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

391–400 of 504 posts

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

#391

Post by ranger_danger »

pm215 wrote: post #65
hparadiz wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How funny would it be if the path to actually implement that thing is then cut off because of a PR that was submitted with the exact same patch. I'm honestly sitting here grinning at the absurdity demonstrated here. Some things can only be done a certain way. Especially when you're working with 3rd party libraries and APIs. The name of the function is the name of the function. There's no walking around it.

That's why I said "somebody else, without looking at it". Clean-room reimplementation, if you like. The functionality is not forever unimplementable, it is only not implementable by merging this AI-generated PR. It's similar to how I can't implement a feature by copying-and-pasting the obvious code from some commercially licensed project. But somebody else could write basically the same thing independently without kn…

The trick is getting people to believe you.

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

#392

Post by pmarreck »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #274
pmarreck wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You not realizing how ridiculous this is, is exactly why half of all devs are about to get left behind. Like, this should be enshrined as the quintessential “they simply, obstinately, perilously, refused to get it” moment. Shortly, no one is going to care about anyone’s bespoke manual keyboard entry of code if it takes 10 times as long to produce the same functionality with imperceptibly less error.

> Shortly, no one is going to care about anyone’s bespoke manual keyboard entry of code if it takes 10 times as long to produce the same functionality with imperceptibly less error. Well that day doesn't appear to be coming any time soon. Even after years of supposed improvements, LLMs make mistakes so frequently that you can't trust anything they put out, which completely negates any time savings from not writing th…

Sorry, but this is user error.

1) Most people still don't use TDD, which absolutely solves much of this.

2) Most poople end up leaning too heavily on the LLM, which, well, blows up in their face.

3) Most people don't follow best practices or designs, which the LLM absolutely does NOT know about NOR does it default to.

4) Most people ask it to do too much and then get disappointed when it screws up.

Perfect example:

> you can't trust anything they put out

Yeah, that screams "missing TDD that you vetted" to me. I have yet to see it not try to pass a test correctly that I've vetted (at least in the past 2 months) Learn how to be a good dev first.

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

#393

Post by DrewADesign »

junon wrote: post #143
swiftcoder wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it really is - drive-by changes have been a net burden on maintainers long before LLMs started writing code. Someone who wants to put in the work to become a repeat contributor to a project is a different story.

Hard disagree. Drive by's were the easiest to deal with, and the most welcome. Especially when the community tilted more to the side of non-amateurs and passionate people.

Low effort drive-bys were easy to spot because the amount of code was minimal, documentation was nonexistent, they didn’t use the idioms and existing code effectively, etc. Low-skill drive-bys were easy to spot because the structure was a mess, the docs explain language features while ignoring important structural information, and other newbie gaffes.

One latent effect of LLMs in general is multiplying the damage of low-effort contributions. They not only swell the ranks of unknowingly under-qualified contributors, but dramatically increase the effort of filtering them out. And though I see people argue against this assertion all the time, they make more verbose code. Regardless of whether it’s the fault of the software or the people using it, at the end of the day, the effect is more code in front of people that have to revise code, nonetheless. Additionally, by design, it makes these things plausible looking enough to require significantly more investigation.

Now, someone with little experience or little interest in the wellbeing of the code base can spit out 10 modules with hundreds of tests and thousands of words of documentation that all sorta look reasonable at first blush.

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

#394

Post by FridgeSeal »

MadameMinty wrote: post #125
Muromec wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds complicated in theory, but it's easier in practice. Potential long time contributor is somebody who was already asking annoying questions in the irc channel for a few months and helped with other stuff before shooting off th e PR. If the PR is the first time you hear from a person -- that's pretty drive-by ish.

Why would I ask annoying questions when I can identify, reproduce, pinpoint the bug, locate it in code, and fix it? Doing it alone should make it clear I don't need to ask to understand it. And why would I be interested in small talk? Doubt many people are when they patch up their work tools. It's a dispassionate kind of kindness. Not to mention LLMs can be annoying, too. Demand this, and you'll only be inviting bots…

“Why would I ever want to talk to other humans about things? Especially anyone who might have some kind of extra understanding on the project that I’m not currently privy to!”

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

#395

Post by cindyllm »

DrewADesign wrote: post #393
junon wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Drive by's were the easiest to deal with, and the most welcome. Especially when the community tilted more to the side of non-amateurs and passionate people.

Low effort drive-bys were easy to spot because the amount of code was minimal, documentation was nonexistent, they didn’t use the idioms and existing code effectively, etc. Low-skill drive-bys were easy to spot because the structure was a mess, the docs explain language features while ignoring important structural information, and other newbie gaffes. One latent effect of LLMs in general is multiplying the damage of…

[dead]

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

#396

Post by edelbitter »

flammafex wrote: post #197
eatonphil wrote: post #176

If you're curious to see what everyone else is doing, I did a survey of over 100 major source available projects and four of them banned AI assisted commits (NetBSD, GIMP, Zig, and qemu). On the other hand projects with AI assisted commits you can easily find include Linux, curl, io_uring, MariaDB, DuckDB, Elasticsearch, and so on. Of the 112 projects surveyed, 70 of them had AI assisted commits already. https://thec…

[flagged]

To complete your analogy: To this day there are humans who have never in their life exceeded 300km/h outside of an airplane. Mostly people in places that had become used to driving. Used to subpar travel times, safety, efficiency and cost. In hindsight, those that saw the horses swapped for electric ones with the carriages mostly unchanged should have been more protective in their transport planning. Could have saved us from the 110 year detour that scarred almost all urban centers.

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

#397

Post by est31 »

pjc50 wrote: post #119
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #20

I think we will be getting into an interesting situation soon, where project maintainers use LLMs because they truly are useful in many cases, but will ban contributors for doing so, because they can't review how well did the user guide the LLM.

The GPL talks about "the preferred form for modification of the software", and I'm starting to think that anything which involves any kind of LLM agent should be including all the text that the user gave to it as well. Prompts, etc. Of course, even then it's not reproducible and requires proprietary software!

I still think the source code is the preferred form for modification because it is what you point the AI at when you want it to make a change.

Sure there might be md documents that you created that the AI used to implement the software, but maybe those documents themselves have been AI written from prompts (due to how context works in LLMs, it's better for larger projects to first make an md document about them, even if an LLM is used for it in the first place).

As for proprietary software, the chinese models are not far behind the cutting edge of the US models.

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

#398

Post by flammafex »

Copyrightest wrote: post #318
flammafex wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

NetBSD has a very reasonable stance: If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code. Code generated by a large language model or similar tec…

No, it is not reasonable to presume code generated by any large language model is "tainted code." What does that even mean? It sounds like a Weird Al parody of the song "Tainted Love."

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

#399

Post by foxes »

Terr_ wrote: post #361
h3lp wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of computer users are domain experts in something like chemistry or physics or material science. Computing to them is just a tool in their field, e.g. simulating molecular dynamics, or radiation transfer. They dot every i and cross every t _in_their_competency_domain_, but the underlying code may be a horrible FORTRAN mess. LLMs potentially can help them write modern code using modern libraries and tooling. My…

The difference is that compilers involve rules we can enumerate, adjust, etc. Consider calculators: Their consistency and adherence to requirements was necessary for adoption. Nobody would be using them if they gave unpredictable wrong answers, or where calculations involving 420 and 69 somehow keep yielding 5318008. (To be read upside-down, of course.)

But thats the point, an llm is a vastly different object to a calculator. Its a new type of tool for better or worse based on probabilities, distributions.

If you can internalise that fact and look at it like having a probable answer rather than an exact answer it makes sense.

Calculators cant have a stab at writing an entire c compiler. A lot of people cant either or takes a lot of iteration anyway, no one one shotted complicated code before llms either.

I feel discussion shouldnt be about how they work as the fundamental objection, rather the costs and impacts they have.

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

#400

Post by flammafex »

joelthelion wrote: post #211
flammafex wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How about picking software based on how well it works?

How about trusting the review process, and not attempting to regulate the tools used to produce code. We already accept code from IDE autocompletion, StackOverflow, templates, etc. The real control point is review, testing, and license verification.
Post reply on HN