanks to the attention economy.
Re: AI Usage Policy
#219At the Zulip open-source project, we've had a significant onslaught of AI slop in the past few months. It gets as absurd as PR descriptions with AI-generated "screenshots" of the app to "demonstrate" the changes. We've had to start warning contributors that we won't be able to review their work if they continue misusing AI, and occasionally banning repeat offenders. It's feels draining -- we want to spend our time mentoring people who'll actually learn from feedback, not interacting with contributors who are just copy-pasting LLM responses without thought.
Our evolving AI policy is in the same spirit as ghostty's, with more detail to address specific failure modes we've experienced: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/contribu...
Re: AI Usage Policy
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
This only matters if you get sued for copyright violation, though.
No? Licenses still apply even if you _don't_ get sued?
Licenses determine the outcome of copyright lawsuits. If there's no copyright lawsuit, nobody looks at the license.
Licenses determine whether a copyright lawsuit is likely to happen. Most entities won't sue you if they expect to lose. But they are not the only deciding factor. Some entities never sue, which means you don't have to follow their licenses.
Sometimes they don't sue because they don't think they can prove you infringed copyright, even if you did. Even if AI is found to be copyright infringement in general, that won't mean every output is a copyright infringement of every input. Writing C code wouldn't be copyright infringement of Harry Potter. The entity suing you would still have to prove that you infringed.