LLM policy?

> I can't imagine that any policy against LLM code would allow this sort of thing, but I also imagine that if I don't say "this was made by a coding agent", that no one would ever know. So, should I just stop contributing, or start lying?

If a project has a stated policy that code written with an LLM-based aid is not accepted, then it shouldn't be submitted, same as with anything else that might be prohibited. If you attempt to circumvent this by hiding it and it is revealed that you knowingly did so in violation of the policy, then it would be unsurprising for you to receive a harsh reply and/or ban, as well as a revert if the PR was committed. This would be the same as any other prohibition, such as submitting code copied from another project with an incompatible license.

You could argue that such a blanket ban is unwarranted, and you might be right. But the project maintainers have a right to set the submission rules for their project, even if it rules out high-quality LLM assisted submissions. The right way to deal with this is to ask the project maintainers if they would be willing the adjust the policy, not to try to slip such code into the project anyway.

Everything is collapsing toward a low-trust default. At the end of this trajectory, we rediscover that the analog world becomes valuable precisely because it can't be infinitely replicated.

Authenticity becomes the foundational currency.

But everyone must master AI tools to stay relevant. The brilliant engineer who refuses AI-generated PR by principle will get replaced. Every 18-24 months, as capabilities double, required skills shift. Specialization diminishes. Learning velocity becomes the only durable advantage. These people cannot learn new tricks.

Those who cannot question their assumptions cannot self-correct and will be replaced. The future belongs to the humble, the fluid, and the resilient. 60% of HN users is going toward a very tough time, and I am being very charitable with this assumption.

I completely agree, but it seems that our industry has decided to turn a blind eye to it. They might even get away with it -- the recent rulings around fair use with regard to Facebook and Anthropic's unrepentant copyright violations[1] was particularly galling to me.

Almost all of the projects I work on require you to sign the Developer Certificate of Origin[2] (which attempts to protect projects from people submitting code that they know cannot be licensed under the project's license), and in my view LLM code you submit does not fulfill the requirements of the DCO. Unfortunately, it seems nobody actually cares about this either.

[1]: https://www.debevoise.com/insights/publications/2025/06/anth... [2]: https://developercertificate.org/

>>> the entire issue description contains so much unneeded (and probably incorrect) information that it'd be better if they just provided their LLM prompt as an issue instead

When it's put this way, it seems a lot like the problem of people walking into doctors' offices with certainty that they know their own diagnosis after reading stuff on Reddit and WebMD.

What this post actually amounts to, indirectly, is a plea to trust human expertise in a particular domain instead of assuming that a layperson armed with random web pickings has the same chance as an expert at accurately diagnosing the problem. This wastes the expert's time and just increases mistrust.

The exceptions where Reddit solves something that a doctor failed to solve are what infuse the idea of lay online folk wisdom with merit, for people desperately looking for answers and cures. Makes it impossible to impose a blanket rule that we should trust experts, who are fallible as well.

The problem is societal. It's that if you erode trust in learned expertise long enough, you end up with a chaos of misinformation that makes it impossible to find a real answer.

A friend of mine who died of lung cancer recently, in his last days became convinced that he'd gotten it because of the covid vaccine (despite being a lifelong smoker, whose father had died of it at 41). And in every individual case you say, well, I don't want to disabuse someone of the fantasy they've landed on.

This is a devastatingly bad way to raise a generation, though. Short-circuiting one's own logic and handing it over to non-deterministic machines, or randos online... how do we expect this to end?

What good does having integration tests and linters do when triaging issues? When trying to figure out if a bug report is hallucinated or not?