Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 427 posts

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#251

Post by fingerlocks »

bredren wrote: post #205
WD-42 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This app is concatenating files with an extra line of metadata added? You know this could be done in a few lines of shell script? You can then make it a finder action extension so it’s part of the system file manager app.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#252

Post by taleinat »

1dom wrote: post #229
a4isms wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is very, very germane and a very quotable line. And these people have been around from long before LLMs appeared. These are the people who dash off an incomplete idea on Friday afternoon and expect to see a finished product in production by next Tuesday, latest. T…

The unfortunate truth is that approach does work, sometimes. It's really easy and common for capable engineers to think their way out of doing something because of all the different things they can think about it. Sometimes, an unreasonable dumbass whose only authority comes from corporate heirarchy is needed to mandate the engineers start chipping away at the tasks. If they weren't a dumbass, they'd know the unreaso…

That approach sometimes does work, but usually very poorly and often not at all.

It can work very well when the higher-up is well informed and does have deep technical experience and understanding. Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are great, well-known examples of this. They've also provided great examples of the same approach mostly failing when applied outside of their areas of deep expertise and understanding.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#254

Post by lars_francke »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #233
Thorrez wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any likelihood that the output of the model would be public domain? Even if the model itself is public domain, the prompt was created by a human and impacted the output, so I don't see how the output could be public domain. And then after that, the output was hopefully reviewed by the original prompting human and likely reviewed by another human during code review, leading to more human impact on the final c…

There is no copyright in AI art. Presumably the same reasoning would apply to AI code: https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-a...

This particular case is US only.

The rest of the world might decide differently.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#255

Post by spit2wind »

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…

Sounds like a teachable moment.

If it's that simple, sounds like you've got your solution! Go ahead and take care of it. If it fits V&V and other normal procedures, like passing tests and documentation, then we'll merge it in. Shouldn't be a problem for you since it will only take a moment.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#256

Post by AndrewDucker »

lars_francke wrote: post #254
AndrewDucker wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no copyright in AI art. Presumably the same reasoning would apply to AI code: https://iclg.com/news/22400-us-court-confirms-ai-generated-a...

This particular case is US only. The rest of the world might decide differently.

Absolutely.

And as long as you're not worried about people in the USA reusing your code then you're all good!

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#257

Post by loktarogar »

danielbln wrote: post #239
loktarogar wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Essentially, people who chose not to use AI code tools will be overtaken by the people who do. That's the unfortunate reality. Who is going to "overtake" QEMU, what exactly does that mean, and what will it matter if they are?

OP said people. QEMU is not people.

We're talking about a decision that the people behind QEMU made that affects people, to which the consequences of made the discussion of merits "directly relevant".

If we're talking about something that neither involving QEMU nor the people behind it, where is the relevance? It's just a rant on AI at that point.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#258

Post by pmlnr »

graemep wrote: post #217
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…

Proprietary source code would not usually end up training LLMs. Unless its leaked, how would an LLM have access to it? > it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries I wonder whether AI might be a useful tool for making that easier. If you have evidence then you can get courts to order disclosure or examination of code. > And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it a…

Licence incompatibility is enough.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#259

Post by pwm »

fingerlocks wrote: post #251
bredren wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This app is concatenating files with an extra line of metadata added? You know this could be done in a few lines of shell script? You can then make it a finder action extension so it’s part of the system file manager app.

Sic transit gloria mundi

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#260

Post by stefanha »

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…

There is ongoing discussion about this topic in the QEMU AI policy: https://lore.kernel.org/qemu-devel/20250625150941-mutt-send-...
Post reply on HN