Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy • Hacker News Board

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#61

Post by pseudalopex » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 3:25 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #31

duskdozer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can understand that some behavior is toxic and should be banned, then you should understand the people behind "cancel culture." Alternatively, if you see "cancelling" "cancel culture" as not "cancel culture", then you can understand the paradox of tolerance, and why an idealistic fully tolerant approach is not possible either way.

Banning someone is not the same as canceling them though. Banishment is just enforcement of boundaries. It gets rid of a problematic person in a specific space where their behavior is not tolerated. It's about the community, not the banished. Once the troublemaker is gone, that's the end of it. Everyone goes back to their normal activities. Cancel culture consists of people going out of their way to get a person bann…

Many people who complained of cancel culture called banishment or weaker action from 1 community cancel culture. Many more when 2 communities disciplined the same person independently. Or 1 community disciplined someone for something they did or said in another public space.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#62

Post by pseudalopex » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

orphea wrote: post #37

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you. I too hate disclosing LLM usage. I hate giving free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. There's also the fact people will probably look down on me for it and assume I'm incompetent because I used an LLM, and I've actually ended up sitting on reviewed and tested patches to open source projects because of this. However, we should be polite and respect their house rules. They are bein…

> I hate giving free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. Are you required to tell you used Anthropic™ (or whichever your AI provider of the month is) to generate this code, and not only that *an LLM* was involved?

Strengths and weaknesses of different models are helpful to know. And the model could be important later for legal reasons.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#63

Post by xboxnolifes » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

weli wrote: post #32

I really dislike every kind of rule that says something along the lines "if it's LLM generated you must self-disclose otherwise it is against the rules". Because this quickly leads to witch hunting and easy persecution of IC's under the pretense "it looks generated by an LLM" or they just investigate you and put you on cooldown from being able to contribute while they check for signs of "LLM-generated code". It's no…

Thats why they also added the no harassing about LLM rule. Im not sure how the moderators will actually discern AI use, but I imagine if the code is high quality they dont actually care if its LLM, they just want to stop the obvious spam of drive-by PRs from first time contributors.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#64

Post by minimaxir » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

ChrisRR wrote: post #52

matheusmoreira wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you. I too hate disclosing LLM usage. I hate giving free advertising to trillion dollar corporations. There's also the fact people will probably look down on me for it and assume I'm incompetent because I used an LLM, and I've actually ended up sitting on reviewed and tested patches to open source projects because of this. However, we should be polite and respect their house rules. They are bein…

> There's also the fact people will probably look down on me for it and assume I'm incompetent because I used an LLM I've seen so many arguments (mainly from non-developers) claiming that anyone who uses an llm to generate code doesn't know how to program. They can't understand the difference between people using an LLM to blindly churn out code, and people developing with an LLM to generate the boring bits

The drama around LLM use in game decompiling and other related hacking is very funny. I've seen "well maybe you should learn C++ instead of being lazy and vibecoding" a nonneligible number of times.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#65

Post by bendmorris » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 5:15 PM UTC

weli wrote: post #57

jynelson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is not what the policy says. it says "authors must disclose", "reviewers don't need to play detective", and "if a reviewer is not sure whether a post is LLM-created they should handle it privately, consulting mods". and the recourse is "go to this zulip channel", because closing a PR isn't the same as geting banned.

For the morale of the person who created the PR, closing every PR you make is pretty similar to just being banned

The "contributor poker" made by someone on the Zig core team is a good one. You're thinking from the perspective like yourself and how they might be affected negatively by this policy. The org is thinking about what's happening at scale and what policy is going to improve outcomes overall for them.

Are there some potential contributors who might be discouraged because of this policy? Probably. Will maintainers have less time wasted by obvious low effort changes and engagement? Also probably. A user of AI is, in the experience of many maintainers, way more likely to be lazy than engaged.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#66

Post by cbarnes99 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

thunky wrote: post #58

andsoitis wrote: post #2

In a nutshell: It's fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.

This implies that "create" is the hard part that we should not offload to machines. But IME all of the other things are the hard part. So basically it's fine to get the LLM to think for you and give you the answers as long as you understand Rust syntax well enough to type it all out yourself? This also seems like it will produce worse code, because it's preventing the LLM from doing the easy/boring part that it's goo…

They explicitly say that "create" is not the hard or valuable part. I suggest you actually read their policy instead of just the headline and then reacting to comments.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#67

Post by cbarnes99 » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 6:09 PM UTC

lukasco wrote: post #60

I think LLM policies which ban usage are ultimately self-defeating. They neatly switch concerns about quality of contributions to concerns about "AI slop". These two things are not the same. But the biggest problem is that they ignore the (unevenly distributed) future. The future: SWEs will no longer write code by hand. The era of hand coding is over. We only saw that for sure in the last 6 - 9 months. But it's over.…

You clearly didn't read the actual policy if you think they're banning llms.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#68

Post by incrudible » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #27

incrudible wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No codebase worth being deeply invested in is deeply understood by anyone, including the original authors. The eternal maintenance argument is tiresome. If there is a problem in need of fixing, you figure it out, you do not depend on some author being available, and LLMs are exceptionally helpful in this regard as well. Then, if the LLM has trouble figuring out, so will another human. It is a code smell.

There are all kinds of projects out there that have had significant impact on the world, which were written and maintained over the course of years by a single, highly capable developer. The way people talk about code nowadays, just because they have more powerful authoring tools, is frankly disgraceful. Imagine if modern construction techniques had become a reason to stop caring about the natural beauty of wood grai…

People are reading this as a slight against single authors, but it is a slight against the belief that anyone deeply understands complex code they wrote even a week ago. It is just a bullshit belief. Yes, you build an intuition about it, but you need to constantly refresh your understanding. That is just how the brain works.

Now, if you have program that is highly complex, written by a single author who is not you, hinging on the ongoing goodwill and capability of that single author, that is a liability you do not want to have, operationally. Again, that is just how it is.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#69

Post by NobodyNada » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:13 PM UTC

seanhunter wrote: post #51

incrudible wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No codebase worth being deeply invested in is deeply understood by anyone, including the original authors. The eternal maintenance argument is tiresome. If there is a problem in need of fixing, you figure it out, you do not depend on some author being available, and LLMs are exceptionally helpful in this regard as well. Then, if the LLM has trouble figuring out, so will another human. It is a code smell.

Strongly disagree. The obvious counterexample is in the foss world is ffmpeg, which I would submit is deeply understood by Fabrice Bellard. As a sibling points out, there are also various worthwhile single author projects. Outside the world of foss there are for example multiple games that are highly respected that were all entirely or largely developed by a single developer. Rimworld, Songs of Syx, Dwarf Fortress, O…

> The obvious counterexample is in the foss world is ffmpeg, which I would submit is deeply understood by Fabrice Bellard

Bellard hasn't worked on FFMpeg since 2003.

Re: Rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

#70

Post by matheusmoreira » Wed, Aug 05, 2026, 8:48 PM UTC

minimaxir wrote: post #64

ChrisRR wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's also the fact people will probably look down on me for it and assume I'm incompetent because I used an LLM I've seen so many arguments (mainly from non-developers) claiming that anyone who uses an llm to generate code doesn't know how to program. They can't understand the difference between people using an LLM to blindly churn out code, and people developing with an LLM to generate the boring bits

The drama around LLM use in game decompiling and other related hacking is very funny. I've seen "well maybe you should learn C++ instead of being lazy and vibecoding" a nonneligible number of times.

I have a decompilation project for Mega Man Battle Network 2... Claude decompiles it, and then we go over the code together line by line until I understand it, then I commit the commented assembly code and my hand written documentation to the repository.

Yet another thing I won't be able to publish I guess. Sigh.