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Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

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Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#291

Post by alganet »

linsomniac wrote: post #156
alganet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you show these 3 things to us?

Not OP, but: I'm getting towards the end of a vibe coded ZFS storage backend to ganeti that includes the ability to live migrate VMs to another host by: taking snapshot and replicating it to target, pausing VM, taking another incremental snapshot and replicating it, and then unpausing the VM on the new destination machine. https://github.com/linsomniac/ganeti/tree/newzfs Other LLM tools I've built this week: This aft…

All the features you mentioned are not coming from the AI.

Here it is invoking the actual zfs commands:

https://github.com/ganeti/ganeti/compare/master...linsomniac...

All the extra python boilerplate just makes it harder to understand IMHO.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#292

Post by alganet »

viraptor wrote: post #268
alganet wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The time to make them generic enough to share would be much longer than creating my specific version in the first place Welcome to the reality of software development. "Works on my machine" is often not good enough to make the cut.

It doesn't matter that my thing doesn't generalise if someone can build their own customised solution quickly. But also, if I wanted to sell it or distribute it, I'd ensure it was more generic from the beginning.

You need to put your money where your mouth is.

If you comment about AI generated code in a thread about qemu (mission-critical project that many industries rely upon), a pomodoro app is not going to do the trick.

And no, it doesn't "show that is possible". qemu is not only more complex, it's a whole different problem space.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#293

Post by guappa »

compton93 wrote: post #31
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.

I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand This really bothers me. I've had people ask me to do some task except they get AI to provide instructions on how to do the task and send me the instructions, rather than saying "Hey can you please do X". It's insulting.

My company hired a new CTO and he asked chatgpt to write some lengthy documents about "how engineering gets done in our company".

He also writes all his emails with chatgpt.

I don't bother reading.

Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#294

Post by JonChesterfield »

guappa wrote: post #293
compton93 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to review code the author doesn't understand This really bothers me. I've had people ask me to do some task except they get AI to provide instructions on how to do the task and send me the instructions, rather than saying "Hey can you please do X". It's insulting.

My company hired a new CTO and he asked chatgpt to write some lengthy documents about "how engineering gets done in our company". He also writes all his emails with chatgpt. I don't bother reading. Oddly enough he recently promoted a guy who has been fucking around with LLMs for years instead of working as his right hand man.

That's directly lethal, in a limited sympathy with engineers that don't immediately head for the exit sort of fashion. Best of luck

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#295

Post by latexr »

ben_w wrote: post #270
alganet wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your QR generator is actually a project written by humans repackaged: https://github.com/neocotic/qrious All the hard work was made by humans. I can do `npm install` without having to pay for AI, thanks.

I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it, but it was something like this: Real musicians don’t mix loops they bought. Real musicians make their own synth patches. Real musicians build their own instruments. Real musicians hand-forge every metal component in their instruments. … They say real musicians raise goats for the leather for the drum-skins, but I wouldn't know because I haven’t made…

> I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it

You only need to search for “loops goat skin”. You’re butchering the quote and its meaning quite a bit. The widely circulated version is:

> I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

It’s not about “real musicians”¹ but a personal reflection on dependencies and abstractions and the nature of creative work and remixing. Your interpretation of it is backwards.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#296

Post by jitl »

mattmanser wrote: post #208
jitl wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ri…

For bigger inputs I have the AI write the new output to an adjacent file and diff the two to confirm equivalence

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#297

Post by alganet »

ben_w wrote: post #270
alganet wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your QR generator is actually a project written by humans repackaged: https://github.com/neocotic/qrious All the hard work was made by humans. I can do `npm install` without having to pay for AI, thanks.

I am reminded of a meme about musicians. Not well enough to find it, but it was something like this: Real musicians don’t mix loops they bought. Real musicians make their own synth patches. Real musicians build their own instruments. Real musicians hand-forge every metal component in their instruments. … They say real musicians raise goats for the leather for the drum-skins, but I wouldn't know because I haven’t made…

Ice Ice Baby getting the bass riff of Under Pressure is sampling. Making a cover is covering. Milli Vanilli is another completely different situation.

I am sorry, none of your points are made. Makes no sense.

The LLM work sounds dumb, and the suggestion that it made "a qr code generator" is disingenuous. The LLM barely did a frontend for it. Barely.

Regarding the "free" price, read the comment I replied on again:

> Built with Aider and either Sonnet 3.5 or Gemini 2.5 Pro

Paid tools.

It sounds like the author payed for `npm install`, and thinks he's on top of things and being smart.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#298

Post by strogonoff »

ben_w wrote: post #267
strogonoff wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People sometimes miss that copyleft is powered by copyright. Copyleft (which means Linux, Blender, and plenty of other goodness) needs the ability to impose some rules on what users do with your work, presumably in the interest of common good. Such ability implies IP ownership. This does not mean that powerful interests abusing copyright with ever increasing terms and enforcement overreach is fair game. It harms comm…

While this is a generally true statement (and has echoes in other areas like sovereign citizens), GenAI may make copyright (and copyleft) economically redundant. While the AI we have now is not good enough to make an entire operating system when asked*, if/when they can, the benefits of all the current licensing models evaporate, and it doesn't matter if that model is proprietary with no source, or GPL, or MIT, becau…

I have a few sociophilosophical quibbles about the impact of this, but to focus on a practical part:

> by that point anyone else can reproduce your OS for whatever the cost of tokens is without ever touching your code.

Do you think that the cost of tokens will remain low enough once these companies for now operating at loss have to be profitable, and it really is going to be “anyone else”? Or, would it be limited to “big tech” or select few corporations who can pay a non-trivial amount of money to them?

Do you think it would mean they essentially sell GPL’ed code for proprietary use? Would it not affect FOSS, which has been till now partially powered by the promise to contributors that their (often voluntary) work would remain for public benefit?

Do you think someone would create and make public (and gather so much contributor effort) something on the scale Linux, if they knew that it would be open to be scraped by an intermediary who can sell it at whatever price they choose to set to companies that then are free to call it their own and repackage commercially without contributing back, providing their source or crediting the original authors in any way?

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#299

Post by olalonde »

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…

Seems like a fake problem. Who would sue QEMU for using AI-generated code? OpenAI? Anthropic?

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#300

Post by latexr »

Philpax wrote: post #263
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.

Here's Armin Ronacher describing his open-source "sloppy XML" parser that he had AI write with his guidance from this week: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/6/21/my-first-ai-library/

> To be clear: this isn't an endorsement of using models for serious Open Source libraries. This was an experiment to see how far I could get with minimal manual effort, and to unstick myself from an annoying blocker. The result is good enough for my immediate use case and I also felt good enough to publish it to PyPI in case someone else has the same problem.

By their own admission, this is just kind of OK. They don’t even know how good or bad it is, just that it kind of solved an immediate problem. That’s not how you create sustainable and reliable software. Which is OK, sometimes you just need to crap something out to do a quick job, but that doesn’t really feel like what your parent comment is talking about.

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