211–220 of 504 posts
If you're curious to see what everyone else is doing, I did a survey of over 100 major source available projects and four of them banned AI assisted commits (NetBSD, GIMP, Zig, and qemu). On the other hand projects with AI assisted commits you can easily find include Linux, curl, io_uring, MariaDB, DuckDB, Elasticsearch, and so on. Of the 112 projects surveyed, 70 of them had AI assisted commits already. https://thec…
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bottlenecks today are: * understanding the problem * modelling a solution that is consistent with the existing modelling/architecture of the software and moves modelling and architecture in the right direction * verifying that the the implementation of the solution is not introducing accidental complexity These are the things LLMs can't do well yet. That's where contributions will be most appreciated. Producing c…
I still think there is value in external contributors solving problems using LLMs, assuming they do the research and know what they are doing. Getting a well written and tested solution from LLM is not as easy as writing a good prompt, it's a much longer/iterative process.
This is the assumption that has almost always failed and thus has lead to the banning of AI code altogether in a lot of projects.
I think we will be getting into an interesting situation soon, where project maintainers use LLMs because they truly are useful in many cases, but will ban contributors for doing so, because they can't review how well did the user guide the LLM.
The GPL talks about "the preferred form for modification of the software", and I'm starting to think that anything which involves any kind of LLM agent should be including all the text that the user gave to it as well. Prompts, etc. Of course, even then it's not reproducible and requires proprietary software!
That breaks "copyleft" entirely.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The commit you listed was merged upstream. https://github.com/zigimg/zigimg/pull/313
So does that mean they contradicted their own no LLM policy?
It makes lots of sense to me.
[flagged]
At some point your manager is going to force you to AI code. At best you can try to find some healthcare or finance company that is too cheap to buy a machine that can locally run 400B models.
If you're curious to see what everyone else is doing, I did a survey of over 100 major source available projects and four of them banned AI assisted commits (NetBSD, GIMP, Zig, and qemu). On the other hand projects with AI assisted commits you can easily find include Linux, curl, io_uring, MariaDB, DuckDB, Elasticsearch, and so on. Of the 112 projects surveyed, 70 of them had AI assisted commits already. https://thec…
[flagged]
Earlier quoted context omitted.
did you write this with an LLM?
The hyphen instead of an em dash suggests a human (though one could simply replace em dashes with hyphens to make the text more “human-like”).
Also to, intentionally introduce random innoccuous punctuation and speling errors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you tell that it's LLM-generated in that case? If the submitter is prepared to explain the code and vouch for its quality then that might reasonably fall under "don't ask, don't tell". However, if LLM output is either (a) uncopyrightable or (b) considered a derivative work of the source that was used to train the model, then you have a legal problem. And the legal system does care about invisible "bit colou…
It's (c) copyright of the operator. For one simple reason. Intention. Here's some code for example: https://i.imgur.com/dp0QHBp.png Both sides written by an LLM. Both sides written based on my explicit prompts explaining exactly how I want it to behave, then testing, retesting, and generally doing all the normal software eng due diligence necessary for basic QA. Sometimes the prompts are explicitly "change this varia…
It doesn't matter if the "change this variable name" instruction ends up with the same result as a human operator using a text editor.
There is a big difference between "change this variable name" and "refactor this code base to extract a singleton".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Project maintainers will always have the right to decide how to maintain their projects, and "owe" nothing to no one. That being said, to outright ban a technology in 2026 on pure "vibes" is not something I'd say is reasonable. Others have already commented that it's likely unenforceable, but I'd also say it's unreasonable for the sake of utility. It leaves stuff on the table in a time where they really shouldn't. Th…
> That being said, to outright ban a technology in 2026 on pure "vibes" is not something I'd say is reasonable. To outright accept LLM contributions would be as much "pure vibes" as banning it. The thing is, those that maintain open source projects have to make a decision where they want to spend their time. It's open source, they are not being paid for it, they should and will decide what it acceptable and what is n…
If you look back and think about what your saying for a minute, it's that low effort PRs are bad.
Using an LLM to assist in development does not instantly make the whole work 'low effort'.
It's also unenforceable and will create AI witch hunts. Someone used an em-dash in a 500 line PR? Oh the horror that's a reject and ban from the project.
2000 line PR where the user launched multiple agents going over the PR for 'AI patterns'? Perfectly acceptable, no AI here.
I think we will be getting into an interesting situation soon, where project maintainers use LLMs because they truly are useful in many cases, but will ban contributors for doing so, because they can't review how well did the user guide the LLM.
[flagged]
We are inventing problems here. Fact is, an LLM writes better code than 95% of developers out there today. Yes, yes this is Lake Wobegone, everyone here is in the 1%. But for the world at large, I bet code quality goes up.