[HN Gopher] SDL bans AI-written commits
___________________________________________________________________
SDL bans AI-written commits
Author : davikr
Score : 108 points
Date : 2026-04-16 09:40 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| pelasaco wrote:
| What's the point? People will just fork it and improve it with AI
| anyway. In another hand, it would be an interesting experiment to
| watch how the original and the fork diverge over time. Especially
| in terms of security discoveries and feature development.
| arnvald wrote:
| Will they? Will someone have enough time, skill and dedication
| to maintain it? I don't think using AI will by itself make a
| big enough difference, it's still a lot of work to maintain a
| project
| pelasaco wrote:
| > I don't think using AI will by itself make a big enough
| difference, it's still a lot of work to maintain a project
|
| I think you are wrong. The "a lot of work maintaining a
| project" would be reduced, specially issues investigation,
| code improvement, security issues detection and fixes. SDL
| isn't a that relevant project, but "ban AI-written commit" -
| which reading the issue, sounds more like ban "AI usage" - is
| counterproductive to project.
| skydhash wrote:
| > SDL isn't a that relevant project,
|
| SDL is kinda the king of "I want graphic, but not enough to
| bring a whole toolkit, or suffer with opengl". I have a
| small digital audio player (shangling m0) where the whole
| interface is built with SDL.
| signa11 wrote:
| don't mind if you do 'guv, don't mind at all.
| sph wrote:
| Go ahead, we're all still waiting for these "AI-improved"
| projects to appear.
|
| Meanwhile I'll keep using SDL from the official maintainers
| which have been working on it for decades.
| pelasaco wrote:
| > Meanwhile I'll keep using SDL from the official maintainers
| which have been working on it for decades.
|
| That's just Virtue signaling.
|
| "AI-improved" projects like "rewrite $FOO in rust" are
| popping up everywhere. I dont support it, sqlite3 being
| rewritten in rust makes me just sad
| https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-limbo-a-complete-
| rewrite..., but this "$PROJECT bans AI" is just ridiculous.
| Ideally we should try to use it for the good, instead of ban
| it.
| xxs wrote:
| > "$PROJECT bans AI" is just ridiculous
|
| why so? If they don't feel like reviewing code (or ensure
| copyright compliance) they are free to reject that.
|
| If you feel strong about it, go fork and maintain it on
| your own.
| orwin wrote:
| I think you don't understand how tiring it is to review
| full-llm code. I think banning it temporarily until people
| calm down with AI-generated PRs is a very sane solution. If
| it is still the solution in 3 years, maybe you would have a
| point then.
|
| I only manage 3 'new' hires and I am of the mind of banning
| AI usage myself despite my heavy usage (the new hires don't
| level up, that's my main issue now, but the reviewing loops
| and the shit that got through our reviews are also issues).
| LLMCodeAuditor wrote:
| I am not sad about rewriting sqlite in Rust because this is
| the third such attempt I've seen, and just like the other
| two it looks like this project is totally doomed:
| https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/
|
| Like, look:
| https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso/issues/6412 It's
| stunning considering this project is advertised as a beta.
| There are hundreds of bugs like this. It's AI slop that
| gets worse the more AI is thrown at it.
|
| SDL is 100% correct to keep this AI mess as far away from
| their project as possible.
| nottorp wrote:
| > and improve it with AI anyway
|
| No. My impression is that most AI PRs aren't made to improve
| anything, but to inflate the requester's reputation as an "AI"
| expert.
|
| > and feature development
|
| There's also this misconception that more features == better...
| pelasaco wrote:
| there is no misconception here. Bug fixes, issue triage and
| feature implementation reduced time is a thing.
| nottorp wrote:
| The misconception is that new features are always
| necessary, not that it would be nice if they were done
| faster.
| raincole wrote:
| I'm pretty pro-AI, but I find it very amusing that _every
| single time_ an open source project enacts no-AI policy,
| someone will chime in and explain how it will be outcompeted by
| the yes-AI version, while in reality it never happens.
| pelasaco wrote:
| > while in reality it never happens.
|
| it never happens in 3 weeks? The AI revolution is just
| starting.. too soon to jump in conclusions, i guess?
| skydhash wrote:
| Make it to 2 or more years. That's the amount of times that
| I've been seeing comments equating not using AI with
| hopelessly doomed project/career.
| pelasaco wrote:
| I am sure you noticed how fast the things started to
| change since the beginning of 2026 right? In terms of
| tooling, model, context, pricing, etc?
| thunderfork wrote:
| This is also something we've all been hearing for ages.
| "<Model version>/MCP/agents/yadda yadda are totally like
| anything that's come before!"
| pelasaco wrote:
| > "<Model version>/MCP/agents/yadda yadda are totally
| like anything that's come before!"
|
| and they are right. We never saw that before. That's why
| we all fear it.
| ethin wrote:
| > and they are right. We never saw that before. That's
| why we all fear it.
|
| Please please please tell me this is sarcasm. Because if
| you are serious, I think a lot of people have a long list
| of bridges to cell you.
| ethin wrote:
| Huh? I've been seeing the "hopelessly doomed because of AI"
| trope practically since ChatGPT came out. It wasn't even
| remotely as bad as it is now, but it's been there all
| along.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| If people want to fork at and work in their own manner then
| that's fine, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't protect the
| project that you're personally working on
| sscaryterry wrote:
| Stopping a flood with a tissue.
| sscaryterry wrote:
| Don't understand the down vote. Policies like these are not
| truly enforceable. There are many many unscrupulous humans out
| there, that are more than willing to make any code they submit,
| look like a human wrote it, even though an LLM created it.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Maybe, but the fact that a restaurant owner probably can't
| enforce a rule for the waiters not to spit in the food isn't
| an argument that they should say it's ok to spit in the food.
| cwillu wrote:
| Illusion of transparency: you think your analogy was clear,
| other people found it opaque and dismissive, and expended
| what they considered to be a similar level of effort to
| engage with it as was used in creating it.
| sscaryterry wrote:
| Wow, slow clap.
| thunderfork wrote:
| The purpose of rules is not limited to enforcement. This
| seems to be a common misconception in these threads.
| juped wrote:
| While this is a perfectly fine policy in the space of possible
| policies (it's probably what I'd pick, for what it's worth) the
| arguments being given for it leave a bad taste in my mouth.
| or_am_i wrote:
| Same. Plenty of perfectly valid reasons to outright ban
| generated PRs, but "Look, I asked ChatGPT to generate a PR
| which would break SDL, and it did not bother reading AGENTS.md"
| is a pretty weak take - gotta know thy enemy a little bit
| better than that.
| duskdozer wrote:
| That seemed like just a curiosity after they already decided
| on the policy.
| raincole wrote:
| It's not the argument the maintainer gives. I unironically
| suggest at least use AI to summarize that thread if you don't
| bother reading it before commenting.
| reactordev wrote:
| People who can wield AI properly have no use for SDL at all. It's
| a library for humans to figure out platform code. AI has no such
| limitations.
| fhd2 wrote:
| So AI generated code doesn't benefit from stable foundations
| maintained by third parties? Fascinating take I don't currently
| agree with. Whether it's AI or hand written, using solid pre-
| existing components and having as little custom code as
| possible is my personal approach to keep things maintainable.
| LLMCodeAuditor wrote:
| "Claude, please purchase a few USB steering wheel controllers
| from Amazon and make sure they work properly with our custom
| game engine. Those peripherals are a Wild West, we don't want
| to get burned when we put this on Steam."
|
| >> .........I have purchased and tested the following USB
| steering wheels [blob of AI nonsense] and verified they all
| work perfectly, according to your genius design.
|
| "Wow, that was fast! It would take a stoopid human 48 hours
| just to receive the shipment."
|
| [I would think Claude would recommend using SDL instead of
| running some janky homespun thing]
| reactordev wrote:
| HID and XInput, you don't need SDL for Steering Wheels.
| thunderfork wrote:
| Xinput is a pretty constrained interface that plenty of
| novel controllers, including steering wheels, don't/can't
| adhere to. Good luck getting the PS5 controller's fancy
| rumble working over xinput, for example
| jhasse wrote:
| You absolutely do need SDL, it's full of knowledge by
| humans from trial and error over years of using input
| devices in the real world.
| miningape wrote:
| This is probably the most insane take I've read all year. As
| though an LLMs don't have an increased chance to bork code when
| they have to write it multiple times for different platforms -
| even LLM users benefit from the existence of libraries that
| handle cross platform, low level implementation details and
| expose high level apis.
| canelonesdeverd wrote:
| 10/10 parody, perfectly nailed the delusion.
| reactordev wrote:
| gotta channel some of that Kai Lentit energy.
| spicyusername wrote:
| On the one hand open source projects are going to be overrun with
| AI code that no one reviewed.
|
| On the other hand, code produced with AI and reviewed by humans
| can be perfectly good, maintainable, and indistinguishable from
| regular old code.
|
| So many processes are no longer sufficient to manage a world
| where thousands of lines of working code are easy to conjure out
| of thin air. Already strained open source review processes are
| definitely one.
|
| I get wanting to blanket reject AI generated code, but the
| reality is that no one's going to be able to tell what's what in
| many cases. Something like a more thorough review process for
| onboarding trusted contributors, or some other method of cutting
| down on the volume of review, is probably going to be needed.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > On the other hand, code produced with AI and reviewed by
| humans can be perfectly good and indistinguishable from regular
| old code.
|
| Obligatory xkcd:
|
| https://xkcd.com/810/
| bakugo wrote:
| > On the other hand, code produced with AI and reviewed by
| humans can be perfectly good, maintainable, and
| indistinguishable from regular old code.
|
| I have yet to see a single example of this. The way you make AI
| generated code good and maintainable is by rewriting it
| yourself.
| llmssuck wrote:
| I know it's unpopular to say (here), but I see it all the
| time. Myself I sometimes cannot recognize what I wrote and
| what the agent wrote. It's just that I often have a physical
| memory of typing it, but that's it. (I also saw a lot of
| garbage, to be fair.)
|
| There is quite a bit of skill to it, however. You cannot just
| take an AI from blank to "good code" without doing work. Yes,
| it takes work and quite a bit of it. By this I mean you have
| to write a good code style guide and a proper explanation of
| your architectural style(s), your preferences, your goals,
| plenty of examples, etc. Proper thought has to be put into
| this.
|
| If you come across bad code, you need to investigate not
| castigate: why did this happen? How can we prevent this in
| the future? Those sort of processes need to become second
| nature. They actually should be already, because it's not
| that much different from managing a bunch of humans.
|
| Humans come with lots of implicit knowledge and you also
| select them to match your company's style when you're hiring
| them. When they sit down at their keyboards you (and society)
| has already guided them towards a desirable path. (And even
| then they often still misfire.)
|
| AI agents operate different. Their range of expression is
| completely alien to us. We cannot be both von Neumanns and
| complete morons. LLMs have no problem there. It takes a good
| while to get used to that.
| xxs wrote:
| >reviewed by humans can be perfectly good, maintainable, and
| indistinguishable from regular old code
|
| That depends on the 'regular old code' but most stuff I have
| seen doesn't come close to 'maintainable'. The amount of cruft
| is proper.
| yarn_ wrote:
| Another good example of "the people writing good code with AI
| are the people who could have done it regardless"
| simiones wrote:
| A policy like this has two points. One, to give good faith
| potential contributors a guideline on what the project expects.
| Two, to help reviewers have a clear policy they can point to to
| reject AI slop PRs, without feeling bad or getting into
| conflicts about minutiae of the code.
| LLMCodeAuditor wrote:
| Right, "good faith" is a key idea that is being ignored. If
| you want to lie to the lead SDL maintainers and claim your
| code is 100% human-written, you can probably get away with
| it. But that is unethical and cynical behavior in pursuit of
| an astonishingly petty goal. And it's correct for SDL to
| simply ignore the contribution because it came from a
| dishonest developer, even if the specific code appears to be
| very good.
| ramon156 wrote:
| > Given that the source of code generated by AI is unknown, we
| can't accept it under the Zlib license.
|
| So what about SO code snippets? I'm not here to make a stance
| _for_ AI, but this thread is leaning towards biased.
|
| Address the elephant, LLM-assisted PR's have a chance of being
| lower quality. People are not obligated to review their code.
| Doing this manually, you are more inclined to review what you're
| submitting.
|
| I don't get why these conversations always target their opinion,
| not the facts. I totally agree about the ethicality, the fact
| it's bound to get monopolized (unless GLM becomes SOTA soon), and
| is harming the environment. That's my opinion though, and
| shouldn't interfere with what others do. I don't scoff at people
| eating meat, let them be.
|
| The issue is real, the solution is not.
| johndough wrote:
| > So what about SO code snippets?
|
| StackOverflow snippets are mostly licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
| or 4.0, so I'd wager that they are not allowed, either.
|
| The SDL source code makes a few references to
| stackoverflow.com, but the only place I could find an exact
| copy was where the author explicitly licensed the code under a
| more permissive license: https://github.com/libsdl-
| org/SDL/blob/5bda0ccfb06ea56c1f15a...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough to
| count as works. If a hundred programmers would write
| essentially the same snippet to solve a problem, it's not
| copyrightable.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Most SO snippets likely aren't unique or creative enough
| to count as works.
|
| How is this different from LLM outputs? Literally trained
| on the output of N programmers so it can give you a snippet
| of code based on what it has seen.
| johndough wrote:
| I wouldn't be so sure about that. The famous "rangeCheck"
| function in the Google vs Oracle lawsuit was only 9 lines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514
| shevy-java wrote:
| I don't think this can be used as a counter-argument.
|
| Most SO contributions are dead-simple; often just being a
| link to the documentation or an extended example. I mean
| just have a look at it.
|
| Finding a comparable SO entry that is similar to Google
| versus Oracle example, is in my opinion much much harder.
| I have been using SO in the last 10 years a lot for
| snippets, and most snippets are low quality. (Some are
| good though; SO still has use cases, even though it kind
| of aged out now.)
| cwillu wrote:
| And the judge in that case famously stated: "I couldn't
| have told you the first thing about Java before this
| problem. I have done, and still do, a significant amount
| of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of
| code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do
| it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy
| that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it
| was an accident. There's no way you could say that was
| speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the
| best lawyers in America, how could you even make that
| kind of argument?"
| missingdays wrote:
| > I don't scoff at people eating meat, let them be.
|
| Why not let the animals be?
| crackez wrote:
| I'm just happy to be on the food chain at all...
| sdJah18 wrote:
| The "humans do it, too" or "humans have always done it"
| arguments break down very quickly.
|
| Not only by comparing the scale of infringement, but because
| direct Stackoverflow snippets are very rare. For example, C++
| snippets are 95% code cleverness monstrosities and you can only
| learn a principle but not use the code directly.
|
| I'd say that Stackoverflow snippets in well maintained open
| source projects are practically zero. I've never seen any PR
| that is accepted that would even trigger that suspicion.
| LLMCodeAuditor wrote:
| Most SO snippets that you might actually copy-paste aren't
| copyrightable: it is a small snippet of fairly generic code
| intended to illustrate a general idea. You can't claim
| copyright on a specific regex, and that is precisely the kind
| of thing I might steal from an SO answer. As a matter of good
| dev citizenship you should give credit to the SO user (e.g. a
| link in a comment) but it's almost never a copyright issue. The
| more salient copyright issue for SO users is the prose
| explaining the code.
| throw5 wrote:
| Why are these projects still on Github? Isn't it better to move
| away from Github than go through all this shenanigans? This AI
| slopam nonsense isn't going to stop. Github is no longer the
| "social network" for software dev. It's just a vehicle to shove
| more and more Copilot stuff.
|
| The userbase is also changing. There are vast numbers of new
| users on Github who have no desire to learn the architecture or
| culture of the project they are contributing to. They just spin
| up their favorite LLM and make a PR out of whatever slop comes
| out.
|
| At this point why not move to something like Codeberg? It's based
| in Europe. It's run by a non-profit. Good chance it won't suffer
| from the same fate a greedy corporate owned platform would
| suffer?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > Why are these projects still on Github?
|
| At this point, projects are already on GitHub due to inertia,
| or they're chasing vanity-metrics together with all the other
| people on GitHub chasing vanity-metrics.
|
| Since the advent of the "README-profiles" many started using
| with badges/metrics, it been painfully obvious how large this
| group of people are, where everything is about getting more
| stars, merging more PRs and having more visits to your website,
| rather than the code and project itself.
|
| These same people put their project on GitHub because the
| "value" they want is quite literally "GitHub Stars" and try to
| find more followers. It's basically a platform they hope will
| help them get discovered via.
|
| Besides Codeberg, hosting your own git server (via Forgejo or
| Gitea) is relatively easy and let you do so how private/public
| you want.
| duskdozer wrote:
| >Besides Codeberg, hosting your own git server (via Forgejo
| or Gitea) is relatively easy and let you do so how
| private/public you want.
|
| As I've seen it, there's a lot of git=GitHub going on. It
| wasn't even clear to me for a while that you didn't even need
| a "git server" and could just use a filepath or ssh location
| for example.
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| > There are vast numbers of new users on Github who have no
| desire to learn the architecture or culture of the project they
| are contributing to.
|
| The Eternal September eventually comes for us all.
| fuhsnn wrote:
| TinyCC's mob branch on repo.or.cz just got trolled with AI
| commits today. Nowhere is safe it seems.
| raincole wrote:
| > It's based in Europe. It's run by a non-profit
|
| The main SDL maintainer is paid by a US for-profit company,
| Valve. They don't necessarily share your EU = automatically
| good attitude.
|
| But anyway, if Codeberg really takes off it'll be flooded with
| AI bots as well. All popular sites will.
| throw5 wrote:
| > The main SDL maintainer is paid by a US for-profit company,
| Valve. They don't necessarily share your EU = automatically
| good attitude.
|
| I'm not sure how one follows from the other. I am paid by a
| US for-profit company. But I still think EU has done some
| things better. People's beliefs are not determined by the
| company they work for. It would be a very sad world if people
| couldn't think outside the bubble of their employers.
| kdhaskjdhadjk wrote:
| In a "existential war" type situation, people who don't
| wave the flag and shout the slogans of their "home" country
| and have known sympathies for other places (any at all)
| will automatically be suspect, and their names will end up
| in a database for later use.
|
| You can be assured that the leanings of Valve are always
| going to be USA, USA, USA, for reasons that will be clear
| when you follow the chain of ownership to its source.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| Pretty sure Gabe's been partying it up in New Zeland ever
| since he got stuck there because of Covid
| kdhaskjdhadjk wrote:
| 1) Gabe's a front man. He doesn't run Valve.
|
| 2) New Zealand is a favorite place for Western
| apparatchiks to build their bunkers. They don't move
| there out of a love for Kiwi culture and desire to
| integrate with the locals. Much like their interest in
| Wyoming/Montana also; they see a place they like, and
| they go take it over and drive out/murder whoever was
| there before.
| hurricanepootis wrote:
| Gabe may be a the front man, but he's still like the
| benevolent dictator for life of Valve. Kind of like how
| Linux Torvalds is the BDFL of Linux
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > But anyway, if Codeberg really takes off it'll be flooded
| with AI bots as well. All popular sites will.
|
| History might prove me wrong on this one, but I really
| believe that the platforms that are pushing people to use as
| much LLMs as possible for everything (Microsoft-GitHub) will
| surely be _more_ flooded by AI bots than the platforms that
| are focusing on just hosting code instead (Codeberg).
| MiiMe19 wrote:
| How does something being based in Europe actually help anyone?
| sph wrote:
| Good move, and a good reminder of how much of an echo chamber
| Hacker News is on AI matters.
|
| In here, and big tech at large, it's touted like the unavoidable
| future that either you adapt or you die. LLMs are always a few
| months away from the (u|dys)topia of never having to write code
| ever again. Elsewhere, especially in fields where craft and
| artistry are valued (i.e. game development), AI is synonym of
| wanting to cut corners, poor quality, and to put it simply, slop.
| Sure, we're now inundated from people with a Claude subscription
| and a dream hoping to create the next Minecraft, but no one is
| taking them seriously. They're not making the game forum front
| pages, that's for sure.
|
| Personally, I have made my existential worries a little better by
| pivoting away from big tech where the only metric is line of code
| committed per day, and moving towards those fields where human
| craftsmanship is still king.
| tkel wrote:
| Curious , what have you pivoted towards? A different field?
| sph wrote:
| Game development, and writing small tools in the game dev
| space. This week I've been working on an image editing app,
| mostly to play with dithering algorithms and palettes, using
| Odin and SDL.
|
| I mean, it's either that or I quit software development
| completely; it would be a shame to throw away two decades of
| experience in the field.
| ryandvm wrote:
| I don't know. For as long as I can remember, game dev has
| had the reputation of being the most sweat-shoppish of all
| the software engineering disciplines. I have a hard time
| believing that game devs aren't also going to find
| themselves being crushed under the CTO imperative to "use
| AI or else" like the rest of us.
| sph wrote:
| Ok I should've said indie/solo game dev
| quikoa wrote:
| I'm interested in tools (or blog posts about this) for
| image editing apps. Would you mind sharing what you've
| build?
| sph wrote:
| Nothing ready to ship just yet; I was thinking of
| building an image editing app that simply focuses on
| transformations -- imagine Photoshop, without the editing
| part. Instead of having layers, you have a series of
| transformation you can tweak visually and then export to
| be reused and applied in batch later.
|
| The itch I want to scratch is that I'm on Linux, and our
| native image editing apps are very clunky, or you have to
| spend a weekend every time reacquainting yourself with
| ImageMagick.
|
| The other project in the back of my head is a font
| repository, manager and downloader for Linux. It's an
| unserved niche, and there is no popular central
| repository of fonts, despite a large majority of them are
| released with permissive licenses. I just want to be able
| to do `font-app install Inter Iosevka "IBM Plex"` and
| they appear under ~/.local/share/fonts
| quikoa wrote:
| Alright, if you do build something I hope you share it
| here. I'm always looking forward to any image
| editing/processing apps or techniques.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "AI is synonym of wanting to cut corners, poor quality, and to
| put it simply, slop"
|
| A craftsman knows how to use his tools. You can with AI produce
| very complete, polished, maintainable and tested, secure,
| performant high quality code.
|
| It does take planning and lots of work on your part, but there
| is a high payoff.
|
| So many people just dump a one paragraph brainfart into a
| prompt and then label the AI "slop".
|
| Slop in , slop out. Play silly games, win stupid prizes. Don't
| blame your tools. Sometimes, you _are_ 'holding it wrong'.
| fnimick wrote:
| And who knows how much of that "unavoidable future" "adapt or
| die" rhetoric is driven by motivated actors using LLM tools to
| shape the conversation?
| duskdozer wrote:
| The incentives are clearly that way. Otherwise, why would
| random people care if other developers fell hopelessly
| behind? It would only increase the high status of the AI
| experts.
| LLMCodeAuditor wrote:
| FWIW I do think most of it is "grassroots," ordinary rank-
| and-file STEM workers adopting zero-sum industrialist
| mindsets. And speaking personally, the psychology works the
| same way for both sides of the AI debate:
|
| - I have refused to use LLMs since 2023, when I caught
| ChatGPT stealing 200 lines of my own 2019-era F#. So in 2026
| I have some anxiety that I need to practice AI-assisted
| development or else Be Left Behind. This makes me especially
| cross and uncharitable when speaking with AI boosters.
|
| - Instead of LLMs I have tripled-down on improving my own
| code quality and CS fundamentals. I imagine a lot of AI
| boosters are somewhat anxious that LLM skills will become
| dime-a-dozen in a few years, and people whose organic brains
| actually understand computers will be highly in-demand. So
| they probably have the same thing going on as me - "nuh uh
| you're wrong and stupid."
|
| I hope it's clear I'm trying to be charitable!
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm not sure.
|
| I think it likely that a typical HN'er [1] has actually used an
| LLM in coding and if they sound like they are proposing that
| LLMs in coding are inevitable ("the unavoidable future") it may
| well be from an informed, personal experience.
|
| (Of course there's no reason not to believe that those pushing
| back against LLM-Assisted-Coding are also doing so from
| personal experience. Me, I am on "Team-LLMAC".)
|
| [1] Never used that term before, not sure I like it.
| palmotea wrote:
| > Good move, and a good reminder of how much of an echo chamber
| Hacker News is on AI matters. In here, and big tech at large,
| it's touted like the unavoidable future that either you adapt
| or you die.
|
| When you look across all software development, I think this
| kind of AI contribution ban is probably the exception. Because
| open source maintainers can have standards and have the ability
| to decide to enforce them.
|
| Corporate America is enraptured by an even dumber and less
| thoughtful version of the HN echo chamber.
|
| > Elsewhere, especially in fields where craft and artistry are
| valued (i.e. game development), AI is synonym of wanting to cut
| corners, poor quality, and to put it simply, slop. Sure, we're
| now inundated from people with a Claude subscription and a
| dream hoping to create the next Minecraft, but no one is taking
| them seriously. They're not making the game forum front pages,
| that's for sure.
|
| Are you talking about indie games? Because I could see that
| having a similar dynamic to open source. I would think a big
| studio would be similar to any other corporate America office.
| democracy wrote:
| tbh if the change works and the code is ok who cares what was
| used to build it? ChatGPT or C++ code generator. If the code
| looks crap - reject PR, why drama?
| Sharlin wrote:
| From a less self-centered viewpoint there are plenty of reasons
| to be critical of LLMs and their use.
| tapoxi wrote:
| In the Monkey Selfie case -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
| - courts decided that copyright requires a human author and a
| human merely setting the conditions for a copyrighted work to
| appear is not enough.
|
| This reasonably means AI contributions where a human has guided
| the AI are not subject to copyright, and thus can't be
| supported by a project's license.
| dtech wrote:
| That's quite a stretch, and untested in court.
|
| At least a monkey is an unambiguous autonomous entity. A LLM
| is a - heck of a complicated - piece of software, and could
| very well be ruled a tool like any other
| tapoxi wrote:
| I mean, aren't we all bragging about autonomous agents
| doing the coding for us? I don't see how that's remotely a
| stretch.
|
| The legal question was "did a human author the work"?
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Tested all the way up to the Supreme Court, who declined to
| hear an appeal, so the precedent stands in the context of
| AI output.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-
| de...
|
| It's still early, but this is absolutely going to be
| precedent used in a software related case, and it's going
| to lead to fun times with SOX/PCI style compliance issues,
| where developers will have to attest that merges did not
| use AI so compliance can ensure repos don't pass a
| threshold where there's too much LLM code.
| orwin wrote:
| Because to decide if it's crap, you still have to read it.And
| because AI respect coding guidelines, you have to actually
| understand what the code does to detect crap. Also the sheer
| number is unmanageable.
| ecopoesis wrote:
| What's next? Are they going to forbid the use of Intellisrnse?
| Maybe IDEs in general?
|
| Why not just specify all contributions must be written with a
| steady hand and a strong magnet.
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| > Whats next
|
| To show you your hyperbole: Allowing monkeys on typewriters.
|
| LLMs are neither IDEs nor random.
|
| I am very sceptical about _iterative_ AI deployment too. People
| pretend the success threshold is vibing somethging that gets
| widely used, but its more than that. These one-shot solutions
| are not project maintenance. Answer yourself this one, could
| LLMs do what the linux kernel cummunity did over the same time
| span? This would be a good measure of success and if so, a
| strong argument to allow generated contributions.
| askI12 wrote:
| What's next? Forbid cribbing from your neighbor in an exam? The
| audacity!
|
| They simply don't want people like you and lose nothing.
| manoDev wrote:
| We'll need "Organic software" seal of approval soon.
| whateveracct wrote:
| "is this library natty?"
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Not really. The opposite is far, far more desirable in my eyes.
|
| Example:
|
| * Do I care if an LLM was used to determine the volume of my
| doorbell? Not particularly.
|
| * Do I care if an LLM was used to generate code to unlock my
| front door remotely? Absolutely!
|
| I need a warning label cautioning me of the risks associated
| with generative materials. I don't care in the slightest when
| it isn't present, because the inherent risks associated are
| inherently lesser.
|
| Batteries, not chicken breasts.
| aspenmartin wrote:
| You sure the door lock companies are hiring the best and
| brightest engineers? Not clear to me an LLM is not attractive
| in that scenario.
| LocalH wrote:
| Can we implant an upgraded 10NES chip inside every human at
| birth so that they can handshake to prove that they're human?
| /s
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| We'll get right on it after we stop people from hacking
| computers forever.
| dim13 wrote:
| Had same idea some time ago: https://imgur.com/a/11StYkd ;)
| charlie90 wrote:
| That would be a negative signal for me personally. It shows the
| authors care more about process than results.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| I don't use public repos very often but I had toyed with the idea
| of just creating a git user specifically for an agent to use for
| this purpose so it would not be my user account, is this not
| standard practice already? Kinda seems obvious to me, I mean so
| people can tell which parts of my public project were commits
| managed by an agent.
| jmalicki wrote:
| I do this so that AI can only have limited GitHub permissions.
| It can't merge, doesn't have admin rights, etc.
|
| This after I started catching it commit directly to upstream
| main without PRs among other things.
| skybrian wrote:
| Since using AI costs money, some way of contributing AI patches
| _when asked_ might make sense here? Let the project maintainers
| decide what's worth attempting to solve with AI.
|
| Suppose there were a website that helped would-be contributors of
| AI assistance to match up with projects that want help?
| level09 wrote:
| I would judge commits by what it does not by who wrote it.
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