> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place.

That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know how to use AI correctly.

The rumors we hear have to do with projects inundated with more pull requests that they can review, the pull requests are obviously low quality, and the contributors' motives are selfish. IE, the PRs are to get credit for their Github profile. In this case, the pull requests aren't opened with the same good faith that you're putting into your work.

In general, a good policy towards AI submission really has to primarily address the "good faith" issue; and then explain how much tolerance the project has for vibecoding.

Similar story, albeit not so extreme. I have similar ergonomic issues that crop up from time to time. My programming is not so impacted (spend more time thinking than typing, etc), but things like email, documentation, etc can be brutal (a lot more computer usage vs programming).

My simple solution: I use Whisper to transcribe my text, and feed the output to an LLM for cleanup (custom prompt). It's fantastic. Way better than stuff like Dragon. Now I get frustrated with transcribing using Google's default mechanism on Android - so inaccurate!

But the ability to take notes, dictate emails, etc using Whisper + LLM is invaluable. I likely would refuse to work for a company that won't let me put IP into an LLM.

Similarly, I take a lot of notes on paper, and would have to type them up. Tedious and painful. I switched to reading my notes aloud and use the above system to transcribe. Still painful. I recently realized Gemini will do a great job just reading my notes. So now I simply convert my notes to a photo and send to Gemini.

I categorize all my expenses. I have receipts from grocery stores where I highlight items into categories. You can imagine it's painful to enter that into a financial SW. I'm going to play with getting Gemini to look at the photo of the receipt and categorize and add up the categories for me.

All of these are cool applications on their own, but when you realize they're also improving your health ... clear win.

Fwiw, I try to make sure we have an accessibility focused talk every year (if possible) at the Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open right now if you'd be interested in submitting something on your story.

Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).

I'm in a very similar situation: I have RSI and smarter-autocomplete style AI is a godsend. Unlike you I haven't found more complex AI (agent mode) particularly useful though for what I do (hard realtime C++ and Rust). So I avoid that. Plus it takes away the fun part of coding for me. (The journey matters more than the destination.)

The accessibility angle is really important here. What we need is a way to stop people who make contributions they don't understand and/or can not vouch they are the author for (the license question is very murky still, and no what the US supreme court said doesn't matter here in EU). This is difficult though.

Accessibility is an angle that rarely comes up in these debates and it's a strong one

>other people are reasonable like you

No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them".

AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare on the internet, specifically the global internet, because with some of these actors you have zero recourse. AI moved this from moderately drowning in crap to being crushed under an ocean of it.

Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this.

For projects, it's also a licensing issue. You don't own the copyright on AI generated code, no one does, so it can't be licensed.

If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. It’s ok to use it, if that enables you to work.

> But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips.

This is the technique I've picked up and got the most from over the past few months. I don't give it hard, high-level problems and then review a giant set of changes to figure it out. I give it the technical solution I was already going to implement anyway, and then have it generate the code I otherwise would have written.

It cuts back dramatically on the review fatigue because I already know exactly what I'm expecting to see, so my reviews are primarily focused on the deviations from that.

>Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality

This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that?

It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!"

Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me

> I see reviewing and accepting a PR is a question of trust

I think that's backwards, at least as far as accepting a PR. Better that all code is reviewed as if it is probably a carefully thought out Trojan horse from a dedicated enemy until proven otherwise.

That's the key part in all this. Reviewing PR needs to be a rock solid process that can catch errors. Human or AI generated.

I think framing it as a trust question is exactly right

Important though we generally assume few bad actors.

But like the XZ attack, we kind of have to assume that advanced perissitant threats are a reality for FOSS too.

I can envisage a Sybil attack where several seemingly disaparate contributors are actually one actor building a backdoor.

Right now we have a disparity in that many contributors can use LLMs but the recieving projects aren't able to review them as effectively with LLMs.

LLM generated content often (perhaps by definition) seems acceptable to LLMs. This is the critical issue.

If we had means of effectively assessing PRs objectively that would make this moot.

I wonder if those is a whole new class of issue. Is judging a PR harder than making one? It seems so right now

> It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly.

It is. You haven't argued it at all, right here. You just asserted it as if it were self-evident, talked about your feelings, then demanded policy.

Your only job here was to convince people to align with you, and you didn't bother. It makes me suspect that you haven't really solidified the argument in your own mind.

The tacit understanding of all these is that the valued contributors can us AI as long as they can "defend the code" if you will, because AI used lightly and in that way would be indistinguishable from knuthkode.

The problem is having an unwritten rule is sometimes worse than a written one, even if it "works".

Let's burn that bridge when we get to it. I'm not even sure what 2027 will look like at this rate. There's no point concerning about 2035 when things are so tumultuous today.

They have a settings page where you can set the colours you like… Most people who don't like them just change them to something they like.

> If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules.

No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed.

This matters for open source projects that care about licensing. It should also matter for proprietary code bases, as anyone can copy and distribute "their" AI generated code for any purpose, including to compete with the "owner".

this is equivalent to claiming that automation has no negative side effects at all.

we do often choose automation when possible (especially in computer realms), but there are endless examples in programing and other fields of not-so-surprising-in-retrospect failures due to how automation affects human behavior.

so it's clearly not true. what we're debating is the amount of harm, not if there is any.

You worked with people before haven't you? Sometimes they make stuff up, or misremember stuff. Sometimes people who do this are brilliant and you end up learning a lot from them.

The only issue to beat in mind is that visual inspection is only about 85% accurate at its limit. I was responsible for incoming inspection at a medical device factory and visual inspection was the least reliable test for components that couldn’t be inspected for anything else. We always preferred to use machines (likes big CMM) where possible.

I also use LLM assistance, and I love it because it helps my ADHD brain get stuff done, but I definitely miss stuff that I wouldn’t miss by myself. It’s usually fairly simple mistakes to fix later but I still miss them initially.

I’ve been having luck with LLM reviewers though.

This, and I curate a tree of MD docs per topic to define the expected structure. It is supposed to output code that looks exactly like my code. If not, I manually edit it and perhaps update the docs.

This is how I've found myself to be productive with the tools, or since productivity is hard to measure, at least it's still a fun way to work. I do not need to type everything but I want a very exact outcome nonetheless.

It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer.

Both can look like the same exact type of AI-generated code. But one is a broken useless piece of shit and the other actually does what it claims to do.

The problem is just how hard it is to differentiate the two at a glance.

This isn't an issue of "nobody can use this" but an "everyone can use this", i.e. projects can use AI generated code just fine and they own the copyright to any modifications they do to it.

Think of it like random noise in an image editor: you do own the random pixels since they're generated by the computer, but you can still use them as part of making your art - you do not lose copyright to your art because you used a random noise filter.

this sounds reasonable, but in practice people will simply sign off on anything without having thoroughly reviewed it.

I agree with you that there's a huge distinction between code that a person understands as thoroughly as if they wrote it, and vibecoded stuff that no person actually understands. but actually doing something practical with that distinction is a difficult problem to solve.

> Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet.

AI also generates spam though, so this is a much bigger problem than merely "unreasonable" people alone.

> I thought if you used the exact input and seed with the temperature set to 0 you would get the same output.

I think they can also be differences on different hardware, and also usually temperature is set higher than zero because it produces more "useful/interesting" outputs

I agree. If the real concern is the flood of low-effort slop, unmaintainable patches, accidental code reuse, or licensing violations, then the process should target those directly. The useful work is improving review and triage so those problems get filtered out early. The genie is already out of the bottle with AI tooling, so broad “no AI” rules feel like a reaction to the tool and do not seem especially useful or enforceable.

> Quixotic, unworkable, pointless. It’s fundamentally impossible (at least without a level of surveillance that would obviously be unavceptable) to prove the “artisanal hand-crafted human code” label.

Difficulty of enforcing is a detail. Since the rule exists, it can be used when detection is done. And importantly it means that ignoring the rule means you’re intentionally defrauding the project.

I don't know, it's a pretty leap for me to consider AI being hard to distinguish from human contributions.

AI is predictive at a token level. I think the usefulness and power of this has been nothing short of astonishing; but this token prediction is fundamentally limiting. The difference between human _driven_ vs AI generated code is usually in design. Overly verbose and leaky abstractions, too many small abstractions that don't provide clear value, broad sweeping refactors when smaller more surgical changes would have met the immediate goals, etc. are the hallmarks of AI generated code in my experience. I don't think those will go away until there is another generational leap beyond just token prediction.

That said, I used human "driven" instead of human "written" somewhat intentionally. I think AI in even its current state will become a revolutionary productivity boosting developer aid (it already is to some degree). Not dissimilar to a other development tools like debuggers and linters, but with much broader usefulness and impact. If a human uses AI in creating a PR, is that something to worry about? If a contribution can pass review and related process checks; does it matter how much or how little AI was used in it's creation?

Personally, my answer is no. But there is a vast difference between a human using AI and an AI generated contribution being able to pass as human. I think there will be increasing degrees of the former, but the latter is improbable to impossible without another generational leap in AI research/technology (at least IMO).

---

As a side note, over usage of AI to generate code _is_ a problem I am currently wrangling with. Contributors who are over relying on vibecoding are creating material overhead in code review and maintenance in my current role. It's making maintenance, which was already a long tail cost generally, an acute pain.

> My question on AI generated contributions and content in general: on a long enough timeline, with ever improving advancements in AI, how can people reliably tell the difference between human and AI generated efforts?

Can you reliably tell that the contributor is truly the author of the patch and that they aren't working for a company that asserts copyright on that code? No, but it's probably still a good idea to have a policy that says "you can't do that", and you should be on the lookout for obvious violations.

It's the same story here. If you do nothing, you invite problems. If you do something, you won't stop every instance, but you're on stronger footing if it ever blows up.

Of course, the next question is whether AI-generated code that matches or surpasses human quality is even a problem. But right now, it's academic: most of the AI submissions received by open source projects are low quality. And if it improves, some projects might still have issues with it on legal (copyright) or ideological grounds, and that's their prerogative.

Of course you can tell. If someone suddenly submits a mountainous pile of code out of nowhere that claims to fix every problem, you can make a reasonable estimate that the author used AI. It's then equally reasonable to suggest said author might not have taken the requisite time and detail to understand the scope of the problem.

This is the basis of the argument - it doesn't matter if you use AI or not, but it does matter if you know what you're doing or not.

The system works because responsibility sits with the submitter

> Is judging a PR harder than making one?

Depends on the assumptions. If you assume good intent of the submitter and you spend time to explain what he should improve, why something is not good, etc, than it's a lot of effort. If you assume bad intent, you can just reject with something like "too large review from unproven user, please contribute something smaller first".

Yes, we might need to take things a bit slower, and build relations to the people you collaborate with in order to have some trust (this can also be attacked, but this was already possible).

> If they submitted bad code...

The core issue is that it takes a large amount of effort to even assess this, because LLM generated code looks good superficially.

It is said that static FP languages make it hard to implement something if you don't really understand what you are implementing. Dynamically typed languages makes it easier to implement something when you don't fully understand what you are implementing.

LLMs takes this to another level when it enables one to implement something with zero understanding of what they are implementing.

The real invariant is responsibility: if you submit a patch, you own it. You should understand it, be able to defend the design choices, and maintain it if needed

It should be the responsibility of the person submitting changes. The problem is AI apparently makes it easy for people to shirk that responsibility.

Debian has always been Debian and thus there are these purist opinions, but perhaps my take too would be something along the "one-strike-and-you-are-out" kind of a policy (i.e., you submit slop without being able to explain your submission in any way) already followed in some projects:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109952

Precisely. “AI” contributions should be seen as an extension of the individual. If anything, they could ask that the account belong to a person and not be a second bot only account. Basically, a person’s own reputation should be on the line.

The same way niche/luxury product and services compare to fast/cheap ones: they are made with focus and intent that goes against the statistical average, which also normally would take more time and effort to make.

McDonalds cooks ~great~ (edit: fair enough, decent) burgers when measured objectively, but people still go to more niche burger restaurants because they want something different and made with more care.

That's not to say that an human can't use AI with intent, but then AI becomes another tool and not an autonomous code generating agent.

Why accept PR's in this case, if the maintainers themselves can ask their favorite LLM to implement a feature/fix an issue?

> but in 3-10 years AI will get significantly better

Crystal ball or time machine?

What do you mean?

Isn't your prediction a good thing? People prefer humans currently as they are better but if AI is just as good, doesn't that just mean more good PRs?

Yeah, if RSI is an issue why would you want to be forced to type more?

I appreciate the feedback.

I like it because I have no expectation of perfection-- out of others, myself, and especially not AI. I expect "good enough" and work upwards from there, and with (most) things, I find AI to be better than good enough.

Only if the generated text has no inherited copyright from the source data.

Which it might. And needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis, under current copyright law.

Unless the code is explicitly signed by AI as auto-commit, you cannot really tell if it was reviewed by human. So it essentially becomes a task of detecting specific AI code smell, which is barely noticeable in code reviewed by an experienced engineer. Very subjective, probably does not make sense at all.

I mean, AI generates spam at the behest of unreasonable people currently, and we can just think of it as a powerful automated extension of other technologies. We could say it's a new problem in quantity but the same old problem in kind.

Now, with that said I don't think we're very far from automated agents causing problems all on their own.

> It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer.

This is one of those areas where you might have been right.. 4-6 months ago. But if you're paying attention, the floor has moved up substantially.

For the work I do, last year the models would occasionally produce code with bugs, linter errors, etc, now the frontier models produce mostly flawless code that I don't need to review. I'll still write tests, or prompt test scenarios for it but most of the testing is functional.

If the exponential curve continues I think everyone needs to prepare for a step function change. Debian may even cease to be relevant because AI will write something better in a couple of hours.

On judging vs. making, also someone has to take time away from development to do code review. If the code being reviewed is written by someone who is involved and interested then at least there's a benefit to training and consensus building in discussing the code and the project in the review phase. The time and energy of developers who are qualified to review is quite possibly the bottleneck on development speed too so wasting review time will slow down development.

For AI generated code if previous PRs aren't loaded into context then there's no lasting benefit from the time taken to review and it's blank slate each time. I think ultimately it can be solved with workflow changes (i.e. AI written code should be attributed to the AI in VCS, the full trace and manual edits should be visible for review, all human input prompts to the AI should be browsable during review without having scroll 10k lines of AI reasoning.)

The people likely to submit low-effort contributions are also the people most likely to ignore policies restricting AI usage.

The people following the policies are the most likely to use AI responsibly and not submit low-effort contributions.

I’m more interested in how we might allow people to build trust so that reviewers can positively spend time on their contributions, whilst avoiding wasting reviewers time on drive-by contributors. This seems like a hard problem.

Ownership and responsibility are useless when a YouTuber tells it to their million followers that GitHub contributions are valued by companies and this is how you can create a pull request with AI in three minutes, and you get hundred low value noise PRs opened by university students from the other side of the globe. It’s Hacktoberfest on steroids.

Trusted contributors using LLMs do not cause this problem though. It is the larger volume of low-effort contributions causing this problem, and those contributors are the most likely to ignore the policies.

Therefore, policies restricting AI-use on the basis of avoiding low-quality contributions are probably hurting more than they’re helping.

> people to shirk that responsibility.

Actually not shrink, but just transfer it to reviewers.

Yeah this is what I was getting at with “reputation” - I think the world where anyone can submit a patch and get human eyes on it is a thing of the past.

IIRC Mitchell Hashimoto recently proposed some system of attestations for OSS contributors. It’s non-obvious how you’d scale this.

Great for large patches, great way to kill very small but important patches.

Because it might require time consuming testing, iterations, documentation etc.

If everything the maintainer wants can (hypothetically) be one-shotted, then there is no need to accept PR's at all. Just allow forks in case of open source.

> Precisely. “AI” contributions should be seen as an extension of the individual.

That's an OK view to hold, but I'll point out two things. First, it's not how the tech is usually wielded to interact with open-source software. Second, your worldview is at odds with the owners of this technology: the main reason why so much money is being poured into AI coding is that it's seen by investors as a replacement for the individual.

Obviously - it takes effort to hone the idea/spec, and it takes time to validate the result. Code being free doesn’t make a kernel patch free, though it would make it cheaper.

A number of debian developers do that as part of their full time jobs for canonical, microsoft, and other companies.

This is like trying to stop spam by banning emails that send you spam.

They can spin up LLM-backed contributors faster than you can ban them.

Interesting argument for AI ethics in general. It takes the form of "guns don't kill people - people kill people".

Reputation isn't very relevant here. Yes, for established well known FOSS developers, their reputation will tank if they put out sloppy PRs and people will just ignore them.

But the projects aren't drowning under PRs from reputable people. They're drowning in drive-by PRs from people with no reputation to speak of. Even if you outright ban their account, they'll just spin up a new one and try again.

Blocking AI submissions serves as a heuristic to reduce this flood of PRs, because the alternative is to ban submissions from people without reputation, and that'd be very harmful to open source.

And AI cannot be the solution here, because open source projects have no funds. Asking maintainers to fork over $200/month for "AI code reviews" just kills the project.

> McDonalds cooks great burgers when measured objectively

Wait, what? In what world are McDonalds burgers "great"? They're cheap. Maybe even a good value. But that's not the same as great.

Crystal ball, maybe, but 3 years ago, the AI generated classes with empty methods containing "// implement logic here" and now, AI is generating whole stack applications that run from the first try.

Past performance does not guarantee future results, of course. But acting like AI is now magically going to stagnate is also a really bold bet.

> but if AI is just as good, doesn't that just mean more good PRs?

If you believe the outputs of LLMs are derivative products of the materials the LLMs were trained on (which is a position I lean towards myself, but I also understand the viewpoint of those who disagree), then no, that's not a good thing, because it would be a license violation to accept those derived products without following the original material's license terms, such as attribution and copyleft terms. You are now party to violating the original materials' copyright by accepting AI generated code. That's ethically dubious, even if those original authors may have a hard time bringing a court case against you.

This very much depends on the domain you work in. Small projects in well tread domains are incredible for AI. SaaS projects can essentially be one-shot. But large projects, projects with specific standards or idioms, projects with particular versions of languages, performance concerns, hardware concerns, all things the Debian project has to deal with, aren't 'solved' in the same way.

I wonder if the right call wouldn't be impose a LOC limit on contributions (sensibly chosen for the combination of language/framework/toolset).

That's what "shirk" means. It wasn't a typo.

I'm not sure I agree. If you have a blanket "you must disclose how you use AI" policy it's socially very easy to say "can you disclose how you used AI", and then if they say Claude code wrote it, you can just ignore it, guilt-free.

Without that policy it feels rude to ask, and rude to ignore in case they didn't use AI.

If the situation becomes that worse, I agree with you; otherwise, I don't see that as a problem.

Unfortunately ChatGPT turned “text continuation” into “separate entity you can talk to”

I don't think any side on the issue of gun ownership has ever claimed that statement is false, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Banning AI would hardly stop that, the LLM contributors would simply claim they're not AI.

Hence why banning AI contributions is meaningless, you literally only punish 'good' actors.

Probably more of the measure of the Deluxe burger, which if fresh doesn't seem to have any faults for a burger. Now the little McFrankinstines leave much to be desired.

> because the alternative is to ban submissions from people without reputation, and that'd be very harmful to open source.

Hmmm, no? That's actually very common in open source. Maybe "banning" isn't the right word, but lots of projects don't accept random drive-by submissions and never have. Debian is a perfect example, you are very unlikely to get a nontrivial patch or package into Debian unless you have some kind of interaction or rapport with a package maintainer, or commit to the process of building trust to become a maintainer yourself.

I have seen high profile GitHub projects that summarily close PRs if you didn't raise the bug/feature as an issue or join their discord first.

An argument that I have some sympathy for, while still being moderately+ in favor of gun control (here in the USA where I'm a citizen).

It seems that gun control—though imperfect—in regions that have implemented it has had a good bit of success and the legitimate/non-harmful capabilities lost seem worth it to me in trade for the gains. (Reasonable people can disagree here!)

Whereas it seems to me that if we accept the proposition that the vast majority of code in the future is going to be written by AI (and I do), these valuable projects that are taking hard-line stances against it are going to find themselves either having to retreat from that position or facing insurmountable difficulties in staying relevant while holding to their stance.

I don't see why we can't have AI powered reviews as a verification of truth and trust score modifier. Let me explain.

1. You layout policy stating that all code, especially AI code has to be written to a high quality level and have been reviewed for issues prior to submission.

2. Given that even the fastest AI models do a great job of code reviews, you setup an agent using Codex-Spark or Sonnnet, etc to scan submissions for a few different dimensions (maintainability, security, etc).

3. If a submission comes through that fails review, that's a strong indication that the submitter hasn't put even the lowest effort into reviewing their own code. Especially since most AI models will flag similar issues. Knock their trust score down and supply feedback.

3a. If the submitter never acts on the feedback - close the submission and knock the trust score down even more.

3b. If the submitter acts on the feedback - boost trust score slightly. We now have a self-reinforcing loop that pushes thoughtful submitters to screen their own code. (Or ai models to iterate and improve their own code)

4. Submission passes and trust score of submitter meets some minimal threshold. Queued for human review pending prioritization.

I haven't put much thought into this but it seems like you could design a system such that "clout chasing" or "bot submissions" would be forced to either deliver something useful or give up _and_ lose enough trust score that you can safely shadowban them.

Well, the problem you just outlined is a reputation (+ UI) problem: why are contributions from unknown contributors shown at the same level as PRs from known quality contributors, for example?

We need to rethink some UX design and processes here, not pretend low quality people are going to follow your "no low quality pls i'm serious >:(" rules. Rather, design the processes against low quality.

Also, we're in a new world where code-change PRs are trivial, and the hard part isn't writing code anymore but generating the spec. Maybe we don't even allow PRs anymore except for trusted contributors, everyone else can only create an issue and help refine a plan there which the code impl is derived?

You know, even before LLMs, it would have been pretty cool if we had a better process around deliberating and collaborating around a plan before the implementation step of any non-trivial code change. Changing code in a PR with no link to discussion around what the impl should actually look like always did feel like the cart before the horse.

They are consistent and decent, though arguably some are even good (though everyone usually has a preferred fast food destination).

Some of the best burgers I've ever had came from fast food.

Fair enough, I should've said borderline decent.

I’d argue this social angle is not very nuanced or effective. Not all people who used Claude Code will be submitting low-effort patches, and bad-faith actors will just lie about their AI-use.

For example, someone might have done a lot of investigation to find the root cause of an issue, followed by getting Claude Code to implement the fix, which they then tested. That has a good chance of being a good contribution.

I prefer tackling this from the trust side. One approach would be to only allow new contributors to make small patches. If they get those contributions accepted, then allow progressively larger contributions. That would be one approach that I think would be more effective at helping with the real problem, which is higher volumes of low-effort contributions overwhelming maintainers.

I quite like this direction. Limit new contributors to small contributions, and then relax restrictions as more of their contributions are accepted.

The desire to anthropomorphize LLMs is super interesting. People naturally anthropomorphize technology (even printers: "why are you not working!?"). It's a natural and useful heuristic. However, I can easily see how chatGPT would want to intensify this tendency in order to sell the technology's "agency" and the promise that it can solve all your problems. However, since it's a heuristic, it papers over a lot of details that one would do well to understand.

(as an aside - this reminds me of the trend of Object Oriented Ontology that specifically /tried/ to imbue agency onto large-scale phenomena that were difficult to understand discretely. I remember "global warming" being one of those things - and I can see now how this philosophy would have done more to obscure the dominion of experts wrt that topic)

> now, AI is generating whole stack applications that run from the first try

I sincerely doubt that, because it still can't even generate a few hundred line script that runs on the first try. I would know, I just tried yesterday. The first attempt was using hallucinated APIs and while I did get it to work eventually, I don't think it can one shot a complex application if it can't one shot a simple script.

IMO, AI has already stagnated and isn't significantly better than it was 3 years ago. I don't see how it's supposed to get better still when the improvement has already stopped.

> If you believe the outputs of LLMs are derivative products of the materials the LLMs were trained on

In that case a lot of proprietary software is in breach of copyleft licences. Its probably by far the commonest breach.

> You are now party to violating the original materials' copyright by accepting AI generated code. That's ethically dubious

That is arguable. Is it always ethically dubious to breach a law? If not, which is it ethically dubious to breach this law in this particular way?

The point is thst this is a common pro-gun argument to deflect from the fact that making guns harder to own does in fact reduce gun violence. Which is how much of the rest of the world works.

But post Sandy Hook, it's clear which side prevailed in this argument.

> these valuable projects that are taking hard-line stances against it are going to find themselves either having to retreat from that position or facing insurmountable difficulties in staying relevant while holding to their stance.

It is the conservative position: it will be easier to walk back the policy and start accepting AI produced code some time down the road when its benefits are clearer than it will be to excise AI produced code from years prior if there's a technical or social reason to do that.

Even if the promise of AI is fulfilled and projects that don't use it are comparatively smaller, that doesn't mean there's no value in that, in the same way that people still make furniture in wood with traditional methods today even if a company can make the same widget cheaper in an almost fully automated way.

Setting aside "make an issue first" because those too are flooded with LLMs.

> you are very unlikely to get a nontrivial patch or package into Debian unless you have some kind of interaction or rapport with a package maintainer

I did mean the "trivial" patches as well, as often it's a lot of these small little fixes to single issues that improve software quality overall.

But yes, it's true that it's not uncommon for projects to refuse outside PRs.

This already causes massive amounts of friction and contributes (heh) heavily to what makes Open Source such a pain in the ass to use.

Conversely, many popular "good" open source libraries rely extensively on this inflow of small contributions to become comprehensively good.

And so it's a tradeoff. Forcing all open source into refusing drive-by PRs will have costs. What makes sense for major security-sensitive projects with large resources doesn't make sense for others.

It's not that we won't have open source at all. It's that it'll just be worse and encourage further fragmentation. e.g. One doesn't build a good .ZIP library by carefully reading the specification, you get it by collecting a million little examples of weird zip files in the wild breaking your code.

You can literally just attach a patch to a bugreport on debian…

> It seems that gun control—though imperfect—in regions that have implemented it has had a good bit of success and the legitimate/non-harmful capabilities lost seem worth it to me in trade for the gains.

This is even true despite the fact that there are bad actors only a few minutes drive away in many cases (Chicago->Indiana border, for example).

The immediate problem is just cost. Open Source has no money, so any fancy AI solution is off the table immediately.

In terms of your plan though, you're just building a generative adversarial network here. Automated review is relatively easy to "attack".

Yet human contributors don't put up with having to game an arbitrary score system. StackOverflow imploded in no small part because of it.

In the long distant past of 4-5 years ago, it simply wasn't a problem. Few projects were overwhelmed with PRs to begin with.

And for the major projects where there was a flood of PRs, it was fairly easy to identify if someone knew what they were talking about by looking at their language; Correct use of jargon, especially domain-specific jargon.

The broader reason why "unknown contributor" PRs were held in high regard is that, outside of some specific incidents (thank you, DigitalOcean and your stupid tshirts), the odds were pretty good of a drive by PR coming from someone who identified a problem in your software by using it. Those are incredibly valuable PRs, especially as the work of diagnosing the problem generally also identifies the solution.

It's very hard to design a UX that impedes clueless fools spamming PRs but not the occasional random person finding sincere issues and having the time to identify (and fix them) but not permanent project contribution.

> and the hard part isn't writing code anymore but generating the spec

My POV: This is a bunch of crap and always has been.

Any sufficiently detailed specification is code. And the cost of writing such a specification is the cost of writing code. Every time "low code" has been tried, it doesn't work for this very reason.

e.g. The work of a ticket "Create a product category for 'Lime'" consists not of adding a database entry and typing in the word 'Lime', it consists of the human work of calling your client and asking whether it should go under Fruit or Cement.

What tool did you use ?

I routinely generate applications for my personal use using OpenCode + Claude Sonnet/Opus.

Yesterday I generated an app for my son to learn multiplication tables using spaced repetition algorithm and score keeping. It took me like 5 minutes.

Of course if you use ChatGPT it will not work but there is no way Claude Code/Open Code with any modern model isn't able to generate a one hundred line script on the first try.

Because until now, unknown contributors either submitted obvious junk which could be closed by even an unskilled moderator (I've done triage work for OS projects before) or they submitted something that was workable and a good start.

The latter is where you get all known contributors from! So if you close off unknown contributors the project will eventually stagnate and die.

The biggest grift is invested tech Bro's trying to sell you on thr fact that Ai growth is linear or even exponential.

In reality it's Logarithmic. Maybe with the occasional jolt. You'd think with Moores "law" that we'd know better by now that explosive growth isn't forever. Or at least that we're bound to physics as a cap to hit.

>isn't significantly better than it was 3 years ago.

Eh?

Ever hear the saying the first 90% of a problem is 90% of the work, the last 10% of the program is also 90% of the work.

AI/LLMs have improved massively in that context. That's not even including the other model types such as visual/motion-visual/audio which are to the point that telling their output from reality is a chore.

And one shotting a simple script simply doesn't mean much without context. I have it dump relatively complex powershell scripts often enough and it's helped me a lot with being able to explain scripting actions to other humans where before I'd make assumptions about the other users knowledge where it was not warranted.

> In that case a lot of proprietary software is in breach of copyleft licences. Its probably by far the commonest breach.

Sure, but this doesn't really seem relevant to the conversation. Someone else violating software license terms doesn't justify me (or Debian, in the case of TFA) doing so.

> Is it always ethically dubious to breach a law?

I'm not really concerned with the law, here. I think it is ethically dubious to use someone else's work without compensating them in the manner they declared. Copyright law happens to be the method we've used for a couple hundred years to standardize the discussion about that compensation, and sometimes enforce it. Breaching the law doesn't really enter into the conversation, except as a way our society agrees to hold everyone to a minimum ethical standard.

> I'm not really concerned with the law, here. I think it is ethically dubious to use someone else's work without compensating them in the manner they declared.

OK, that is reasonable. I do not think copyright is a good mechanism though, and I think the need to compensate depends on multiple factors depending on what you use a work for and under what circumstances.