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

Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

gitlab.redox-os.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 504 posts

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#351

Post by dnautics »

notpachet wrote: post #279
GorbachevyChase wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you’re being serious. Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written. Maybe you haven’t used a decent harness or a model released in the last year? It’s usually verbose, whereas I would try the simplest thing that could possibly work. However, it can knock out but would have taken me multiple weekends in a few minutes. The value proposition isn’t even close. It’…

> Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written Is that really true? Like, if you took the time to plan it carefully, dot every i, cross every t? The way I think of LLM's is as "median targeters" -- they reliably produce output at the centre of the bell curve from their training set. So if you're working in a language that you're unfamiliar with -- let's say I wanted to make…

no. I'm a pretty skilled programmer and I definitely have to intervene and fix an architectural problem here and there, or gently chastise the LLM for doing something dumb. But there are also many cases where the LLM has seen something that i completely missed or just hammered away at a problem enough to get a solution that is correct that I would have just given up on earlier.

The clanker can produce better programs than me because it will just try shit that I would never have tried, and it can fail more times than I can in a given period of time. It has specific advantages over me.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#352

Post by hrmtst93837 »

BlackFly wrote: post #15
khalic wrote: post #3

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evidence?

It is enforceable, I think you mean to say that it cannot be prevented since people can attempt to hide their usage? Most rules and laws are like that, you proscribe some behavior but that doesn't prevent people from doing it. Therefore you typically need to also define punishments: > This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge reques…

[flagged]

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#353

Post by mech422 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #323
fireflash38 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having reviewed a lot of Ai-written python code, I think it's absolute nonsense. It never picks a style, it'll alternate between exceptions and then return codes. It'll massively overcomplicate things. It'll reference things that straight up don't exist. But boy is it brilliant at a fuzzy find and replace.

if it wasn't so maddening it would be funny when you literally have to tell it to slow down, focus and think. My tinfoil hat suggests this is intentional to make me treat it like a real, live junior dev!

"you literally have to tell it to slow down, focus and think" - This soo much! When I get an unexpected result from claude, I ask it why - what caused it to do such-and-such. After one back and forth session like this putting up tons of guardrails on a prompt, claude literally said "you shouldn't have to teach me to think every session" !!

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#354

Post by munk-a »

A long list of contribution PRs are seen as a resume currency in the modern world. A way to game that system is to autogenerate a whole bunch of PRs and hope some of them are accepted to buff your resume. Our issue is that we've been impressed with volume of PRs and not the quality of PRs. The correction is that we should start caring about the volume of rejected PRs and quality of those accepted PRs (like reviewing merge discussions since they're a close corollary to what can be expected during an internal PR). As long as the volume of PRs is seen as a positive indicator people will try and maximize that number.

This is made more complex that the most senior members of organizations tend to be irrationally AI positive - so it's difficult for the hiring layer to push back on a candidate for over reliance on tools even if they fail to demonstrate core skills that those tools can't supplement. The discussion has become too political[1] in most organizations and that's going to be difficult to overcome.

1. In the classic intra-organizational meaning of politics - not the modern national meaning.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#355

Post by logicprog »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #245
logicprog wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say let people hold this stance. We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features or refinements we wanted, and use that fork for ourselves, but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. With AI, it's very easy to form a good architectural understanding of a large code base and figure out how to modify it in…

> We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project And this is why eventually you are likely to run the artisanal coders who tend to do most of the true innovation out of the room. Because by and large, agentic coders don't contribute, they make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them and the code quality is questionable at best. Eventually, I'm sure LLM code quali…

I mean, I do open PRs for most of my changes upstream if they allow AI, once I've been using the feature for a few weeks and have fixed the bugs and gone over the code a few times to make sure it's good quality. Also, I'm going to be using the damn thing, I don't want it to be constantly broken either, and I don't want the code to get hacky and thus incompatible with upstream or cause the LLMs to drift, so I usually spend a good amount of time making sure the code is high quality — integrates with the existing architecture and model of the world in the code, follows best practices, covers edge cases, has tests, is easy to read so that I can review it easily.

But if a project bans AI then yeah, they'll be run out of town because I won't bother trying to contribute.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#356

Post by logicprog »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #325
logicprog wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say let people hold this stance. We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features or refinements we wanted, and use that fork for ourselves, but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. With AI, it's very easy to form a good architectural understanding of a large code base and figure out how to modify it in…

>> but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. this feels like the place where your approach breaks down. I have had very poor results trying to build a foundation that CAN be polished, or where features don't quickly feel like a jenga tower. I'm wondering if the success we've seen is because AI is building on top of, or we're early days in "fou…

I've been able to make very clear, modular, well put together architectural foundations for my greenfield projects with AI. We don't have studies, of course, so it is only your anecdote versus mine.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#357

Post by logicprog »

sanderjd wrote: post #273
short_sells_poo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project And this is why eventually you are likely to run the artisanal coders who tend to do most of the true innovation out of the room. Because by and large, agentic coders don't contribute, they make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them and the code quality is questionable at best. Eventually, I'm sure LLM code quali…

Maybe! Or maybe there is really a competitive advantage to "artisanal" coding. Personally, I would not currently expect a fork of RedoxOS that is AI-implemented to become more popular than RedoxOS itself.

Indeed, maybe there is. I'm interested to see how it plays out.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#358

Post by logicprog »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #293
geoffmunn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them" Isn't that literally how open-source works, and why there's so many Linux distros? Code quality is a subjective term as well, I feel like everyone dunking on AI coding is a defensive reaction - over time this will become an entirely acceptable concept.

For a human to be able to do any customization, they have to dive into the code and work with it, understand it, gain intuition for it. Engage with the maintainers and community. In the process, there's a good chance that they'll be encouraged to contribute improvements upstream even if they have their own fork. Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their…

> Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their LLMs do some modifications that are completely opaque to the vibe coder.

I spend time using my agent to better understand existing codebases and their best practices than I'd ever have the time/energy to do before, giving me a broader and more holistic view on whatever I'm changing, before I make a change.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#359

Post by mcherm »

andrewchambers wrote: post #39
ptnpzwqd wrote: post #6

I think this is a reasonable decision (although maybe increasingly insufficient). It doesn't really matter what your stance on AI is, the problem is the increased review burden on OSS maintainers. In the past, the code itself was a sort of proof of effort - you would need to invest some time and effort on your PRs, otherwise they would be easily dismissed at a glance. That is no longer the case, as LLMs can quickly g…

Isn't the obvious solution to not accept drive by changes?

I'm all in favor of not accepting "drive-by changes". But every contributor to the project had to make their first contribution at some point in time. What's the process for inviting in new contributors?

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#360

Post by FridgeSeal »

logicprog wrote: post #182
sillysaurusx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose almost all work in the future is done via LLMs, just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses. Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?

I say let people hold this stance. We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features or refinements we wanted, and use that fork for ourselves, but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. With AI, it's very easy to form a good architectural understanding of a large code base and figure out how to modify it in…

> We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features

Bold of you to assume that people won’t move (and their code along with it) to spaces where parasitic behaviour like this doesn’t occur, locking you out.

In addition to just being a straight-up rude, disrespectful and parasite position to take, you’re effectively poisoning your own well.

Post reply on HN