Open source maintainers have enough trouble without trying to ban all AI generated code just to comply with a distributor.
AI code is inevitable. Even if you outright ban it, people will try to sneak it in. Lets say the change is literally just changing the order of calls to fix a bug - but the person who found and fixed the bug used AI to do so. Do you ban that? If it’s not disclosed, how would you know? After all the commit is literally just a line order swap. What if the committer actually hand wrote that fix but used AI for the PR body because they don’t speak English well and don’t want to appear dumb?
The best practice is to allow AI-generated code as long as the person providing the commit can properly reason about its function - meaning they understand what the code does and have done their due diligence. Good quality AI generated code isn’t the issue, it’s the skiddies who think prompting Claude with the most basic queries and blindly accepting the output until the one thing they wanted to achieve works, results in usable code. It results in unmaintainable slop. You need an actual engineer with experience to review it, but maintainers don’t have that capacity, so banning slop and requiring contributors to understand what they’re trying to get merged is the best way forward.
The problem is never the tool. It’s the idiot using it.
Give an idiot a table saw and you will have a finger on the floor by end of shift. Give it to a master carpenter and you might still have a finger on the floor by end of shift but you will also have a well cut piece of wood either way.
Llms can cause harm, but it’s only idiots who only cause harm with them
There are serious legal concerns about what integration of AI code could mean for open source licenses as it’s already been decided that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted.
Open source maintainers have enough trouble without trying to ban all AI generated code just to comply with a distributor.
AI code is inevitable. Even if you outright ban it, people will try to sneak it in. Lets say the change is literally just changing the order of calls to fix a bug - but the person who found and fixed the bug used AI to do so. Do you ban that? If it’s not disclosed, how would you know? After all the commit is literally just a line order swap. What if the committer actually hand wrote that fix but used AI for the PR body because they don’t speak English well and don’t want to appear dumb?
The best practice is to allow AI-generated code as long as the person providing the commit can properly reason about its function - meaning they understand what the code does and have done their due diligence. Good quality AI generated code isn’t the issue, it’s the skiddies who think prompting Claude with the most basic queries and blindly accepting the output until the one thing they wanted to achieve works, results in usable code. It results in unmaintainable slop. You need an actual engineer with experience to review it, but maintainers don’t have that capacity, so banning slop and requiring contributors to understand what they’re trying to get merged is the best way forward.
The problem is never the tool. It’s the idiot using it.
Give an idiot a table saw and you will have a finger on the floor by end of shift. Give it to a master carpenter and you might still have a finger on the floor by end of shift but you will also have a well cut piece of wood either way.
Llms can cause harm, but it’s only idiots who only cause harm with them
There are serious legal concerns about what integration of AI code could mean for open source licenses as it’s already been decided that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted.
Well good news then. Fuck copyright as it currently is. It needs a god damn massive overhaul.
This might actually get some work put towards defucking it.
Yeah, the powerful open source software political lobby will certainly ensure positive change is made.
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