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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

#301

Post by MoreQARespect »

colechristensen wrote: post #113
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.

People keep asking me if AI is going to take my job and recent experience shows that it very much is not. AI is great for being mostly correct and then giving someone without enough context a mostly correct way to shoot themselves in the foot. AI further encourages the problem in DevOps/Systems Engineering/SRE where someone comes to you and says "hey can you do this for me" having come up with the solution instead of…

The question about whether it takes jobs away is more whether one programmer with taste can multiply their productivity between ~3-15x and take the same salary while demand for coding remains constant. It's less about whether the tool can directly replace 100% of the functions of a good programmer.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#302

Post by zelphirkalt »

tobyhinloopen wrote: post #194
Groxx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By far the largest review-effort PRs of my career have been in the past year, due to mid-sized LLM-built features. Multiple rounds of other signoffs saying "lgtm" with only minor style comments only for me to finally read it and see that no, it is not even remotely acceptable and we have several uses built by the same team that would fail immediately if it was merged, to say nothing of the thousands of other users th…

I think a future with LLM coding requires much more tests, both testing happy and bad flows.

I think the issue is with people taking mental shortcuts and thus no longer properly thinking about design decisions and the bigger picture in terms of concepts of the software.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#303

Post by devmor »

brabel wrote: post #198
devmor wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of your claims here are based in factual assertion. These are unproven, wishful fantasies that may or may not be eventually true. No one should be evaluating or writing policy based on fantasy.

Are you familiar with the futures market? It’s all about what you call fantasy ! Similarly, if you are determining the strategy of your organization, all you have to help you is “fantasy”. By the time evidence exists in sufficient quantity your lunch has already been eaten long ago. A good CEO is one that can see where the market is going before anyone else. You may be right that AI is just a fad , but given how much…

Both the futures market and resource planning are based on evidential standards (usually). When you make those decisions without any reasoning, you are gambling, and might as well go to the casino.

But notably, FOSS development is neither a corporation or stock trading. It is focused on longevity and maintainability.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#304

Post by ethbr1 »

olalonde wrote: post #299
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?

Anyone whose code is in a used model's training set.*

This is about future existential tail risk, not current risk.

* Depending on future court decisions in different jurisdictions

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#305

Post by zelphirkalt »

danielbln wrote: post #235
stevage wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically I think open source has traditionally HEAVILY relied on hidden competency markers to judge the quality of incoming contributions. Yep, and it's not just code. Student essays, funding applications, internal reports, fiction, art...everything that AI touches has this problem that AI outputs look superficially similar to the work of experts.

Trajectory so far has been that AI outputs are converging increasingly not just in superficial similarity but also quality of expert output. We are obviously not there yet, and some might say we never will. But if we do, there is a whole new conversation to be had.

I suspect that there are at least 1 or 2 more significant discoveries in terms of architecture and general way of models working, before these things become actual experts. Maybe they will never get there and we will discover how to better incorporate facts and reasoning, rather than just ingesting billions of training data points.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#306

Post by fireflash38 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #243
amake wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those businesses are probably everywhere. They just aren't open about admitting "Where's the evidence?" "Probably everywhere." OK, good luck, have fun

Yup. Or, "Just look around!".

Schroedingers AI. It's everywhere, but you can't point to it cause it's apparently indistinguishable from humans, except for the shitty AI which is just shitty AI.

It's a thought terminating cliche.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#307

Post by latexr »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #153
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.

> the authors vibe out while playing guitar and clipping their toenails I don't think anyone is claiming that. If you submit changes to a FOSS project and an LLM assisted you in writing them how would anyone know? Assuming at least that you are an otherwise competent developer and that you carefully review all code before you commit it. The (admittedly still controversial) claim being made is that developers with LLM…

> Assuming at least that you are an otherwise competent developer and that you carefully review all code before you commit it.

That is a big assumption. If everyone were doing that, this wouldn’t be a major issue. But as the curl developer has noted, people are using LLMs without thinking and wasting everyone’s time and resources.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielstenberg_hackerone-curl...

I can attest to that. Just the other day I got a bug report, clearly written with the assistance of an LLM, for software which has been stable and used in several places for years. This person, when faced with an error on their first try, instead of pondering “what am I doing wrong” instead opened a bug report with a “fix”. Of course, they were using the software wrong. They did not follow the very short and simple instructions and essentially invented steps (probably suggested by an LLM) that caused the problem.

Waste of time for everyone involved, and one more notch on the road to causing burnout. Some of the worst kind of users are those who think “bug” means “anything which doesn’t immediately behave the way I thought it would”. LLMs empower them, to the detriment of everyone else.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#308

Post by guappa »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #131
duskwuff wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also worry that a language model is much more likely to introduce subtle logical errors, potentially ones which violate the hypervisor's security boundaries - and a user relying heavily on that model to write code for them will be much less prepared to detect those errors.

Generally speaking AI will make it easier to write more secure code. Tooling and automation help a lot with security and AI makes it easier to write good tooling. I would wager good money that in a few years the most security-focused companies will be relying heavily on AI somewhere in their software supply chain. So I don't think this policy is about security posture. No doubt human experts are reviewing the securit…

> Generally speaking AI will make it easier to write more secure code

In my personal experience, not at all.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#309

Post by latexr »

rvnx wrote: post #287
amake wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All around you, just that it doesn’t make sense for developers to reveal that OK, but I asked for evidence and people just keep not providing any. "God is all around you; he just works in mysterious ways" OK, good luck with that.

Billions of people believe in god(s). In fact, 75 to 85% of the world population, btw.

And not that long ago, the majority of the population believed the Earth is flat, and that cigarettes are good for your health. Radioactive toys were being sold to children.

Wide belief does not equal truth.

Re: Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

#310

Post by guappa »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #52
SchemaLoad wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could honestly break open source, with how quickly you can generate bullshit, and how long it takes to review and reject it. I can imagine more projects going the way of Android where you can download the source, but realistically you can't contribute as a random outsider.

I have an online acquaintance that maintains a very small and not widely used open-source project and the amount of (what we assume to be) automated AI submissions* they have to wade through is kinda wild given the very small number of contributors and users the thing has. It's gotta be clogging up these big projects like a DDoS attack. *"Automated" as in bots and "AI submissions" as in ai-generated code

I find that by being on codeberg instead of github i tune out a lot of the noise.
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