Live data from Hacker News

SDL bans AI-written commits

github.com

31–40 of 145 posts

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#31
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go ahead, we're all still waiting for these "AI-improved" projects to appear. Meanwhile I'll keep using SDL from the official maintainers which have been working on it for decades.

> Meanwhile I'll keep using SDL from the official maintainers which have been working on it for decades. That's just Virtue signaling. "AI-improved" projects like "rewrite $FOO in rust" are popping up everywhere. I dont support it, sqlite3 being rewritten in rust makes me just sad https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-limbo-a-complete-rewrite... , but this "$PROJECT bans AI" is just ridiculous. Ideally we should try to…

> "$PROJECT bans AI" is just ridiculous

why so? If they don't feel like reviewing code (or ensure copyright compliance) they are free to reject that.

If you feel strong about it, go fork and maintain it on your own.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#32

tbh if the change works and the code is ok who cares what was used to build it? ChatGPT or C++ code generator. If the code looks crap - reject PR, why drama?

In the Monkey Selfie case - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput... - courts decided that copyright requires a human author and a human merely setting the conditions for a copyrighted work to appear is not enough.

This reasonably means AI contributions where a human has guided the AI are not subject to copyright, and thus can't be supported by a project's license.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#33

People who can wield AI properly have no use for SDL at all. It’s a library for humans to figure out platform code. AI has no such limitations.

“Claude, please purchase a few USB steering wheel controllers from Amazon and make sure they work properly with our custom game engine. Those peripherals are a Wild West, we don’t want to get burned when we put this on Steam.”

>> ………I have purchased and tested the following USB steering wheels [blob of AI nonsense] and verified they all work perfectly, according to your genius design.

“Wow, that was fast! It would take a stoopid human 48 hours just to receive the shipment.”

[I would think Claude would recommend using SDL instead of running some janky homespun thing]

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#34
post #12

Why are these projects still on Github? Isn't it better to move away from Github than go through all this shenanigans? This AI slopam nonsense isn't going to stop. Github is no longer the "social network" for software dev. It's just a vehicle to shove more and more Copilot stuff. The userbase is also changing. There are vast numbers of new users on Github who have no desire to learn the architecture or culture of the…

> It's based in Europe. It's run by a non-profit

The main SDL maintainer is paid by a US for-profit company, Valve. They don't necessarily share your EU = automatically good attitude.

But anyway, if Codeberg really takes off it'll be flooded with AI bots as well. All popular sites will.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#35
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and improve it with AI anyway No. My impression is that most AI PRs aren't made to improve anything, but to inflate the requester's reputation as an "AI" expert. > and feature development There's also this misconception that more features == better...

there is no misconception here. Bug fixes, issue triage and feature implementation reduced time is a thing.

The misconception is that new features are always necessary, not that it would be nice if they were done faster.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#36

On the one hand open source projects are going to be overrun with AI code that no one reviewed. On the other hand, code produced with AI and reviewed by humans can be perfectly good, maintainable, and indistinguishable from regular old code. So many processes are no longer sufficient to manage a world where thousands of lines of working code are easy to conjure out of thin air. Already strained open source review pro…

A policy like this has two points. One, to give good faith potential contributors a guideline on what the project expects. Two, to help reviewers have a clear policy they can point to to reject AI slop PRs, without feeling bad or getting into conflicts about minutiae of the code.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#37
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what about SO code snippets? StackOverflow snippets are mostly licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0, so I'd wager that they are not allowed, either. The SDL source code makes a few references to stackoverflow.com, but the only place I could find an exact copy was where the author explicitly licensed the code under a more permissive license: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/5bda0ccfb06ea56c1f15a...

Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works. If a hundred programmers would write essentially the same snippet to solve a problem, it's not copyrightable.

> Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works.

How is this different from LLM outputs? Literally trained on the output of N programmers so it can give you a snippet of code based on what it has seen.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#38

People who can wield AI properly have no use for SDL at all. It’s a library for humans to figure out platform code. AI has no such limitations.

This is probably the most insane take I've read all year. As though an LLMs don't have an increased chance to bork code when they have to write it multiple times for different platforms - even LLM users benefit from the existence of libraries that handle cross platform, low level implementation details and expose high level apis.

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#39
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what about SO code snippets? StackOverflow snippets are mostly licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 or 4.0, so I'd wager that they are not allowed, either. The SDL source code makes a few references to stackoverflow.com, but the only place I could find an exact copy was where the author explicitly licensed the code under a more permissive license: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/5bda0ccfb06ea56c1f15a...

Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to count as works. If a hundred programmers would write essentially the same snippet to solve a problem, it's not copyrightable.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. The famous "rangeCheck" function in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit was only 9 lines: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514

Re: SDL bans AI-written commits

#40

> Given that the source of code generated by AI is unknown, we can't accept it under the Zlib license. So what about SO code snippets? I'm not here to make a stance for AI, but this thread is leaning towards biased. Address the elephant, LLM-assisted PR's have a chance of being lower quality. People are not obligated to review their code. Doing this manually, you are more inclined to review what you're submitting. I…

> I don't scoff at people eating meat, let them be. Why not let the animals be?

I'm just happy to be on the food chain at all...
Post reply on HN