The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.
Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.
It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before.
Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.
You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know.
They don't have this. _At all_.
They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.
You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.
In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.
This is so completely spot on. It’s happening in other fields too, particularly non-coding (but still otherwise specialized or technical) areas. AI is extremely empowering but what’s happening is that people are now showing up in all corners of the world armed with their phone at the end of their outstretched arm saying “Well ChatGPT says…” and getting very upset when told that, no, many apologies, but ChatGPT is wrong here too.
It's why artists despise the AI art users. In that field it isn't simply them trying to contribute but instead insisting that you wasted your time learning to create art and if you're a professional you deserve to starve. All while being completely ignorant to the medium or the process.
Many artists through the ages have learned to work in various mediums, like sculpture of materials, oil painting, watercolors, fresco or whatever. There are myriad ways to express your visual art using physical materials.
Likewise, a girlfriend of mine was a college-educated artist, and she had some great output in all sorts of media, and had a great grasp of paints, and paper and canvas and what-have-you.
But she was also an Amiga aficionado, and then worked on the PCs I had, and ultimately the item she wanted most in life was a Wacom Tablet. This tablet was a force-multiplier for her art, and allowed her some real creative freedom to work in digital mediums and create art with ease that was unheard-of for messy oil paintings or whatever on canvas in your garage (we actually lived in a converted garage anyway.)
So, digital art was her saving grace, but also a significant leveler of playing fields. What would distinguish her original creativity from A.I.-generated stuff later on? Really not much. You could still make an oil or watercolor painting that is obviously hand-made. Forgeries of great artists have been perpetrated, but most of us can't explain, e.g. the Shroud of Turin anyway.
So generative A.I. is competing in these digital mediums, and perhaps 3D-printing is competing in the realm of physical objects, but it's unfortunate for artists that their choices have narrowed so far, that they are practically required to work in digital media exclusively, and master those apps, and therefore, they compete with gen A.I. in the virtual realm. That's just how it's gonna be, until folks go back to sculpting marble and painting soup cans.
FWIW, even in physical medium, artists have huge competition with "factory art", i.e. a lot of low-paid laborers creating paintings and drawings for cheap. Quantity, not quality, is the name of the game here - and this is the art that adorns all the offices and hallways around the world.
It's basically like GenAI, but running on protein substrate instead of silicon one.
And even in the digital realm, artists already spent the last decade+ competing with equivalent "factory art", too. Advertising stands on art, and most of that isn't commissioned, it's rented or bought for cheap from stock art providers, and a lot of supply there comes from people and organizations who specialize in producing art for them. The OG slop art, before AI.
EDIT: there's some irony here, in that people like to talk about how GenAI might (or might already be) start putting artists out of work. But I haven't seen anyone mention that the AI has already put slop creators out of work.
Funny, reading your comment I had the idle thought: I mostly really see callousness towards artists coming from people retaliating after being belittled by artists for using AI
And here's your response to what felt like a pretty good faith response that deserved at most an equally earnest answer, and at worst no response.
That all makes sense. But the more I know, the more I realize that a lot of software engineering isn't about crazy algorithms and black magic. I'd argue a good 80% of it is the ability to pick up the broken glass, something even many students can pull off. 15% of that comes down to avoiding landmines in a large field as you pick up said glass.
But that care isn't even evident here. People submitting prs that don't even compile, bug reports for issues that may not even exist. The minimum I'd expect is to check the work of whatever you vibe coded. We can't even get that. It's some. Odd form of clout chasing as if repos are a factor of success, not what you contribute to them.
I find that interesting because for the first 10 years of my career, I didn’t feel any confidence in contributing to open source at all because I didn’t feel I had the expertise to do so. I was even reluctant to file bugs because I always figured I was on the wrong and I didn’t want to cause churn for the maintainers.
This is easily the most spot-on comment I've read on HN in a long time.
The humility of understanding what you don't know and the limitations of that is out the window for many people now. I see time and time again the idea that "expertise is dead". Yet it's crystal clear it's not. But those people cannot understand why.
It all boils down to a simple reality: you can't understand why something is fundamentally bad if you don't understand it at all.
It's not as if there weren't that sort of people in our profession even before the rise of LLMs, as evidenced by the not infrequent comments about "gatekeeping" and "nobody needs to know academic stuff in a real day-to-day job" on HN.
> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have.
ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT?
ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text?
no, people have no shame. they have a need for a little bit of (borrowed) self importance and validation.
Which is why i applaud every code of conduct that has public ridicule as punishment for wasting everybody's time
Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate and detrimental to the society.
Last year I had to deal with a contractor who sincerely believed that a very popular library had some issue because it was erroring when parsing a chatgpt generated json... I'm still shocked, this is seriously scary
My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.
Point out to your boss that trillion dollar companies have million dollar lawyers making sure their terms of service put all responsibility on the user, and if someone still tries to sue them they hire $2000/hour litigators from top law firms to deal with it.
In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.
The Gervais Principle framework calls this type of person a Clueless. They sit in middle management as a buffer between the Sociopaths who run the world, and the Losers who know the world sucks but would just like to get their paycheck and go home. I'm surprised to hear this actually play out — the Gervais Principle doesn't seem very empirical.
I don't agree with this blanket statement. The internet is low trust for lots of reasons, but regular (read small, proximal/spatiotemporally constrained) communities still exist and are not grifters all the way down. Acknowledging that distant strangers are not trustworthy in the traditional sense seems reasonable, but is categorically different than addressing natural social groups (small and local).
Yes, and most young Americans are locked out of those small, high-trust suburbs due to high housing prices. So instead they get to experience the magic of low-trust America first-hand, hence the disconnect between the young and the boomers.
Exactly. Sadly, low-trust America has become the default where most people live. There are still nice, small-town, local shopping, suburban high-trust enclaves here and there, but as soon as you go online or deal with a business with more than a handful of locations, you're back in the low-trust grifting zone.
This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspects of life.
So their boss may be naive, but not hilariously so - because that is, in fact, how the world works[1]! And as a boss, they probably have some understanding of it.
The thing they miss is that AI fundamentally[2] cannot provide this kind of "correct" output, and more importantly, that the "trillion dollar companies" not only don't guarantee that, they actually explicitly inform everyone everywhere, including in the UI, that the output may be incorrect.
So it's mostly failure to pay attention and realize they're dealing with an exception to the rule.
--
[0] - Actually hurt you, I'm ignoring all the fitness/healthy eating fads and "ultraprocessed food" bullshit.
[1] - On a related note, it's also something security people often don't get: real world security relies on being connected - via contracts and laws and institutions - to "men with guns". It's not perfect, but scales better.
[2] - Because LLMs are not databases, but - to a first-order approximation - little people on a chip!
> It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss [...]
We are currently facing a political climate trying to tear many of these safeguards down. Some people really think "caveat emptor" is some kind of natural, efficient, ideal way of life.
"men with guns" only work for cases where the criminal must be in the jurisdiction of the crime for the crime to have occurred.
If you rob a bank in London, you must be in London, and the British police can catch you. If you rob a bank somebody else, the British police doesn't care. If you hack a bank in London though, you may very well be in North Korea.
That's a fair point, and I suppose it is a major reason cybersecurity looks the way it does. The Internet as it is ignores the jurisdictional borders. But I still think cybersec is going overboard with controls, constraining use cases where international cybercrime is not a major factor in the threat model.
For this logic I like to point out that every AI service has text that says, essentially "AI can be wrong, double check your answers". If you had the same disclaimer on your food "This food's quality is not assured" would you feel comfortable buying it or would you take pause until you've built up trust with the seller and manufacturer.
There's so much CYA because there is an A that needs C'ing
Maybe a million dollar company needs to be compliant. A billion dollar company can start to ward off any loopholes with lawsuits instead of compliance.
A trillion dollar company will simply change the law and fight governments over the law to begin with, rather than worrying about compliance.
If only every LLM-shop out there would put disclaimers on their page that they hope absolve them of the responsibility of correctness, so that your boss could make up his own mind... Oh wait.
I think people's attitude would be better calibrated to reality if LLM providers were legally required to call their service "a random drunk guy on the subway"
E.g.
"A random drunk guy on the subway suggested that this wouldn't be a problem if we were running the latest SOL server version" "Huh, I guess that's worth testing"
There’s a non-zero number of people who would get a chuckle out of a browser extension at replaces every occurrence of LLM or AI with a random drunk guy on the subway .
People's trust on LLM imo stems from the lack of awareness of AI hallucinating. Hallucination benchmarks are often hidden or talked about hastily in marketing videos.
I think it's better to say that LLMs only hallucinate. All the text they produce is entirely unverified. Humans are the ones reading the text and constructing meaning.
Which is why I keep saying that anthropomorphizing LLMs gives you good high-order intuitions about them, and should not be discouraged.
Consider: GP would've been much more correct if they said "It's just a person on a chip." Still wrong, but much less, in qualitative fashion, than they are now.
FWIW, I prefer my "little people on a chip" because this is a deliberate riff on SoC, aka. System on a Chip, aka. an actual component you put when designing computer systems. The implication being, when you design information processing systems, the box with "LLM" on it should go where you'd consider putting a box with "Person" on it, not where you'd put "Database" or any other software/hardware box.
No, it does not, it just adds to the risk that you'd be fooled by them or the corporations that produce them and surveil you through their SaaS-models.
It's a person in the same sense as a Markov chain is one, or the bot in the reception on Starship Titanic, i.e. not at all.
It is probabilistic unlike a database which is not. It is also a lossy way to compress data. We could go on about the differences but those two things make it not a database.
Edit: unless we are talking about MongoDB. It will only keep your data if you are lucky and might lose it. :)
No, it is still just a database. It is a way to store and query information, it is nothing else.
It's not just the weirdness in Mongo that could exhibit non-deterministic behaviour, some common indexing techniques do not guarantee order and/or exhaustiveness.
Let it go, LLM:s and related compression techniques aren't very special, and neither are chatbots or copy-paste-oriented software development. Optimising them for speed or manipulation does not change this, at least not from a technical perspective.
> It's just a database. There is no difference in a technical sense between "hallucination" and whatever else you imagine.
It's like a JPEG. Except instead of lossy compression on images that give you a pixel soup that only vaguely resembles the original if you're resource bound (and even modern SOTA models are when it comes to LLMs), instead you get stuff that looks more or less correct but just isn't.
It would be like JPEG if opening JPEG files involved pushing in a seed to get an image out. It's like a database, it just sits there until you enter a query.
I get what you're saying but I think it's wrong (I also think it's wrong when people say "well, people used to complain about calculators...").
An LLM chatbot is not like querying a database. Postgres doesn't have a human-like interface. Querying SQL is highly technical, when you get nonsensical results out of it (which is most often than not) you immediately suspect the JOIN you wrote or whatever. There's no "confident vibe" in results spat out by the DB engine.
Interacting with a chat bot is highly non-technical. The chat bot seems to many people like a highly competent person-like robot that knows everything, and it knows it with a high degree of confidence too.
So it makes sense to talk about "hallucinations", even though it's a flawed analogy.
I think the mistake people make when interacting with LLMs is similar to what they do when they read/watch the news: "well, they said so on the news, so it must be true."
No, it does not. It's like saying 'I talk to angels' because you hear voices in the humming from the ventilation.
It's precisely like a database. You might think the query interface is special, but that's all it is and if you let it fool you, fine, go ahead, keep it public that you do.
I don't remember exactly who said it, but at one point I read a good take - people trust these chatbots because there's big companies and billions behind them, surely big companies test and verify their stuff thoroughly?
But (as someone else described), GPTs and other current-day LLMs are probabilistic. But 99% of what they produce seems feasible enough.
> But 99% of what they produce seems feasible enough.
This being a big part of the problem-- their false answers are more plausible and convincing then the truth. The output almost always seems feasible-- true or not is an entirely different matter.
Historically when most things fail they produce nonsense. If they do they are producing something related to the truth (but perhaps biased or mis-calibrated). LLM output can be both highly plausible and unrelated to reality.
Billions of dollars of marketing have been spent to enable them to believe that, in order to justify the trillions of investment. Why would you invest a trillion dollars in a machine that occasionally randomly gave wrong answers?
I think in science fiction it’s one of the most common themes for the talking computer to be utterly horribly wrong, often resulting in complete annihilation of all life on earth.
Unless I have been reading very different science fiction I think it’s definitely not that.
I think it’s more the confidence and seeming plausibility of LLM answers
In terms of mass exposure, you're probably talking things like Cmdr Data from Star Trek, who was very much on the 'infallible' end of the fictional AI spectrum.
Sure, but this failure mode is not that. "AI will malfunction and doom us all" is pretty far from "AI will malfunction by sometimes confabulating stuff".
This is probably more of a GAI achievement, but we definitely need confidence levels when it comes to making queries with factual responses.
But yes, look at the US c.2025-6. As long as the leader sounds assertive, some people will eat the blatant lies that can be disproven even by the same AI tools they laud.
This sounds a bit like the "Asking vs. Guessing culture" discussion on the front page yesterday. With the "Guesser" being GP who's front-loading extra investigation, debugging and maintenance work so the project maintainers don't have to do it, and with the "Asker" being the client from your example, pasting the submission to ChatGPT and forwarding its response.
>> In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
Still, I meant that in the other direction: not request, but a gift/favor. "Guess culture" would be going out of your way to make the gift valuable for the receiver - matching what they need, and not generating extra burden. "Ask culture" would be like doing whatever's easiest that matches the explicit requirements, and throwing it over the fence.
Not OP, but I don't consider these the same thing.
The client in your example isn't a (presumably) professional developer, submitting code to a public repository, inviting the scrutiny of fellow professionals and potential future clients or employers.
Keep in mind that many people also contribute to big open source projects just because they believe it will look good ok their CV/GitHub and help them get a job. They don't care about helping anyone, they just want to write "contributed to Ghostty" in their application.
TBH Im not sure if this is a "growing up in a good area" vibe. But over the last decade or so I have had to slowly learn the people around me have no sense of shame. This wasnt their fault, but mine. Society has changed and if you don't adapt you'll end up confused and abused.
I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.
Like with all things in life shame is best in moderation.
Too little or too much shame can lead to issue.
Problem is no one tells you what too little or too much actually is and there are many different situations where you need to figure it out on your own.
So I think sometimes people just get it wrong but ultimately everyone tries their best. Truly malicious shameless people are extremely rare in my experience.
For the topic at hand I think a lot of these “shameless” contributions come from kids
I feel like there is a growing number of people who just can't even recognize or acknowledge shame. It's not even an emotion they are capable of or understand.
So many people now respond to "You shouldn't do that..." with one or more of:
- But, I'm allowed to.
- But, it's legal.
- But, the rules don't say I can't.
- But, nobody is stopping me.
The shared cultural understanding of right and wrong is shrinking. More and more, there's just can and can't.
Certainly in the political arena we have people that are completely shameless. Maybe that counts as online space, but it has big effects on people's real life.
To add, I don't know if this is a cultural, personal, or other thing but nowadays even if people get shamed for whatever they do, they see it more as a challenge, and it makes them rebel even harder against what is perceived to be old fashioned or whatever.
Basically teenagers. But it feels like the rebellious teenager phase lasts longer nowadays. Zero evidence besides vibes and anecdotes, but still.
The adaption is going to be that competent, knowledgeable people will begin forming informal and formal networks of people they know are skilled and intelligent and begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent. They will be less willing to work with people who don't have a proven record of competence. This results in greater stratification and harder for people who aren't already part of the in group to break in.
I've been saying for a couple years now that we need a healthy revitalization of shame in society. Sure in the past (and present) shaming people has been done for bad reasons but shame itself serves an important social function and I feel like there has been a collapse in its effectiveness, which has been very bad for society. People should be made to feel ashamed for certain things they do. It should impact them deeply and it should linger with them and be reinforced by others around them until they successfully make behavior changes. For example I see people lie pretty shamelessly and they suffer no lasting consequences for it. They should be stained with shame until they alter their behavior. People should not let them move past it and move on to the next lie.
It doesn't help that it seems like society has been trending to reward individuals with a lack of shame. Fortune favors the bold, that is.
Think of a lot of the inflammatory content on social media, how people have made whole careers and fortunes over outrage, and they have no shame over it.
It really does begin to look like having a good sense of shame isn't rewarded in the same way.
I worked for a major open-source company for half a decade. Everyone thinks their contribution is a gift and you should be grateful. To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".
Sounds like everyone's got some main character syndrome, the cure for that is to be a meaningless cog in the enterprise wheels for a while. But then I suspect a lot of open source contributions are done exactly by those people - they don't really matter in their day job, but in open source they can Make A Difference.
Of course, the vast majority of OS work is the same cog-in-a-machine work, and with low effort AI assisted contributions, the non-hero-coding work becomes more prevalent than ever.
Kind of by definition we will not see the people who do not submit frivolous PRs that waste the time of other people. So keep in mind that there's likely a huge amount of survivor bias involved.
Just like with email spam I would expect that a big part of the issue is that it only takes a minority of shameless people to create a ton of contribution spam. Unlike email spam these people actually want their contributions to be tied to their personal reputation. Which in theory means that it should be easier to identify and isolate them.
"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)
It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.
Funny, I had a similar experience TAing “Intro to CS” (first semester C programming course). The student was certain he encountered a compiler bug (pushing back on my assumption there was something wrong with their code, since while compilers do have bugs, they are probably not in the code generation of a nested for loop). After spending a few minutes parsing their totally unindented code, the off-by-one error revealed itself
Offer topic, but the Codeless Code isn't Zen Koans. It's formatted like Zen Koans, and it's entertaining and brings value to the world, but it isn't the same thing.
Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket.
I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.
I had a professor who cautioned us not to assume the problem was in the compiler, or in anyone else’s code. Students assuming that there is a compiler (or similar) bug is not uncommon. Common enough he felt it necessary to pre-empt those discussions.
have found bugs in native JVM, usually it takes some effort, though. Printing the assembly is the easiest one. (I consider the bug in java.lang/util/io/etc. code not an interesting case)
Memory leaks and issues with the memory allocator are months long process to pin on the JVM...
In the early days (bug parade times), the bugs are a lot more common, nowadays -- I'd say it'd be an extreme naivete to consider JVM the culprit from the get-go.
Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.
It's good to regularly see such policies and discussions around them to remind me how staggeringly shameless some people could be and how many of such people out there. Interacting mostly with my peers, friends, acquaintances I tend to forget that they don't represent average population and after some time I start to assume all people are reasonable and act in good faith.
Yep, this. You can just look at the state of FOSS licensing across GitHub to see it in action: licenses are routinely stripped or changed to remove the original developers, even on trivial items, even on forked projects where the action is easily visible, even on licenses that allow for literally everything else. State "You can do everything except this" and loads of people will still actively do it, because they have no shame (or because they enjoy breaking someone else's rules? Because it gives them a power trip? Who knows).
A subset of open source contributors are only interested in getting something accepted so they can put it on their resume.
Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).
In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.
There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.
You just have to go take a look at what people write in social media, using their real name and photo, to conclude that no, some people have no shame at all.
I would imagine there are a lot of "small nice to haves" that people submit because they are frustrated about the mere complexity of submitting changes. Minor things that involve a lot of complexity merely in terms of changing some config or some default etc. Something where there is a significant probability of it being wrong but also a high probability of someone who knows the project being able to quickly see if it's ok or not.
i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).
Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.
Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".
The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.
To have that shame, you need to know better. If you don’t know any better, having access to a model that can make code and a cursory understanding of the language syntax probably feels like knowing how to write good code. Dunning-Krueger strikes again.
I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.
when it comes to enabling opportunities i dont think it becomes a matter of shame for them anymore.
A lot of people (especially in regions where living is tough and competition is fierce) will do anything by hook or crook to get ahead in competition. And if github contributions is a metric for getting hired or getting noticed then you are going to see it become spammed.
Funny enough, reading this makes me feel a little more confident and less... shame.
I've been deep-diving into AI code generation for more niche platforms, to see if it can either fill the coding gap in my skillset, or help me learn more code. And without writing my whole blog post(s) here, it's been fairly mediocre but improving over time.
But for the life of me I would never submit PRs of this code. Not if I can't explain every line and why it's there. And in preparation of publishing anything to my own repos I have a readme which explicitly states how the code was generated and requesting not to bother any upstream or community members with issues from it. It's just (uncommon) courtesy, no?
This is one thing I find funny about all the discussion around AI watermarking. Yes for absolutely nefarious bad actors it is incredibly important, but what seems clear is that the majority of AI users do absolutely nothing to conceal obvious tells of AI generation. Turns out people are shameless!
Two immediate ones I can think of:
- The yellow hue/sepia tone of any image coming out of ChatGPT
- People responding to text by starting with "Good Question!" or inserting hard-to-memorize-or-type unicode symbols like → into text where they obviously wouldn't have used that and have no history of using it.
> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have
My guess is that those people have different incentives. They need to build a portfolio of open-source contributions, so shame is not of their concern. So, yeah, where you stand depends on where you sit.
To put this another way, shame is only effective if it's coupled with other repercussions with long standing effects.
An example I have of this is from high school where there were guys that were utterly shameless in asking girls for sex. The thing is it worked for them. Regardless of how many people turned them down they got enough of a hit rate it was an effective strategy. Simply put there was no other social mechanism that provided enough disincentive to stop them.
And to take the position as devil's advocate, why should they feel shame? Shame is typically a moral construct of the culture you're raised in and what to be ashamed for can vary widely.
For example, if your raised in the culture of Abrahamic religions it's very likely you're told to be ashamed for being gay. Whereas non-religious upbringing is more likely to say why the hell would you be ashamed for being gay.
TL:DR, shame is not an effective mechanism on the internet because you're dealing with far too many cultures that have wildly different views on shame, and any particular viewpoint on shame is apt to have millions to billions of people that don't believe the same.
It's because the AI is generating code better than they would write, and if you don't like it then that's fine... they didn't write it
it's easy to not have shame when you have no skin in the game... this is similar to how narcissists think so highly of themselves, it's never their fault
I am seeing the doomed future of AI math: just received another set theory paper by a set theory amateur with an AI workflow and an interest in the continuum hypothesis.
At first glance, the paper looks polished and advanced. It is beautifully typeset and contains many correct definitions and theorems, many of which I recognize from my own published work and in work by people I know to be expert. Between those correct bits, however, are sprinkled whole passages of claims and results with new technical jargon. One can't really tell at first, but upon looking into it, it seems to be meaningless nonsense. The author has evidently hoodwinked himself.
We are all going to be suffering under this kind of garbage, which is not easily recognizable for the slop it is without effort. It is our regrettable fate.
Lots of people cosplay as developers, and "contributing" to open source is a box they must check. It's like they go through the moves without understanding they're doing the opposite of what they should be doing. Same with having a tech blog, they don't understand that the end goal is not "having a blog" but "producing and sharing quality content"
> Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all.
I think this is interesting too. I've noticed the difference in dating/hook-up contexts. The people you're talking about also end up getting laid more but that group also has a very large intersection with sex pests and other shitty people. The thing they have in common though is that they just don't care what other people think about them. That leads some of them to be successful if they are otherwise good people... or to become borderline or actual crininals if not. I find it fascinating actually, like how does this difference come about and can it actually be changed or is it something we get early in life or from the genetic lottery.
The Internet (and developer communities) used to be a high trust society - mostly academics and developers, everyone with shared experiences of learning when it was harder to get resources, etc.
The grift culture has changed that completely, now students face a lot of pressure to spam out PRs just to show they have contributed something.
"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."
And this is one half of why I think
"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."
isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.
> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior.
Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.
The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.
In a functioning society the primary mechanism to deal with violation of social norms is (temporary or permanent) social exclusion and in consequence the loss of future cooperative benefits.
To demand public humiliation doesn’t just put you on the same level as our medieval ancestors, who responded to violations of social norms with the pillory - it’s actually even worse: the contemporary internet pillory never forgets.
You think exile is a better first step than shame? That's certainly a take. On the internet, that does manifest as my suggested way of dealing with people where shame doesn't work, a curated space where offenders are banned -- but I would still advocate for attempting lesser corrective behaviour first before exclusion. Moreover, exclusion only works if you have a means to viably exclude people. Shame is something peers can do; exclusion requires authority.
Shame is also not the same thing as "public humiliation". They are publicly humiliating themselves. Pointing out that what they publicly chose to do themselves is bad is in no way the same as coercing them into being humiliated, which is what "public humiliation as a medieval punishment" entails. For example, the medieval practice of dragging a woman through the streets nude in order to humiliate her is indeed abhorrent, but you can hardly complain if you march through the streets nude of your own volition, against other people's desires, and are then publicly shamed for it.
No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing.
What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?
Temporary or permanent social exclusion, and consequently the loss of future cooperative benefits.
A permanent public internet pillory isn’t just useless against the worst offenders, who are shameless anyway. It’s also permanently damaging to those who are still learning societal norms.
The Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance in this regard. No consideration for the age or experience of the offender. No consideration for how serious the offense actually was.
Drive-by PRs don't come from people interested in participating in the community in question. They have infinite places to juke their stats.
I see plenty of nuance beyond the bold print. They clearly say they love to help junior developers. Your assumption that they will apply this without thought is, well, your assumption. I'd rather see what they actually do instead of getting wrapped up in your fantasies.
Thanks to Social Media bubbles, there's no social exclusion possible anymore. Shameless people just go online find each other and reinforce each others' shamelessness. I bet there's a Facebook group for people who don't return their shopping carts.
Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain.
It is well supported that TFT with a delayed mirroring component and Generous Tit for Tat where you sometimes still cooperate after defection are pretty succesful.
What is written in the Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance or generosity. It's more like a Grim Trigger strategy than Tit for Tat.
You can't have 1,000,000 abusers and be nuanced and generous to all of them all the time. At some point either you either choose to knowingly enable the abuse or you draw a line in the sand, drop the hammer, send a message, whatever you want to call the process of setting boundaries in anger. Getting a hammer dropped on them isn't going to feel fair to the individuals it falls on, but it's also unrealistic to expect that a mob-like group can trample with impunity because of the fear of being rude or unjust to an individual member of that mob.
It is understanding of these dynamics that lead to us to our current system of law: punitive justice, but forgiveness through pardons.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's the people that are the problem, not the technology. In the hands of people who understand it's utility and limitations, AI becomes an assistant you can't imagine life without. In the hands of people who aren't so intellectually curious, it helps them run into a brick wall much faster.
My former boss often shared the words of his father: "A fool with a tool...is still a fool!"
On a tangent: the origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature. That might have been great when GitHub started, but nowadays many use it as portfolio padding and/or social proof.
"This person contributed to a lot of projects" heuristic for "they're a good and passionate developer" means people will increasingly game this using low-quality submissions. This has been happening for years already.
Of course, AI just added kerosene to the fire, but re-read the policy and omit AI and it still makes sense!
A long term fix for this is to remove the incentive. Paradoxically, AI might help here because this can so trivially be gamed that it's obvious it's not longer any kind of signal.
Your point about rereading without ai makes so much sense.
The economics of it have changed, human nature hasn’t. Before 2023 (?) people also submitted garbage PRs just to be able to add “contributed to X” to their CV. It’s just become a lot cheaper.
Let's not forget the Hacktober Fest, the scourge of open source for over a decade now, the driver of low-quality "contribution" spam by hordes of people doing it for a goddamn free t-shirt.
No, this problem isn't fundamentally about AI, it's about "social" structure of Github and incentives it creates (fame, employment).
Mailing lists essentially solve this by introducing friction: only those who genuinely care about the project will bother to git send-email and defend a patch over an email thread. The incentive for low-quality drive-by submissions also evaporates as there is no profile page with green squares to farm. The downside is that it potentially reduces the number of contributors by making it a lot harder for new contributors to onboard.
I can see this becoming a pretty generally accepted AI usage policy. Very balanced.
Covers most of the points I'm sure many of us have experienced here while developing with AI. Most importantly, AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
On that last point, whenever I've gotten Codex to generate a substantial feature, usually I've had to rewrite a lot of the code to make it more compact even if it is correct. Adding indirection where it does not make sense is a big issue I've noticed LLMs make.
Everything except the first provision is reasonable. IMO it's none of your damn business how I wrote the code, only that I understand it, and am responsible for it.
It's one of those provisions that seem reasonable, but really have no justification. It's an attempt to allow something, while extracting a cost. If I am responsible for my code, and am considered the author in the PR, than you as the recipient don't have a greater interest to know than my own personal preference not to disclose. There's never been any other requirement to disclose anything of this nature before. We don't require engineers to attest to the operating system or the licensing of the tools they use, so materially outside your own purant interests, how does it matter?
It's a signal vs noise filter, because today, AI can make more mistakes. Your operating system or IDE cannot lead you to make a similar level or amount of mistakes while writing code.
It is of course your responsibility, but the maintainer may also want to change their review approach when dealing with AI generated code. And currently, as the AI Usage Policy also states, because of bad actors sending pull requests without reviewing or taking the responsibility themselves, this acts as a filter to separate your PR which you have taken the responsibility for.
Maintenance, for one. I imagine contributions that are 100% AI generated are more likely to have a higher maintenance burden and lower follow-up participation from the author in case fixes are needed.
> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?
According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.
Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.
> Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?
It seems to be the goal. But they seem very far away from achieving that goal.
One thing you probably account for is that most of the proponents of these technologies are trying to sell you something. Doesn't mean that there is no value to these tools, but the wild claims about the capabilities of the tools are just that.
No, the code is generated by a tool that's "smarter than people in many ways". So which parts of "thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite" can we trust it with?
Trust is a function of responsibility, not of smarts.
You may hire a genius developer that's better than you at everything, and you still won't trust them blindly with work you are responsible for. In fact, the smarter they are than you, the less trusting you can afford to be.
Very little, until it stops being stupid in many ways. We don't need smart, we need tools to not be stupid. An unreliable tool is more dangerous and more useless than having no tool.
This is such a good write-up and something I'm struggling with very hard. Does quality of code in the traditional sense even matter anymore if e.g. CC can work with said code anyway. I haven't had imposter's in a long time, but it's spiking hard now. Whenever i read or write code I feel like I'm an incompetent dev doing obsolete things.
I think I’m going to use it as a guide for our own internal AI guideline. We hire a lot of contractors and the amount of just awful code we get is really taking a toll and slowing site buildouts.
> Bad AI drivers will be banned and ridiculed in public. You've been warned. We love to help junior developers learn and grow, but if you're interested in that then don't use AI, and we'll help you. I'm sorry that bad AI drivers have ruined this for you.
Finally an AI policy I can agree with :) jokes aside, it might sound a bit too agressive but it's also true that some people have really no shame into overloading you with AI generated shit. You need to protect your attention as much as you can, it's becoming the new currency.
Well, this is explicitly public ridicule. The penalty isn't just feeling shamed. It's reputational harm, immortalized via Google.
One of the theorized reasons for junk AI submissions is reputation boosting. So maybe this will help.
And I think it will help with people who just bought into the AI hype and are proceeding without much thought. Cluelessness can look a lot like shamelessness at first.
I think it makes sense, both for this, and for curl.
Presumably people want this for some kind of prestige, so they can put it on their CV (contributed to ghostty/submitted security issue to curl).
If we change that equation to have them think "wait, if I do this, then when employers Google me they'll see a blog post saying I'm incompetent" changes calculation that is neutral/positive for if their slop gets accepted to negative/positive.
Doubly so as these bad AI drivers are trading away even the possibility of having attention. It's very possible to render yourself senseless through a habit of deference. Even if you're coming up with ways to optimize AI responses, you are just trying to make a more superior superior to defer to.
If you have good tests, certain types of change can be merged without manual testing. One problem specific to AI is that it has a tendency to game/bypass/nerf/disable tests, as opposed to actually making the code do the correct thing.
Quality of that verification matters, people who might use AI tend to cut corners. This does not completely solve problem with AI slop imo and solution quality. You ask Claude Code to go and implement a new feature in a complex code base, it will, the code might even work, but implementation might have subtle issues and might be missing the broader vision of the repo.
AI is so smart these days that I typically just ask Claude to verify the code for me.
This sort of request may have made sense in the old days but as the quality of generated code rapidly increases, so does the necessity of human intervention decrease.
If you're going to put something on someone else's desk, you're going to have to own it.
If you don't check it yourself, then you're going to own whatever your tooling misses, and also own the amount of others' time you waste through what the project has decided to categorize as negligence, which will make you look worse than if you simply made an honest mistake.
You still live under the impression that they are able to reason and verify it. Verification is done by doing it in The Real, not your or some llm's imagination (which is all their output, at best)
I literally just scrolled past a thread discussing the psychology of shamelessness and undeserved self-confidence that creates all this drive-by AI pull request slop wasting everyone else’s time and see this comment…
If you care so little, why are you even prompting at all? Surely you can leave it to its own devices without troubling it with your wishes? It seems like the farther you go down this path, the more likely it is that it'll have something better to do.
I really like the phrase "bad AI drivers"...AI is a tool, and the stupid drive-by pull requests just mean you're being inconsiderate and unhelpful in your usage of the tool, similar to how "bad drivers" are a nightmare to encounter on a highway...so stop it or you'll end up on the dashcam subreddit of programming.
The experience of using a coding agent is that you're more of a "backseat driver" though. The AI acts as your driver and you tell it where to go, sometimes making corrections if it's going the wrong way.
The experience is what you make of it. Personally I'm quite enjoying using AI as a way to generate code I can disagree with and refactor into what I want.
A factor that people have not considered is that the copyright status of AI generated text is not settled law and precedent or new law may retroactively change the copyright status of a whole project.
Maybe a bit unlikely, but still an issue no one is really considering.
There has been a single ruling (I think) that AI generated code is uncopyrightable. There has been at least one affirmative fair use ruling. Both of these are from the lower courts. I'm still of the opinion that generative AI is not fair use because its clearly substitutive.
I agree with you that generative AI is clearly not fair use.
However, at this point, the economic impact of trying to de tangle this mess would be so large, the courts likely won't do anything about it. You and I don't get to infringe on copyright; Microsoft, Facebook and Google sure do though.
I think the usage is so widespread now that the law will adapt to customs. It is untenable now to say code generated is uncopyrightable IMO. Maybe copyright as is defined right now is not enough, but then the legislation will change it. There is enough pressure on them from the business community to do so.
Some take that in consideration, I did when I until recently was in a CTO role, and I've come across companies that take compliance seriously and have decided against such code synthesis due to the unclear legal status.
Do they? Isn’t the application of the license its enforcement?
It’s illegal to commit fraud or murder, but if you do it and suffer no consequences (perhaps you even get pardoned by your president), does it matter that it was illegal? Laws are as strong as their enforcement.
For a less grim and more explicit example, Apple has a policy on the iOS App Store that apps may not use notifications to advertise. Yet it happens all the time, especially from big players like Uber. Apple themselves have done it too. So if you’re a bad actor and disrespectful to your users, does it matter that the rule exists?
Licenses determine the outcome of copyright lawsuits. If there's no copyright lawsuit, nobody looks at the license.
Licenses determine whether a copyright lawsuit is likely to happen. Most entities won't sue you if they expect to lose. But they are not the only deciding factor. Some entities never sue, which means you don't have to follow their licenses.
Sometimes they don't sue because they don't think they can prove you infringed copyright, even if you did. Even if AI is found to be copyright infringement in general, that won't mean every output is a copyright infringement of every input. Writing C code wouldn't be copyright infringement of Harry Potter. The entity suing you would still have to prove that you infringed.
I never thought of this, you are right. What happens if, let's say, AI generated text/code is "ilegal"? Especially what happens with all the companies that have been using it for their products? Do they need to rollback? It should be a shit show but super interesting to see it unfold...
“ Ultimately, I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly.”
I have a side project, git-prompt-story to attach Claude Vode session in GitHub git notes. Though it is not that simple to do automatic (e.g. i need to redact credentials).
Not sure how I feel about transcripts. Ultimately I do my best to make any contributions I make high quality, and that means taking time to polish things. Exposing the tangled mess of my thought process leading up to that either means I have to "polish" that too (whatever that ends up looking like), or put myself in a vulnerable position of showing my tangled process to get to the end result.
I've thought about saving my prompts along with project development and even done it by hand a few times, but eventually I realized I don't really get much value from doing so. Are there good reasons to do it?
For me it's increasingly the work. I spend more time in Claude Code going back and forth with the agent than I do in my text editor hacking on the code by hand. Those transcripts ARE the work I've been doing. I want to save them in the same way that I archive my notes and issues and other ephemera around my projects.
Right, I get that writing prompts is "the work", but if you run them again you don't get the same code. So what's the point of keeping them? They are not 'source code' in the same sense as a programming language.
That's why I want the transcript that shows the prompts AND the responses. The prompts alone have little value. The overall conversation shows me exactly what I did, what the agent did and the end result.
It's not for you. It's so others can see how you arrived to the code that was generated. They can learn better prompting for themselves from it, and also how you think. They can see which cases got considered, or not. All sorts of good stuff that would be helpful for reviewing giant PRs.
Sounds depressing. First you deal with massive PRs and now also these agent prompts. Soon enough there won't be any coding at all, it seems. Just doomscrolling through massive prompt files and diffs in hopes of understanding what is going on.
If the AI generated most of the code based on these prompts, it's definitely valuable to review the prompts before even looking at the code. Especially in the case where contributions come from a wide range of devs at different experience levels.
At a minimum it will help you to be skeptical at specific parts of the diff so you can look at those more closely in your review. But it can inform test scenarios etc.
We're just not going to see any code written entirely without AI except in specialist niches, just as we don't see handwritten assembly and binaries. So the disclosure part is going to become boilerplate.
In the old era, the combination 'it works' + 'it uses a sophisticated language' + 'it integrates with a complex codebase' implied that this was an intentional effort by someone who knew what they were doing, and therefore probably safe to commit.
We can no longer make that social assumption. So then, what can we rely on to signal 'this was thoroughly supervised and reviewed and understood and tested?' That's going to be hard and subjective.
Personal reputations and track records are pedigrees and brands are going to become more important in the industry; and the meritocratic 'code talks no matter where you came from' ethos is at risk.
> No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy.
I find this distinction between media and text/code so interesting. To me it sounds like they think "text and code" are free from the controversy surrounding AI-generated media.
But judging from how AI companies grabbed all the art, images, videos, and audio they could get their hands on to train their LLMs it's naive to think that they didn't do the same with text and code.
> To me it sounds like "text and code" are free from the controversy surrounding AI-generated media.
It really isn't, don't you recall the "protests" against Microsoft starting to use repositories hosted at GitHub for training their own coding models? Lots of articles and sentiments everywhere at the time.
Seems to have died down though, probably because most developers seemingly at this point use LLMs in some capacity today. Some just use it as a search engine replacement, others to compose snippets they copy-paste and others wholesale don't type code anymore, just instructions then review it.
I'm guessing Ghostty feels like if they'd ban generated text/code, they'd block almost all potential contributors. Not sure I agree with that personally, but I'm guessing that's their perspective.
Right, that's what I'm thinking too (I'll update my statement a bit to make that more clear), but I constantly hear this perspective that it's all good for text and code but when it's media, then it's suddenly problematic. It's equally problematic for text and code.
And to be frank, why would they? Who would stop them? Would take a massive case for them to be compelled to be stopped, and no one seems to care about attribution anymore, or licensing at all in most cases. Companies are using torrents to download copyrighted material, stuff individuals gone to prison for before, and they hardly even get a slap on the wrist.
It's not that code is distinct or "less than" art. It's an authority and boundaries question.
I've written a fair amount of open source code. On anything like a per-capita basis, I'm way above median in terms of what I've contributed (without consent) to the training of these tools. I'm also specifically "in the crosshairs" in terms of work loss from automation of software development.
I don't find it hard to convince myself that I have moral authority to think about the usage of gen AI for writing code.
The same is not true for digital art.
There, the contribution-without-consent, aka theft, (I could frame it differently when I was the victim, but here I can't) is entirely from people other than me. The current and future damages won't be born by me.
Alright, if I understand correctly, what you're saying is they make this distinction because they operate in the "text and code" space but not in the media space.
I've written _a lot_ of open source MIT licensed code, and I'm on the fence about that being part of the training data. I've published it as much for other people to use for learning purposes as I did for fun.
I also build and sell closed source commercial JavaScript packages, and more than likely those have ended up in the training data as well. Obviously without consent. So this is why I feel strong about making this separation between code and media, from my perspective it all has the same problem.
I agree it does all have the same problem, but on balance: it's much easier to rationalize my own use of genAI to augment my programming skillset and (maybe) stay employable, than it is to rationalize using genAI to do commercial artwork.
re: MIT license, I generally tell people they have to credit and that's functionally the only requirement. Are they crediting? That's really the lowest imaginable bar, they're not asked to do ANYTHING else.
> No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy
What's the reason for this?
Media is the most likely thing I'd consider using AI for as part of a contribution to an open source project.
My code would be hand crafted by me. Any AI use would be similar to Google use: a way to search for examples and explanations if I'm unclear on something. Said examples and explanations would then be read, and after I understand what is going on I'd write my code.
Any documentation I contributed would also be hand written. However, if I wanted to include a diagram in that documentation I might give AI a try. It can't be worse than my zero talent attempts to make something in OmniGraffle or worse a photograph of my attempt to draw a nice diagram on paper.
I'd have expected this to be the least concerning use of AI.
At the Zulip open-source project, we've had a significant onslaught of AI slop in the past few months. It gets as absurd as PR descriptions with AI-generated "screenshots" of the app to "demonstrate" the changes. We've had to start warning contributors that we won't be able to review their work if they continue misusing AI, and occasionally banning repeat offenders. It's feels draining -- we want to spend our time mentoring people who'll actually learn from feedback, not interacting with contributors who are just copy-pasting LLM responses without thought.
it's really strange, I maintain a lot of OSS and I just don't see it. I've had a bit of slop, and the # of PRs I receive has 10x'ed, but the quality is generally quite good. I wonder if maybe it's because I make dev tool CLIs that are just easier for AI to work with?
A well crafted policy that, I think, will be adopted by many OSS.
You'd need that kind of sharp rules to compete against unhinged (or drunken) AI drivers and that's unfortunate. But at the same time, letting people DoS maintainers' time at essential no cost is not an option either.
Until now code was something costly to make and could only be created by our monkey brains.
But now we have some kind of electronic brains that can also generate code, not at the level of the best human brains out there but good enough for most projects. And they are quicker and cheaper than humans, for sure.
So maybe in the end this will reduce the need for human contributions to opensource projects.
I just know that as a solo developer AI coding agents enable me to tackle projects I didn't think about event starting before.
It is important to write the code yourself so you understand how it functions. I tried vibe coding a little bit. I totally felt like I was reading someone else's code base.
Sanitization practices of AI are bad too.
Let me be clear nothing wrong with AI in your workflow, just be an active participator in your code. Code is not meant to be one and done.
You will go through iteration after iteration, security fix after fix. This is how development is.
sounds reasonable to me. i've been wondering about encoding detailed AI disclosure in an SBOM.
on a related note: i wish we could agree on rebranding the current LLM-driven never-gonna-AGI generation of "AI" to something else… now i'm thinking of when i read the in-game lore definition for VI (Virtual Intelligence) back when i played mass effect 1 ;)
I think a social norm of disclosing AI use at all times would be great. People and companies should also be held 100% accountable for anything created using AI.
Ultimately what's happening here is AI is undermining trust in remote contributions, and in new code. If you don't know somebody personally, and know how they work, the trust barrier is getting higher. I personally am already ultra vigilant for any github repo that is not already well established, and am even concerned about existing projects' code quality into the future. Not against AI per se (which I use), but it's just going to get harder to fight the slop.
the endless issue with coding policy statements like this is that the people who need to read them the most are the ones who couldn't care less and don't read anything.
The problem is that most aren’t good, and bad ones can take a lot of effort to distinguish, if they look plausible on the surface. So the potentially good ones aren’t worth all the bad ones.
I agree with most of them being bad, I disagree with them taking lots of effort to distinguish, and I am maintainer unfortunately receiving receiving more and more using AI.
I think that a warning of public ridicule may be fine. However, actually doing it is quite low brow IMO. I'm sad to see more and more otherwise admirable projects step down to that (assuming they actually do it).
An unenforced threat is toothless. Publicly stating we do not appreciate XYZ pr that was ai generated, low effort and in bad faith is perfectly acceptable.
> Issues and discussions can use AI assistance but must have a full human-in-the-loop. This means that any content generated with AI must have been reviewed and edited by a human before submission.
I can see this being a problem. I read a thread here a few weeks ago where someone was called out on submitting an AI slop article they wrote with all the usual tells. They finally admitted it but said something to the effect they reviewed it and stood behind every line.
The problem with AI writing is at least some people appear incapable of critically reviewing it. Writing something yourself eliminates this problem because it forces you to pick your words (there could be other problems of course).
So the AI-blind will still submit slop under the policy but believe themselves to have reviewed it and “stand behind” it.
Honestly I don't care how people come with the code they create, but I hold them responsible for what they try to merge.
I work in a team of 5 great professionals, there hasn't been a single instance since Copilot launched in 2022 that anybody, in any single modification did not take full responsibility for what's been committed.
I know we all use it, to different extent and usage, but the quality of what's produced hasn't dipped a single bit, I'd even argue it has improved because LLMs can find answers easier in complex codebases. We started putting `_vendor` directories with our main external dependencies as git subtrees, and it's super useful to find information about those directly in their source code and tests.
It's really as simple. If your teammates are producing slop, that's a human and professional problem and these people should be fired. If you use the tool correctly, it can help you a lot finding information and connecting dots.
Any person with a brain can clearly see the huge benefit of these tools, but also the great danger of not reviewing their output line by line and forfeiting the constant work of resolving design tensions.
Of course, open source is a different beast. The people committing may not be professionals and have no real stakes so they get little to lose by producing slop whereas maintainers are already stretched in their time and attention.
> It's really as simple. If you or your teammates are producing slop, that's a human and professional problem and these people should be fired.
Agree, slop isn't "the tool is so easy to use I can't review the code I'm producing", slop is the symptom of "I don't care how it's done, as long as it looks correct", and that's been a problem before LLMs too, the difference is how quickly you reach the "slop" state now, not that you have gate your codebase and reject shit code.
As always, most problems in "software programming" isn't about software nor programming but everything around it, including communication and workflows. If your workflow allows people to not be responsible for what they produce, and if allows shitty code to get into production, then that's on you and your team, not on the tools that the individuals use.
I mean this policy only applies to outside contributors and not the maintainers.
> Ghostty is written with plenty of AI assistance, and many maintainers embrace AI tools as a productive tool in their workflow. As a project, we welcome AI as a tool!
> Our reason for the strict AI policy is not due to an anti-AI stance, but instead due to the number of highly unqualified people using AI. It's the people, not the tools, that are the problem.
Basically don't write slop and if you want to contribute as an outsider, ensure your contribution actually is valid and works.
I’m starting to think AI will kill open source... and maybe even platforms like GitHub/GitLab as we know them.
What I’m seeing: a flood of new repos appearing on GitHub with huge codebases and "extensive" documentation, often produced in two or three commits. The problem is that nobody uses them, nobody reads the docs, and many of these projects don’t provide real value. But the infrastructure cost is real: storing it all, indexing it, scanning it, backing it up, mirroring it....
Licensing is another issue. Licenses protect against copying, but AI changes totally the game: someone can download a repo, ask Claude to analyze and understand it, and then generate a similar solution with no verbatim copying. That’s likely legal... So GPL becomes irrelevant..
If that becomes normal, I can easily imagine companies pulling back from open source. Why publish your best work if anyone can cheaply reimplement it? Code will move back to closed source and become the "secret sauce" again. A black box is harder to vibe-code than an open source repo...
Another idea is to simply promote the donation of AI credits instead of output tokens. It would be better to donate credits, not outputs, because people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.
>people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.
In an ideal world sure, but I've seen the entire gamut from amateurs making surprising work to experts whose prompt history looks like a comedy of errors and gotchas. There's some "skill" I can't quite put my finger on when it comes to the way you must speak to an LLM vs another dev. There's more monkey-paw involved in the LLM process, in the sense that you get what you want, but do you want what you'll get?
This is the most well-informed and reasonable AI policy I've seen so far. Neither kneejerk-hostile nor laissez faire; just a mature understanding of the limitations of LLMs, and an insistence on transparency and accountability when using them.
TLDR don't be an asshole and produce good stuff. But I have the feeling that this is not the right direction for the future. Distrust the process: only trust the results.
Moreover this policy is strictly unenforceable because good AI use is indistinguishable from good manual coding. And sometimes even the reverse. I don't believe in coding policies where maintainers need to spot if AI is used or not. I believe in experienced maintainers that are able to tell if a change looks sensible or not.
As someone who has picked up recently some 'legacy' code. AI has been really good at mostly summing up what is going on. In many cases it finds things I had no idea was wrong (because I do not know the code very well yet). This is so called 'battle hardened code'. I review it and say 'yeah its is wildly broken and I see how the original developer ended up here'. Sometimes the previous dev would be nice enough to leave a comment or some devs 'the code is the comments'. I have also had AI go wildly off the rails and do very dumb things. It is an interesting tool for sure one you have to keep an eye on or it will confidently make a foot gun for you. It is also nice for someone like me who has some sort of weird social anxiaty thing about bugging my fellow devs. In that I can create options tables and pick good ideas out of that.
I'm not sure I agree it's completely unenforceable: a sloppy, overly verbose PR, maybe without an attached issue, is pretty easy to pick out.
There's some sensible, easily-judged-by-a-human rules in here. I like the spirit of it and it's well written (I assume by Mitchell, not Claude, given the brevity).
This doesn't work in the age of AI where producing crappy results is much cheaper than verifying them. While this is the case, metadata will be important to understand if you should even bother verifying the results.
The time needed for an AI patch written with the prompt "now make it as small as possible, clean, and human coded" is as big as reviewing the patch itself.
If this were so, we wouldn’t be seeing such reactions from open source maintainers. The reality is AI makes it cheap to create large PRs with little substance.
Is it? Just tried it in Safari, Firefox and Chrome on a iPhone 12 Mini and I can read all the text? Obviously it isn't formatted, as it's raw markdown, just like what parent's recommended 3rd party platform does, but nothing is cut off or missing for me.
Actually, trying to load that previous platform on my phone makes it worse for readability, seems there is ~10% less width and not as efficient use of vertical space. Together with both being unformatted markdown, I think the raw GitHub URL seems to render better on mobile, at least small ones like my mini.
Banned I understand but ridiculed? I would say that these bad drive by spammers are analogous to phishing emails. Do you engage with those? Are they worth any energy or effort from you? I think ghostty should just ghost them :)
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted with no feedback, which is fine I guess, so I am just going to share some more colour on my opinion in case I am being misunderstood
What I meant with analogous to phishing is that the intent for the work is likely the one of personal reward and perhaps less of the desire to contribute. I was thinking they want their name on the contributors list, they want the credit, they want something and they don't want to put effort on it.
Do they deserve to be ridiculed for doing that? Maybe. However, I like to think humans deserve kindness sometimes. It's normal to want something, and I agree that it is not okay to be selfish and lazy about it (ignoring contribution rules and whatnot), so at minimum I think respect applies.
Some people are ignorant, naive, and are still maturing and growing. Bullying them may not help (thought it could) and mockery is a form of aggression.
I think some true false positives will fall into that category and pay the price for those who are truly ill intended.
Lastly, to ridicule is to care. To hate or attack requires caring about it. It requires effort, energy, and time from the maintainers. I think this just adds more waste and is more wasteful.
Maybe those wordings are there just to 'scare' people away and maintainers won't bother engaging, though I find it is just compounding the amount of garbage at this point and nobody benefits from it.
Anyways, would appreciate some feedback from those of you that seem to think otherwise.
> You must state the tool you used (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Amp)
Interesting requirement! Feels a bit like asking someone what IDE they used.
There shouldn't be that meaningful of a difference between the different tools/providers unless you'd consistently see a few underperform and would choose to ban those or something.
The other rules feel like they might discourage AI use due to more boilerplate needed (though I assume the people using AI might make the AI fill out some of it), though I can understand why a project might want to have those sorts of disclosures and control. That said, the rules themselves feel quite reasonable!
The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have. I have a handful of open source contributions. All of them are for small-ish projects and the complexity of my contributions are in the same ball-park as what I work on day-to-day. And even though I am relatively confident in my competency as a developer, these contributions are probably the most thoroughly tested and reviewed pieces of code I have ever written. I just really, really don't want to bother someone with low quality "help" who graciously offers their time to work on open source stuff.
Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.
It's because a lot of people that werent skilful werent on your path before. Now that pandora's box has been re-opened, those people feel "they get a second chance at life". It's not that they have no shame, they have no perspective to put that shame.
You on the other hand, have for many years honed your craft. The more you learn, the more you discover to learn aka , you realize how little you know. They don't have this. _At all_. They see this as a "free ticket to the front row" and when we politely push back (we should be way harsher in this, its the only language they understand) all they hear is "he doesn't like _me_." which is an escape.
You know how much work you ask of me, when you open a PR on my project, they don't. They will just see it as "why don't you let me join, since I have AI I should have the same skill as you".... unironically.
In other words, these "other people" that we talk about haven't worked a day in the field in their life, so they simply don't understand much of it, however they feel they understand everything of it.
This is so completely spot on. It’s happening in other fields too, particularly non-coding (but still otherwise specialized or technical) areas. AI is extremely empowering but what’s happening is that people are now showing up in all corners of the world armed with their phone at the end of their outstretched arm saying “Well ChatGPT says…” and getting very upset when told that, no, many apologies, but ChatGPT is wrong here too.
It's why artists despise the AI art users. In that field it isn't simply them trying to contribute but instead insisting that you wasted your time learning to create art and if you're a professional you deserve to starve. All while being completely ignorant to the medium or the process.
You know...
Many artists through the ages have learned to work in various mediums, like sculpture of materials, oil painting, watercolors, fresco or whatever. There are myriad ways to express your visual art using physical materials.
Likewise, a girlfriend of mine was a college-educated artist, and she had some great output in all sorts of media, and had a great grasp of paints, and paper and canvas and what-have-you.
But she was also an Amiga aficionado, and then worked on the PCs I had, and ultimately the item she wanted most in life was a Wacom Tablet. This tablet was a force-multiplier for her art, and allowed her some real creative freedom to work in digital mediums and create art with ease that was unheard-of for messy oil paintings or whatever on canvas in your garage (we actually lived in a converted garage anyway.)
So, digital art was her saving grace, but also a significant leveler of playing fields. What would distinguish her original creativity from A.I.-generated stuff later on? Really not much. You could still make an oil or watercolor painting that is obviously hand-made. Forgeries of great artists have been perpetrated, but most of us can't explain, e.g. the Shroud of Turin anyway.
So generative A.I. is competing in these digital mediums, and perhaps 3D-printing is competing in the realm of physical objects, but it's unfortunate for artists that their choices have narrowed so far, that they are practically required to work in digital media exclusively, and master those apps, and therefore, they compete with gen A.I. in the virtual realm. That's just how it's gonna be, until folks go back to sculpting marble and painting soup cans.
FWIW, even in physical medium, artists have huge competition with "factory art", i.e. a lot of low-paid laborers creating paintings and drawings for cheap. Quantity, not quality, is the name of the game here - and this is the art that adorns all the offices and hallways around the world.
It's basically like GenAI, but running on protein substrate instead of silicon one.
And even in the digital realm, artists already spent the last decade+ competing with equivalent "factory art", too. Advertising stands on art, and most of that isn't commissioned, it's rented or bought for cheap from stock art providers, and a lot of supply there comes from people and organizations who specialize in producing art for them. The OG slop art, before AI.
EDIT: there's some irony here, in that people like to talk about how GenAI might (or might already be) start putting artists out of work. But I haven't seen anyone mention that the AI has already put slop creators out of work.
A shrug and a sigh in so many words.
Funny, reading your comment I had the idle thought: I mostly really see callousness towards artists coming from people retaliating after being belittled by artists for using AI
And here's your response to what felt like a pretty good faith response that deserved at most an equally earnest answer, and at worst no response.
Instead they got worse than no response lol.
That all makes sense. But the more I know, the more I realize that a lot of software engineering isn't about crazy algorithms and black magic. I'd argue a good 80% of it is the ability to pick up the broken glass, something even many students can pull off. 15% of that comes down to avoiding landmines in a large field as you pick up said glass.
But that care isn't even evident here. People submitting prs that don't even compile, bug reports for issues that may not even exist. The minimum I'd expect is to check the work of whatever you vibe coded. We can't even get that. It's some. Odd form of clout chasing as if repos are a factor of success, not what you contribute to them.
I find that interesting because for the first 10 years of my career, I didn’t feel any confidence in contributing to open source at all because I didn’t feel I had the expertise to do so. I was even reluctant to file bugs because I always figured I was on the wrong and I didn’t want to cause churn for the maintainers.
This is easily the most spot-on comment I've read on HN in a long time.
The humility of understanding what you don't know and the limitations of that is out the window for many people now. I see time and time again the idea that "expertise is dead". Yet it's crystal clear it's not. But those people cannot understand why.
It all boils down to a simple reality: you can't understand why something is fundamentally bad if you don't understand it at all.
It's not as if there weren't that sort of people in our profession even before the rise of LLMs, as evidenced by the not infrequent comments about "gatekeeping" and "nobody needs to know academic stuff in a real day-to-day job" on HN.
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> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have.
ever had a client second guess you by replying you a screenshot from GPT?
ever asked anything in a public group only to have a complete moron replying you with a screenshot from GPT or - at least a bit of effor there - a copy/paste of the wall of text?
no, people have no shame. they have a need for a little bit of (borrowed) self importance and validation.
Which is why i applaud every code of conduct that has public ridicule as punishment for wasting everybody's time
Problem is people seriously believe that whatever GPT tells them must be true, because… I don't even know. Just because it sounds self-confident and authoritative? Because computers are supposed to not make mistakes? Because talking computers in science fiction do not make mistakes like that? The fact that LLMs ended up having this particular failure mode, out of all possible failure modes, is incredibly unfortunate and detrimental to the society.
Last year I had to deal with a contractor who sincerely believed that a very popular library had some issue because it was erroring when parsing a chatgpt generated json... I'm still shocked, this is seriously scary
"SELECT isn't broken" isn't a new advice, and it exists for a reason.
My boss says it's because they are backed by trillion dollar companies and the companies would face dire legal threats if they did not ensure the correctness of AI output.
Point out to your boss that trillion dollar companies have million dollar lawyers making sure their terms of service put all responsibility on the user, and if someone still tries to sue them they hire $2000/hour litigators from top law firms to deal with it.
Your boss sounds hilarious naive to how the world works.
In a lot of ways he is, despite witnessing a lot of how the sausage is made directly. Honestly, I think at at least half of it is wanting to convince himself that the world still functions in ways that make sense to him rather than admit that it's mostly grifters grifting all the way down.
The Gervais Principle framework calls this type of person a Clueless. They sit in middle management as a buffer between the Sociopaths who run the world, and the Losers who know the world sucks but would just like to get their paycheck and go home. I'm surprised to hear this actually play out — the Gervais Principle doesn't seem very empirical.
The high-trust Boomer brain cannot comprehend the actual low-trust society of grifters in which we live.
I don't agree with this blanket statement. The internet is low trust for lots of reasons, but regular (read small, proximal/spatiotemporally constrained) communities still exist and are not grifters all the way down. Acknowledging that distant strangers are not trustworthy in the traditional sense seems reasonable, but is categorically different than addressing natural social groups (small and local).
Yes, and most young Americans are locked out of those small, high-trust suburbs due to high housing prices. So instead they get to experience the magic of low-trust America first-hand, hence the disconnect between the young and the boomers.
Exactly. Sadly, low-trust America has become the default where most people live. There are still nice, small-town, local shopping, suburban high-trust enclaves here and there, but as soon as you go online or deal with a business with more than a handful of locations, you're back in the low-trust grifting zone.
This is a good heuristic, and it's how most things in life operate. It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss and jail time serving as strong incentive for food manufacturers and vendors to not fuck this up. The same is the case with drugs, utilities, car safety and other important aspects of life.
So their boss may be naive, but not hilariously so - because that is, in fact, how the world works[1]! And as a boss, they probably have some understanding of it.
The thing they miss is that AI fundamentally[2] cannot provide this kind of "correct" output, and more importantly, that the "trillion dollar companies" not only don't guarantee that, they actually explicitly inform everyone everywhere, including in the UI, that the output may be incorrect.
So it's mostly failure to pay attention and realize they're dealing with an exception to the rule.
--
[0] - Actually hurt you, I'm ignoring all the fitness/healthy eating fads and "ultraprocessed food" bullshit.
[1] - On a related note, it's also something security people often don't get: real world security relies on being connected - via contracts and laws and institutions - to "men with guns". It's not perfect, but scales better.
[2] - Because LLMs are not databases, but - to a first-order approximation - little people on a chip!
> It's the reason you can just buy food in stores without any worry that it might hurt you[0] - there's potential for million ${local currency} fines, lawsuits, customer loss [...]
We are currently facing a political climate trying to tear many of these safeguards down. Some people really think "caveat emptor" is some kind of natural, efficient, ideal way of life.
> [1]
Cybersecurity is also an exception here.
"men with guns" only work for cases where the criminal must be in the jurisdiction of the crime for the crime to have occurred.
If you rob a bank in London, you must be in London, and the British police can catch you. If you rob a bank somebody else, the British police doesn't care. If you hack a bank in London though, you may very well be in North Korea.
That's a fair point, and I suppose it is a major reason cybersecurity looks the way it does. The Internet as it is ignores the jurisdictional borders. But I still think cybersec is going overboard with controls, constraining use cases where international cybercrime is not a major factor in the threat model.
For this logic I like to point out that every AI service has text that says, essentially "AI can be wrong, double check your answers". If you had the same disclaimer on your food "This food's quality is not assured" would you feel comfortable buying it or would you take pause until you've built up trust with the seller and manufacturer.
There's so much CYA because there is an A that needs C'ing
Just doesn't understand the scale of money.
Maybe a million dollar company needs to be compliant. A billion dollar company can start to ward off any loopholes with lawsuits instead of compliance.
A trillion dollar company will simply change the law and fight governments over the law to begin with, rather than worrying about compliance.
And just how many rs does your boss think are in strawberry?
If only every LLM-shop out there would put disclaimers on their page that they hope absolve them of the responsibility of correctness, so that your boss could make up his own mind... Oh wait.
I think people's attitude would be better calibrated to reality if LLM providers were legally required to call their service "a random drunk guy on the subway"
E.g.
"A random drunk guy on the subway suggested that this wouldn't be a problem if we were running the latest SOL server version" "Huh, I guess that's worth testing"
There’s a non-zero number of people who would get a chuckle out of a browser extension at replaces every occurrence of LLM or AI with a random drunk guy on the subway .
It could be the same extension that replaces every occurrence of the cloud with my butt.
That’s the one I trying to think of, I could remember the ‘butt’ part.
People's trust on LLM imo stems from the lack of awareness of AI hallucinating. Hallucination benchmarks are often hidden or talked about hastily in marketing videos.
I think it's better to say that LLMs only hallucinate. All the text they produce is entirely unverified. Humans are the ones reading the text and constructing meaning.
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To quote Luke Skywalker: Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.
Which is why I keep saying that anthropomorphizing LLMs gives you good high-order intuitions about them, and should not be discouraged.
Consider: GP would've been much more correct if they said "It's just a person on a chip." Still wrong, but much less, in qualitative fashion, than they are now.
Just a weird little guy.
A hungry ghost trapped in a jar (https://bsky.app/profile/hikikomorphism.bsky.social/post/3lw...)
Similar analogy, yes.
FWIW, I prefer my "little people on a chip" because this is a deliberate riff on SoC, aka. System on a Chip, aka. an actual component you put when designing computer systems. The implication being, when you design information processing systems, the box with "LLM" on it should go where you'd consider putting a box with "Person" on it, not where you'd put "Database" or any other software/hardware box.
No, it does not, it just adds to the risk that you'd be fooled by them or the corporations that produce them and surveil you through their SaaS-models.
It's a person in the same sense as a Markov chain is one, or the bot in the reception on Starship Titanic, i.e. not at all.
No, it is not. It's a funny way of compressing and querying data, nothing else.
It is probabilistic unlike a database which is not. It is also a lossy way to compress data. We could go on about the differences but those two things make it not a database.
Edit: unless we are talking about MongoDB. It will only keep your data if you are lucky and might lose it. :)
No, it is still just a database. It is a way to store and query information, it is nothing else.
It's not just the weirdness in Mongo that could exhibit non-deterministic behaviour, some common indexing techniques do not guarantee order and/or exhaustiveness.
Let it go, LLM:s and related compression techniques aren't very special, and neither are chatbots or copy-paste-oriented software development. Optimising them for speed or manipulation does not change this, at least not from a technical perspective.
> It's just a database. There is no difference in a technical sense between "hallucination" and whatever else you imagine.
It's like a JPEG. Except instead of lossy compression on images that give you a pixel soup that only vaguely resembles the original if you're resource bound (and even modern SOTA models are when it comes to LLMs), instead you get stuff that looks more or less correct but just isn't.
It would be like JPEG if opening JPEG files involved pushing in a seed to get an image out. It's like a database, it just sits there until you enter a query.
This comes from not having a specific area or understanding, if you ask it about an area you know well, you'll see.
I get what you're saying but I think it's wrong (I also think it's wrong when people say "well, people used to complain about calculators...").
An LLM chatbot is not like querying a database. Postgres doesn't have a human-like interface. Querying SQL is highly technical, when you get nonsensical results out of it (which is most often than not) you immediately suspect the JOIN you wrote or whatever. There's no "confident vibe" in results spat out by the DB engine.
Interacting with a chat bot is highly non-technical. The chat bot seems to many people like a highly competent person-like robot that knows everything, and it knows it with a high degree of confidence too.
So it makes sense to talk about "hallucinations", even though it's a flawed analogy.
I think the mistake people make when interacting with LLMs is similar to what they do when they read/watch the news: "well, they said so on the news, so it must be true."
No, it does not. It's like saying 'I talk to angels' because you hear voices in the humming from the ventilation.
It's precisely like a database. You might think the query interface is special, but that's all it is and if you let it fool you, fine, go ahead, keep it public that you do.
I don't remember exactly who said it, but at one point I read a good take - people trust these chatbots because there's big companies and billions behind them, surely big companies test and verify their stuff thoroughly?
But (as someone else described), GPTs and other current-day LLMs are probabilistic. But 99% of what they produce seems feasible enough.
> But 99% of what they produce seems feasible enough.
This being a big part of the problem-- their false answers are more plausible and convincing then the truth. The output almost always seems feasible-- true or not is an entirely different matter.
Historically when most things fail they produce nonsense. If they do they are producing something related to the truth (but perhaps biased or mis-calibrated). LLM output can be both highly plausible and unrelated to reality.
Billions of dollars of marketing have been spent to enable them to believe that, in order to justify the trillions of investment. Why would you invest a trillion dollars in a machine that occasionally randomly gave wrong answers?
I think in science fiction it’s one of the most common themes for the talking computer to be utterly horribly wrong, often resulting in complete annihilation of all life on earth.
Unless I have been reading very different science fiction I think it’s definitely not that.
I think it’s more the confidence and seeming plausibility of LLM answers
People are literally taking Black Mirror storylines and trying to manifest them. I think they did a `s/dys/u/` and don't know how to undo it...
They codysld start by trying to dysndo it.
I'm sorry. That was a terrible joke.
In terms of mass exposure, you're probably talking things like Cmdr Data from Star Trek, who was very much on the 'infallible' end of the fictional AI spectrum.
Data was also famous for getting things embarrassingly wrong, particularly when interacting with his human colleagues.
Sure, but this failure mode is not that. "AI will malfunction and doom us all" is pretty far from "AI will malfunction by sometimes confabulating stuff".
The stories I read had computers being utterly horribly right, which resulted in attempts (sometimes successful) at annihilate humanity.
This is probably more of a GAI achievement, but we definitely need confidence levels when it comes to making queries with factual responses.
But yes, look at the US c.2025-6. As long as the leader sounds assertive, some people will eat the blatant lies that can be disproven even by the same AI tools they laud.
This sounds a bit like the "Asking vs. Guessing culture" discussion on the front page yesterday. With the "Guesser" being GP who's front-loading extra investigation, debugging and maintenance work so the project maintainers don't have to do it, and with the "Asker" being the client from your example, pasting the submission to ChatGPT and forwarding its response.
>> In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
delicate feelers is like octopus arms
Or octocat arms in this context?
Still, I meant that in the other direction: not request, but a gift/favor. "Guess culture" would be going out of your way to make the gift valuable for the receiver - matching what they need, and not generating extra burden. "Ask culture" would be like doing whatever's easiest that matches the explicit requirements, and throwing it over the fence.
I've also had the opposite.
I raise an issue or PR after carefully reviewing someone else's open source code.
They ask Claude to answer me; neither them nor Claude understood the issue.
Well, at least it's their repo, they can do whatever.
Not OP, but I don't consider these the same thing.
The client in your example isn't a (presumably) professional developer, submitting code to a public repository, inviting the scrutiny of fellow professionals and potential future clients or employers.
I consider them to be the same attitude. Machine made it / Machine said it. It must be right, you must be wrong.
They are sure they know better because they get a yes man doing their job for them.
Our CEO chiming in on a technical discussion between engineers: by the way, this is what Claude says: *some completely made-up bullshit*
I do want to counter that in the past before AI, the CEO would just chime in with some completely off the wall bullshit from a consultant.
Hi CEO, thanks for the input. Next time that we have a discussion, we will ask Claude instead of discussing with who wrote the offending code.
Didn't happen to me yet.
I'm not looking forward to it...
Random people don’t do this. Your boss however…
Keep in mind that many people also contribute to big open source projects just because they believe it will look good ok their CV/GitHub and help them get a job. They don't care about helping anyone, they just want to write "contributed to Ghostty" in their application.
I think this falls under the "have no shame" comment that they made
It's worse. Some of them are required to contribute to an existing project of their choice for some course they're taking.
From my experience, it's not about helping anyone or CV building. I just ran into a bug or a missing feature that is blocking me.
TBH Im not sure if this is a "growing up in a good area" vibe. But over the last decade or so I have had to slowly learn the people around me have no sense of shame. This wasnt their fault, but mine. Society has changed and if you don't adapt you'll end up confused and abused.
I am not saying one has to lose their shame, but at best, understand it.
Like with all things in life shame is best in moderation.
Too little or too much shame can lead to issue.
Problem is no one tells you what too little or too much actually is and there are many different situations where you need to figure it out on your own.
So I think sometimes people just get it wrong but ultimately everyone tries their best. Truly malicious shameless people are extremely rare in my experience.
For the topic at hand I think a lot of these “shameless” contributions come from kids
I feel like there is a growing number of people who just can't even recognize or acknowledge shame. It's not even an emotion they are capable of or understand.
So many people now respond to "You shouldn't do that..." with one or more of:
- But, I'm allowed to.
- But, it's legal.
- But, the rules don't say I can't.
- But, nobody is stopping me.
The shared cultural understanding of right and wrong is shrinking. More and more, there's just can and can't.
I agree and I think it’s a backlash to the 2010’s where many felt there was too much shame/shaming going on in most online spaces.
Fwiw I haven’t noticed either phenomenon much irl but that might just be my bubble.
Certainly in the political arena we have people that are completely shameless. Maybe that counts as online space, but it has big effects on people's real life.
To add, I don't know if this is a cultural, personal, or other thing but nowadays even if people get shamed for whatever they do, they see it more as a challenge, and it makes them rebel even harder against what is perceived to be old fashioned or whatever.
Basically teenagers. But it feels like the rebellious teenager phase lasts longer nowadays. Zero evidence besides vibes and anecdotes, but still.
Or maybe it's me that's getting old?
The adaption is going to be that competent, knowledgeable people will begin forming informal and formal networks of people they know are skilled and intelligent and begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent. They will be less willing to work with people who don't have a proven record of competence. This results in greater stratification and harder for people who aren't already part of the in group to break in.
> skilled and intelligent [people] begin to scorn the people who aren't skilled and aren't intelligent
That has NEVER led to a positive result in the whole of human history, especially that the second group is much larger than the first.
Shame is a good thing it shows one has a conscience and positive self regard.
Just like pain is a good thing, it tells you and signals to remove your hand from the stove.
I've been saying for a couple years now that we need a healthy revitalization of shame in society. Sure in the past (and present) shaming people has been done for bad reasons but shame itself serves an important social function and I feel like there has been a collapse in its effectiveness, which has been very bad for society. People should be made to feel ashamed for certain things they do. It should impact them deeply and it should linger with them and be reinforced by others around them until they successfully make behavior changes. For example I see people lie pretty shamelessly and they suffer no lasting consequences for it. They should be stained with shame until they alter their behavior. People should not let them move past it and move on to the next lie.
Yeah but its not helpful if its the new air fryer thats burning the hand not the stove, unless you adapt.
It doesn't help that it seems like society has been trending to reward individuals with a lack of shame. Fortune favors the bold, that is.
Think of a lot of the inflammatory content on social media, how people have made whole careers and fortunes over outrage, and they have no shame over it.
It really does begin to look like having a good sense of shame isn't rewarded in the same way.
Lack of shame, and antisocial behavior in general are also directly economically rewarded nowadays thanks to the attention economy.
I worked for a major open-source company for half a decade. Everyone thinks their contribution is a gift and you should be grateful. To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".
> To quote Bo Burnham, "you think your dick is a gift, I promise it's not".
For those curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llGvsgN17CQ
Sounds like everyone's got some main character syndrome, the cure for that is to be a meaningless cog in the enterprise wheels for a while. But then I suspect a lot of open source contributions are done exactly by those people - they don't really matter in their day job, but in open source they can Make A Difference.
Of course, the vast majority of OS work is the same cog-in-a-machine work, and with low effort AI assisted contributions, the non-hero-coding work becomes more prevalent than ever.
Kind of by definition we will not see the people who do not submit frivolous PRs that waste the time of other people. So keep in mind that there's likely a huge amount of survivor bias involved.
Just like with email spam I would expect that a big part of the issue is that it only takes a minority of shameless people to create a ton of contribution spam. Unlike email spam these people actually want their contributions to be tied to their personal reputation. Which in theory means that it should be easier to identify and isolate them.
All email is spam.
"Other people" might also just be junior devs - I have seen time and again how (over-)confident newbies can be in their code. (I remember one case where a student suspected a bug in the JVM when some Java code of his caused an error.)
It's not necessarily maliciousness or laziness, it could simply be enthusiasm paired with lack of experience.
Funny, I had a similar experience TAing “Intro to CS” (first semester C programming course). The student was certain he encountered a compiler bug (pushing back on my assumption there was something wrong with their code, since while compilers do have bugs, they are probably not in the code generation of a nested for loop). After spending a few minutes parsing their totally unindented code, the off-by-one error revealed itself
Off topic, but I feel like this could be made into a Zen Koan from The Codeless Code[0]. You're almost there with it!
[0] https://thecodelesscode.com/
Offer topic, but the Codeless Code isn't Zen Koans. It's formatted like Zen Koans, and it's entertaining and brings value to the world, but it isn't the same thing.
Our postgres replication suddenly stopped working and it took three of us hours - maybe days - of looking through the postgres source before we actually accepted it wasn't us or our hosting provider being stupid and submitted a ticket.
I can't imagine the level of laziness or entitlement required for a student (or any developer) to blame their tools so quickly without conducting a thorough investigation.
I had a professor who cautioned us not to assume the problem was in the compiler, or in anyone else’s code. Students assuming that there is a compiler (or similar) bug is not uncommon. Common enough he felt it necessary to pre-empt those discussions.
have found bugs in native JVM, usually it takes some effort, though. Printing the assembly is the easiest one. (I consider the bug in java.lang/util/io/etc. code not an interesting case)
Memory leaks and issues with the memory allocator are months long process to pin on the JVM...
In the early days (bug parade times), the bugs are a lot more common, nowadays -- I'd say it'd be an extreme naivete to consider JVM the culprit from the get-go.
Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.
It's good to regularly see such policies and discussions around them to remind me how staggeringly shameless some people could be and how many of such people out there. Interacting mostly with my peers, friends, acquaintances I tend to forget that they don't represent average population and after some time I start to assume all people are reasonable and act in good faith.
Yep, this. You can just look at the state of FOSS licensing across GitHub to see it in action: licenses are routinely stripped or changed to remove the original developers, even on trivial items, even on forked projects where the action is easily visible, even on licenses that allow for literally everything else. State "You can do everything except this" and loads of people will still actively do it, because they have no shame (or because they enjoy breaking someone else's rules? Because it gives them a power trip? Who knows).
I think of it like people just have crappy prompt adherence. It makes more sense that way.
With AI at least you can wipe the context and reapply system prompt.
You don't have to obey the copyright of anyone who's not willing to sue you for copyright infringement. Business moguls know this.
A subset of open source contributors are only interested in getting something accepted so they can put it on their resume.
Any smart interviewer knows that you have to look at actual code of the contributions to confirm it was actually accepted and that it was a non-trivial change (e.g. not updating punctuation in the README or something).
In my experience this is where the PR-spammers fall apart in interviews. When they proudly tell you they’re a contributor to a dozen popular projects and you ask for direct links to their contributions, they start coming up with excuses for why they can’t find them or their story changes.
There are of course lazy interviewers who will see the resume line about having contributed to popular projects and take it as strong signal without second guessing. That’s what these people are counting on.
You just have to go take a look at what people write in social media, using their real name and photo, to conclude that no, some people have no shame at all.
I would imagine there are a lot of "small nice to haves" that people submit because they are frustrated about the mere complexity of submitting changes. Minor things that involve a lot of complexity merely in terms of changing some config or some default etc. Something where there is a significant probability of it being wrong but also a high probability of someone who knows the project being able to quickly see if it's ok or not.
i.e. imagine a change that is literally a small diff, that is easy to describe as a mere user and not a developer, and that requires quite a lot of deep understanding merely to submit as a PR (build the project! run the tests! write the template for the PR!).
Really a lot of this stuff ends up being a kind of failure mode of various projects that we all fall into at some point where "config" is in the code and what could be a simple change and test required a lot of friction.
Obviously not all submissions are going to be like this but I think I've tried a few little ones like that where I would normally just leave whatever annoyance I have alone but think "hey maybe it's 10 min faff with AI and a PR".
The structure of the project incentives kind of creates this. Increasing cost to contribution is a valid strategy of course, but from a holistic project point of view it is not always a good one especially assuming you are not dealing with adversarial contributors but only slightly incompetent ones.
To have that shame, you need to know better. If you don’t know any better, having access to a model that can make code and a cursory understanding of the language syntax probably feels like knowing how to write good code. Dunning-Krueger strikes again.
I’ll bet there are probably also people trying to farm accounts with plausible histories for things like anonymous supply chain attacks.
when it comes to enabling opportunities i dont think it becomes a matter of shame for them anymore. A lot of people (especially in regions where living is tough and competition is fierce) will do anything by hook or crook to get ahead in competition. And if github contributions is a metric for getting hired or getting noticed then you are going to see it become spammed.
Funny enough, reading this makes me feel a little more confident and less... shame.
I've been deep-diving into AI code generation for more niche platforms, to see if it can either fill the coding gap in my skillset, or help me learn more code. And without writing my whole blog post(s) here, it's been fairly mediocre but improving over time.
But for the life of me I would never submit PRs of this code. Not if I can't explain every line and why it's there. And in preparation of publishing anything to my own repos I have a readme which explicitly states how the code was generated and requesting not to bother any upstream or community members with issues from it. It's just (uncommon) courtesy, no?
This is one thing I find funny about all the discussion around AI watermarking. Yes for absolutely nefarious bad actors it is incredibly important, but what seems clear is that the majority of AI users do absolutely nothing to conceal obvious tells of AI generation. Turns out people are shameless!
Two immediate ones I can think of:
- The yellow hue/sepia tone of any image coming out of ChatGPT
- People responding to text by starting with "Good Question!" or inserting hard-to-memorize-or-type unicode symbols like → into text where they obviously wouldn't have used that and have no history of using it.
> how little shame people apparently have
You can expand this sentiment to everyday life. The things some people are willing to say and do in public is a never ending supply of surprising.
> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have
My guess is that those people have different incentives. They need to build a portfolio of open-source contributions, so shame is not of their concern. So, yeah, where you stand depends on where you sit.
The major companies that made available the very tools they use to create this spam code, applied the exact same ethics.
Shamelessness is very definitely in vogue at the moment. It will pass, let's hope for more than ruins.
To put this another way, shame is only effective if it's coupled with other repercussions with long standing effects.
An example I have of this is from high school where there were guys that were utterly shameless in asking girls for sex. The thing is it worked for them. Regardless of how many people turned them down they got enough of a hit rate it was an effective strategy. Simply put there was no other social mechanism that provided enough disincentive to stop them.
And to take the position as devil's advocate, why should they feel shame? Shame is typically a moral construct of the culture you're raised in and what to be ashamed for can vary widely.
For example, if your raised in the culture of Abrahamic religions it's very likely you're told to be ashamed for being gay. Whereas non-religious upbringing is more likely to say why the hell would you be ashamed for being gay.
TL:DR, shame is not an effective mechanism on the internet because you're dealing with far too many cultures that have wildly different views on shame, and any particular viewpoint on shame is apt to have millions to billions of people that don't believe the same.
It's because the AI is generating code better than they would write, and if you don't like it then that's fine... they didn't write it
it's easy to not have shame when you have no skin in the game... this is similar to how narcissists think so highly of themselves, it's never their fault
I'm not surprised. Lower barrier of entry -- thanks to AI in this case -- often leads to a decrease in quality in most things.
https://x.com/JDHamkins/status/2014085911110131987
I am seeing the doomed future of AI math: just received another set theory paper by a set theory amateur with an AI workflow and an interest in the continuum hypothesis.
At first glance, the paper looks polished and advanced. It is beautifully typeset and contains many correct definitions and theorems, many of which I recognize from my own published work and in work by people I know to be expert. Between those correct bits, however, are sprinkled whole passages of claims and results with new technical jargon. One can't really tell at first, but upon looking into it, it seems to be meaningless nonsense. The author has evidently hoodwinked himself.
We are all going to be suffering under this kind of garbage, which is not easily recognizable for the slop it is without effort. It is our regrettable fate.
Lots of people cosplay as developers, and "contributing" to open source is a box they must check. It's like they go through the moves without understanding they're doing the opposite of what they should be doing. Same with having a tech blog, they don't understand that the end goal is not "having a blog" but "producing and sharing quality content"
> The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have.
My guess is it's mostly people from countries with a culture that reward shameless behavior.
> Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all.
I think this is interesting too. I've noticed the difference in dating/hook-up contexts. The people you're talking about also end up getting laid more but that group also has a very large intersection with sex pests and other shitty people. The thing they have in common though is that they just don't care what other people think about them. That leads some of them to be successful if they are otherwise good people... or to become borderline or actual crininals if not. I find it fascinating actually, like how does this difference come about and can it actually be changed or is it something we get early in life or from the genetic lottery.
The Internet (and developer communities) used to be a high trust society - mostly academics and developers, everyone with shared experiences of learning when it was harder to get resources, etc.
The grift culture has changed that completely, now students face a lot of pressure to spam out PRs just to show they have contributed something.
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If you are from poor society you can't afford to have shame. You either succeed or fail, again and again, and keep trying.
In other news, wet roads cause rain.
"The biggest surprise to me with all this low-quality contribution spam is how little shame people apparently have."
And this is one half of why I think
"Bad AI drivers will be [..] ridiculed in public."
isn't a good clause. The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior. Putting it as a rule in your policy document makes it only worse.
> The other is that ridiculing others, not matter what, is just no decent behavior.
Shaming people for violating valid social norms is absolutely decent behaviour. It is the primary mechanism we have to establish social norms. When people do bad things that are harmful to the rest of society, shaming them is society's first-level corrective response to get them to stop doing bad things. If people continue to violate norms, then society's higher levels of corrective behaviour can involve things like establishing laws and fining or imprisoning people, but you don't want to start with that level of response. Although putting these LLM spammers in jail does sound awfully enticing to me in a petty way, it's probably not the most constructive way to handle the problem.
The fact that shamelessness is taking over in some cultures is another problem altogether, and I don't know how you deal with that. Certain cultures have completely abdicated the ability to influence people's behaviour socially without resorting to heavy-handed intervention, and on the internet, this becomes everyone in the world's problem. I guess the answer is probably cultivation of spaces with strict moderation to bar shameless people from participating. The problem could be mitigated to some degree if a Github-like entity outright banned these people from their platform so they could not continue to harass open-source maintainers, but there is no platform like that. It unfortunately takes a lot of unrewarding work to maintain a curated social environment on the internet.
In a functioning society the primary mechanism to deal with violation of social norms is (temporary or permanent) social exclusion and in consequence the loss of future cooperative benefits.
To demand public humiliation doesn’t just put you on the same level as our medieval ancestors, who responded to violations of social norms with the pillory - it’s actually even worse: the contemporary internet pillory never forgets.
You think exile is a better first step than shame? That's certainly a take. On the internet, that does manifest as my suggested way of dealing with people where shame doesn't work, a curated space where offenders are banned -- but I would still advocate for attempting lesser corrective behaviour first before exclusion. Moreover, exclusion only works if you have a means to viably exclude people. Shame is something peers can do; exclusion requires authority.
Shame is also not the same thing as "public humiliation". They are publicly humiliating themselves. Pointing out that what they publicly chose to do themselves is bad is in no way the same as coercing them into being humiliated, which is what "public humiliation as a medieval punishment" entails. For example, the medieval practice of dragging a woman through the streets nude in order to humiliate her is indeed abhorrent, but you can hardly complain if you march through the streets nude of your own volition, against other people's desires, and are then publicly shamed for it.
No society can function without enforced rules. Most people do the pro-social thing most of the time. But for the rest, society must create negative experiences that help train people to do the right thing.
What negative experience do you think should instead be created for people breaking these rules?
Temporary or permanent social exclusion, and consequently the loss of future cooperative benefits.
A permanent public internet pillory isn’t just useless against the worst offenders, who are shameless anyway. It’s also permanently damaging to those who are still learning societal norms.
The Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance in this regard. No consideration for the age or experience of the offender. No consideration for how serious the offense actually was.
Drive-by PRs don't come from people interested in participating in the community in question. They have infinite places to juke their stats.
I see plenty of nuance beyond the bold print. They clearly say they love to help junior developers. Your assumption that they will apply this without thought is, well, your assumption. I'd rather see what they actually do instead of getting wrapped up in your fantasies.
Thanks to Social Media bubbles, there's no social exclusion possible anymore. Shameless people just go online find each other and reinforce each others' shamelessness. I bet there's a Facebook group for people who don't return their shopping carts.
Getting to live by the rules of decency is a privilege now denied us. I can accept that but I don't have to like it or like the people who would abuse my trust for their personal gain.
Tit for tat
It is well supported that TFT with a delayed mirroring component and Generous Tit for Tat where you sometimes still cooperate after defection are pretty succesful.
What is written in the Ghostty AI policy lacks any nuance or generosity. It's more like a Grim Trigger strategy than Tit for Tat.
You can't have 1,000,000 abusers and be nuanced and generous to all of them all the time. At some point either you either choose to knowingly enable the abuse or you draw a line in the sand, drop the hammer, send a message, whatever you want to call the process of setting boundaries in anger. Getting a hammer dropped on them isn't going to feel fair to the individuals it falls on, but it's also unrealistic to expect that a mob-like group can trample with impunity because of the fear of being rude or unjust to an individual member of that mob.
It is understanding of these dynamics that lead to us to our current system of law: punitive justice, but forgiveness through pardons.
I wholeheartedly agree. It's the people that are the problem, not the technology. In the hands of people who understand it's utility and limitations, AI becomes an assistant you can't imagine life without. In the hands of people who aren't so intellectually curious, it helps them run into a brick wall much faster.
My former boss often shared the words of his father: "A fool with a tool...is still a fool!"
Even more true with AI.
On a tangent: the origin of the problems with low-quality drive-by requests is github's social nature. That might have been great when GitHub started, but nowadays many use it as portfolio padding and/or social proof.
"This person contributed to a lot of projects" heuristic for "they're a good and passionate developer" means people will increasingly game this using low-quality submissions. This has been happening for years already.
Of course, AI just added kerosene to the fire, but re-read the policy and omit AI and it still makes sense!
A long term fix for this is to remove the incentive. Paradoxically, AI might help here because this can so trivially be gamed that it's obvious it's not longer any kind of signal.
Your point about rereading without ai makes so much sense.
The economics of it have changed, human nature hasn’t. Before 2023 (?) people also submitted garbage PRs just to be able to add “contributed to X” to their CV. It’s just become a lot cheaper.
Let's not forget the Hacktober Fest, the scourge of open source for over a decade now, the driver of low-quality "contribution" spam by hordes of people doing it for a goddamn free t-shirt.
No, this problem isn't fundamentally about AI, it's about "social" structure of Github and incentives it creates (fame, employment).
Mailing lists essentially solve this by introducing friction: only those who genuinely care about the project will bother to git send-email and defend a patch over an email thread. The incentive for low-quality drive-by submissions also evaporates as there is no profile page with green squares to farm. The downside is that it potentially reduces the number of contributors by making it a lot harder for new contributors to onboard.
I can see this becoming a pretty generally accepted AI usage policy. Very balanced.
Covers most of the points I'm sure many of us have experienced here while developing with AI. Most importantly, AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
On that last point, whenever I've gotten Codex to generate a substantial feature, usually I've had to rewrite a lot of the code to make it more compact even if it is correct. Adding indirection where it does not make sense is a big issue I've noticed LLMs make.
Everything except the first provision is reasonable. IMO it's none of your damn business how I wrote the code, only that I understand it, and am responsible for it.
It's one of those provisions that seem reasonable, but really have no justification. It's an attempt to allow something, while extracting a cost. If I am responsible for my code, and am considered the author in the PR, than you as the recipient don't have a greater interest to know than my own personal preference not to disclose. There's never been any other requirement to disclose anything of this nature before. We don't require engineers to attest to the operating system or the licensing of the tools they use, so materially outside your own purant interests, how does it matter?
It's a signal vs noise filter, because today, AI can make more mistakes. Your operating system or IDE cannot lead you to make a similar level or amount of mistakes while writing code.
It is of course your responsibility, but the maintainer may also want to change their review approach when dealing with AI generated code. And currently, as the AI Usage Policy also states, because of bad actors sending pull requests without reviewing or taking the responsibility themselves, this acts as a filter to separate your PR which you have taken the responsibility for.
Maintenance, for one. I imagine contributions that are 100% AI generated are more likely to have a higher maintenance burden and lower follow-up participation from the author in case fixes are needed.
I agree with you on the policy being balanced.
However:
> AI generated code does not substitute human thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?
According to the marketing[1], the tools are already "smarter than people in many ways". If that is the case, what are these "ways", and why should we trust a human to do a better job at them? If these "ways" keep expanding, which most proponents of this technology believe will happen, then the end state is that the tools are smarter than people at everything, and we shouldn't trust humans to do anything.
Now, clearly, we're not there yet, but where the line is drawn today is extremely fuzzy, and mostly based on opinion. The wildly different narratives around this tech certainly don't help.
[1]: https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity
> Isn't that the end goal of these tools and companies producing them?
It seems to be the goal. But they seem very far away from achieving that goal.
One thing you probably account for is that most of the proponents of these technologies are trying to sell you something. Doesn't mean that there is no value to these tools, but the wild claims about the capabilities of the tools are just that.
Intern generated code does not substitute for tech lead thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite.
No, the code is generated by a tool that's "smarter than people in many ways". So which parts of "thinking, testing, and clean up/rewrite" can we trust it with?
Trust is a function of responsibility, not of smarts.
You may hire a genius developer that's better than you at everything, and you still won't trust them blindly with work you are responsible for. In fact, the smarter they are than you, the less trusting you can afford to be.
Very little, until it stops being stupid in many ways. We don't need smart, we need tools to not be stupid. An unreliable tool is more dangerous and more useless than having no tool.
The marketing is irrelevant. The AIs are not aware of what they are doing, or motivated in the ways humans are.
This is such a good write-up and something I'm struggling with very hard. Does quality of code in the traditional sense even matter anymore if e.g. CC can work with said code anyway. I haven't had imposter's in a long time, but it's spiking hard now. Whenever i read or write code I feel like I'm an incompetent dev doing obsolete things.
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I think I’m going to use it as a guide for our own internal AI guideline. We hire a lot of contractors and the amount of just awful code we get is really taking a toll and slowing site buildouts.
I agree this could be a template that services like GitHub should propose, the same way as they suggest contributing and code of conduct templates.
> Bad AI drivers will be banned and ridiculed in public. You've been warned. We love to help junior developers learn and grow, but if you're interested in that then don't use AI, and we'll help you. I'm sorry that bad AI drivers have ruined this for you.
Finally an AI policy I can agree with :) jokes aside, it might sound a bit too agressive but it's also true that some people have really no shame into overloading you with AI generated shit. You need to protect your attention as much as you can, it's becoming the new currency.
I don't think ridicule is an effective threat for people with no shame to begin with.
Well, this is explicitly public ridicule. The penalty isn't just feeling shamed. It's reputational harm, immortalized via Google.
One of the theorized reasons for junk AI submissions is reputation boosting. So maybe this will help.
And I think it will help with people who just bought into the AI hype and are proceeding without much thought. Cluelessness can look a lot like shamelessness at first.
I think it makes sense, both for this, and for curl.
Presumably people want this for some kind of prestige, so they can put it on their CV (contributed to ghostty/submitted security issue to curl).
If we change that equation to have them think "wait, if I do this, then when employers Google me they'll see a blog post saying I'm incompetent" changes calculation that is neutral/positive for if their slop gets accepted to negative/positive.
Seems like it's addressing the incentives to me.
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Doubly so as these bad AI drivers are trading away even the possibility of having attention. It's very possible to render yourself senseless through a habit of deference. Even if you're coming up with ways to optimize AI responses, you are just trying to make a more superior superior to defer to.
"Pull requests created by AI must have been fully verified with human use." should always be a bare minimum requirement.
> "Pull requests [] must have been fully verified with human use."
I would expect this is entirely uncontroversial and the AI qualifier redundant.
If you have good tests, certain types of change can be merged without manual testing. One problem specific to AI is that it has a tendency to game/bypass/nerf/disable tests, as opposed to actually making the code do the correct thing.
that's why we have CI like GHA that runs the tests on PRs / commits
I would hope that actually testing the changes is done regardless of whether or not AI is used
> verified with human use
Quality of that verification matters, people who might use AI tend to cut corners. This does not completely solve problem with AI slop imo and solution quality. You ask Claude Code to go and implement a new feature in a complex code base, it will, the code might even work, but implementation might have subtle issues and might be missing the broader vision of the repo.
> people who might use AI tend to cut corners
People do this all the time too, and is one source for the phrase "tech debt"
It's also a biased statement. I use Ai and I cut fewer corners now because the Ai can spam out that boring stuff for me
AI is so smart these days that I typically just ask Claude to verify the code for me.
This sort of request may have made sense in the old days but as the quality of generated code rapidly increases, so does the necessity of human intervention decrease.
If you're going to put something on someone else's desk, you're going to have to own it.
If you don't check it yourself, then you're going to own whatever your tooling misses, and also own the amount of others' time you waste through what the project has decided to categorize as negligence, which will make you look worse than if you simply made an honest mistake.
You still live under the impression that they are able to reason and verify it. Verification is done by doing it in The Real, not your or some llm's imagination (which is all their output, at best)
I literally just scrolled past a thread discussing the psychology of shamelessness and undeserved self-confidence that creates all this drive-by AI pull request slop wasting everyone else’s time and see this comment…
If you care so little, why are you even prompting at all? Surely you can leave it to its own devices without troubling it with your wishes? It seems like the farther you go down this path, the more likely it is that it'll have something better to do.
I really like the phrase "bad AI drivers"...AI is a tool, and the stupid drive-by pull requests just mean you're being inconsiderate and unhelpful in your usage of the tool, similar to how "bad drivers" are a nightmare to encounter on a highway...so stop it or you'll end up on the dashcam subreddit of programming.
The experience of using a coding agent is that you're more of a "backseat driver" though. The AI acts as your driver and you tell it where to go, sometimes making corrections if it's going the wrong way.
The experience is what you make of it. Personally I'm quite enjoying using AI as a way to generate code I can disagree with and refactor into what I want.
Sure, and I ask it to do the refactoring, too!
A factor that people have not considered is that the copyright status of AI generated text is not settled law and precedent or new law may retroactively change the copyright status of a whole project.
Maybe a bit unlikely, but still an issue no one is really considering.
There has been a single ruling (I think) that AI generated code is uncopyrightable. There has been at least one affirmative fair use ruling. Both of these are from the lower courts. I'm still of the opinion that generative AI is not fair use because its clearly substitutive.
I agree with you that generative AI is clearly not fair use.
However, at this point, the economic impact of trying to de tangle this mess would be so large, the courts likely won't do anything about it. You and I don't get to infringe on copyright; Microsoft, Facebook and Google sure do though.
I think the usage is so widespread now that the law will adapt to customs. It is untenable now to say code generated is uncopyrightable IMO. Maybe copyright as is defined right now is not enough, but then the legislation will change it. There is enough pressure on them from the business community to do so.
Some take that in consideration, I did when I until recently was in a CTO role, and I've come across companies that take compliance seriously and have decided against such code synthesis due to the unclear legal status.
This only matters if you get sued for copyright violation, though.
No? Licenses still apply even if you _don't_ get sued?
Do they? Isn’t the application of the license its enforcement?
It’s illegal to commit fraud or murder, but if you do it and suffer no consequences (perhaps you even get pardoned by your president), does it matter that it was illegal? Laws are as strong as their enforcement.
For a less grim and more explicit example, Apple has a policy on the iOS App Store that apps may not use notifications to advertise. Yet it happens all the time, especially from big players like Uber. Apple themselves have done it too. So if you’re a bad actor and disrespectful to your users, does it matter that the rule exists?
Licenses determine the outcome of copyright lawsuits. If there's no copyright lawsuit, nobody looks at the license.
Licenses determine whether a copyright lawsuit is likely to happen. Most entities won't sue you if they expect to lose. But they are not the only deciding factor. Some entities never sue, which means you don't have to follow their licenses.
Sometimes they don't sue because they don't think they can prove you infringed copyright, even if you did. Even if AI is found to be copyright infringement in general, that won't mean every output is a copyright infringement of every input. Writing C code wouldn't be copyright infringement of Harry Potter. The entity suing you would still have to prove that you infringed.
At what time in the future does this not become an issue?
If you're a big enough target, that is inevitable.
You may become a big enough target only when it's too late to undo it.
I never thought of this, you are right. What happens if, let's say, AI generated text/code is "ilegal"? Especially what happens with all the companies that have been using it for their products? Do they need to rollback? It should be a shit show but super interesting to see it unfold...
See x thread for rationale: https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2014433315261124760?s=46&t=FU...
“ Ultimately, I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly.”
I have a side project, git-prompt-story to attach Claude Vode session in GitHub git notes. Though it is not that simple to do automatic (e.g. i need to redact credentials).
Not sure how I feel about transcripts. Ultimately I do my best to make any contributions I make high quality, and that means taking time to polish things. Exposing the tangled mess of my thought process leading up to that either means I have to "polish" that too (whatever that ends up looking like), or put myself in a vulnerable position of showing my tangled process to get to the end result.
I've thought about saving my prompts along with project development and even done it by hand a few times, but eventually I realized I don't really get much value from doing so. Are there good reasons to do it?
For me it's increasingly the work. I spend more time in Claude Code going back and forth with the agent than I do in my text editor hacking on the code by hand. Those transcripts ARE the work I've been doing. I want to save them in the same way that I archive my notes and issues and other ephemera around my projects.
My latest attempt at this is https://github.com/simonw/claude-code-transcripts which produces output like the is: https://gisthost.github.io/?c75bf4d827ea4ee3c325625d24c6cd86...
Right, I get that writing prompts is "the work", but if you run them again you don't get the same code. So what's the point of keeping them? They are not 'source code' in the same sense as a programming language.
That's why I want the transcript that shows the prompts AND the responses. The prompts alone have little value. The overall conversation shows me exactly what I did, what the agent did and the end result.
> shows me exactly what I did
I get that, but I guess what I'm asking is, why does it matter what you did?
The result is working, documented source code, which seems to me to be the important part. What value does keeping the prompt have?
I'm not trying to needle, I just don't see it.
It's like issues in that it helps me record why I had the agent solve problems in a particular way.
It's also great for improving my prompting skills over time - I can go back and see what worked.
It's not for you. It's so others can see how you arrived to the code that was generated. They can learn better prompting for themselves from it, and also how you think. They can see which cases got considered, or not. All sorts of good stuff that would be helpful for reviewing giant PRs.
Sounds depressing. First you deal with massive PRs and now also these agent prompts. Soon enough there won't be any coding at all, it seems. Just doomscrolling through massive prompt files and diffs in hopes of understanding what is going on.
I suspect this future will not play out. Mitchell is definitely leaning to one side on this debate.
To me, quality code is quality code no matter how it was arrived at. That should be the end of it
Using them for evals at a future date.
I save all of mine, including their environment, and plan to use them for iterating on my various system prompts and tool instructions.
If the AI generated most of the code based on these prompts, it's definitely valuable to review the prompts before even looking at the code. Especially in the case where contributions come from a wide range of devs at different experience levels.
At a minimum it will help you to be skeptical at specific parts of the diff so you can look at those more closely in your review. But it can inform test scenarios etc.
>I want to see full session transcripts, but we don't have enough tool support for that broadly
I think AI could help with that.
simow wrote a tool that does this for Claude code
https://simonw.substack.com/p/a-new-way-to-extract-detailed-...
You should be able to attach the plan file that you and Claude develop in Plan mode before even starting to code. This should be the source of truth.
On our team, we have discussed attaching claude transcripts to jira tickets, not github PRs (though the PRs are attached to tickets)
We're just not going to see any code written entirely without AI except in specialist niches, just as we don't see handwritten assembly and binaries. So the disclosure part is going to become boilerplate.
In the old era, the combination 'it works' + 'it uses a sophisticated language' + 'it integrates with a complex codebase' implied that this was an intentional effort by someone who knew what they were doing, and therefore probably safe to commit.
We can no longer make that social assumption. So then, what can we rely on to signal 'this was thoroughly supervised and reviewed and understood and tested?' That's going to be hard and subjective.
Personal reputations and track records are pedigrees and brands are going to become more important in the industry; and the meritocratic 'code talks no matter where you came from' ethos is at risk.
> No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy.
I find this distinction between media and text/code so interesting. To me it sounds like they think "text and code" are free from the controversy surrounding AI-generated media.
But judging from how AI companies grabbed all the art, images, videos, and audio they could get their hands on to train their LLMs it's naive to think that they didn't do the same with text and code.
> To me it sounds like "text and code" are free from the controversy surrounding AI-generated media.
It really isn't, don't you recall the "protests" against Microsoft starting to use repositories hosted at GitHub for training their own coding models? Lots of articles and sentiments everywhere at the time.
Seems to have died down though, probably because most developers seemingly at this point use LLMs in some capacity today. Some just use it as a search engine replacement, others to compose snippets they copy-paste and others wholesale don't type code anymore, just instructions then review it.
I'm guessing Ghostty feels like if they'd ban generated text/code, they'd block almost all potential contributors. Not sure I agree with that personally, but I'm guessing that's their perspective.
Right, that's what I'm thinking too (I'll update my statement a bit to make that more clear), but I constantly hear this perspective that it's all good for text and code but when it's media, then it's suddenly problematic. It's equally problematic for text and code.
I bet they aren't honoring the terms of the MIT license I use for my repos. It's pretty lenient and I bet they're still not compliant.
And to be frank, why would they? Who would stop them? Would take a massive case for them to be compelled to be stopped, and no one seems to care about attribution anymore, or licensing at all in most cases. Companies are using torrents to download copyrighted material, stuff individuals gone to prison for before, and they hardly even get a slap on the wrist.
I see a downvote. All righty then: cite where they credited me. Go on :)
It's not that code is distinct or "less than" art. It's an authority and boundaries question.
I've written a fair amount of open source code. On anything like a per-capita basis, I'm way above median in terms of what I've contributed (without consent) to the training of these tools. I'm also specifically "in the crosshairs" in terms of work loss from automation of software development.
I don't find it hard to convince myself that I have moral authority to think about the usage of gen AI for writing code.
The same is not true for digital art.
There, the contribution-without-consent, aka theft, (I could frame it differently when I was the victim, but here I can't) is entirely from people other than me. The current and future damages won't be born by me.
Alright, if I understand correctly, what you're saying is they make this distinction because they operate in the "text and code" space but not in the media space.
I've written _a lot_ of open source MIT licensed code, and I'm on the fence about that being part of the training data. I've published it as much for other people to use for learning purposes as I did for fun.
I also build and sell closed source commercial JavaScript packages, and more than likely those have ended up in the training data as well. Obviously without consent. So this is why I feel strong about making this separation between code and media, from my perspective it all has the same problem.
I agree it does all have the same problem, but on balance: it's much easier to rationalize my own use of genAI to augment my programming skillset and (maybe) stay employable, than it is to rationalize using genAI to do commercial artwork.
re: MIT license, I generally tell people they have to credit and that's functionally the only requirement. Are they crediting? That's really the lowest imaginable bar, they're not asked to do ANYTHING else.
> No AI-generated media is allowed (art, images, videos, audio, etc.). Text and code are the only acceptable AI-generated content, per the other rules in this policy
What's the reason for this?
Media is the most likely thing I'd consider using AI for as part of a contribution to an open source project.
My code would be hand crafted by me. Any AI use would be similar to Google use: a way to search for examples and explanations if I'm unclear on something. Said examples and explanations would then be read, and after I understand what is going on I'd write my code.
Any documentation I contributed would also be hand written. However, if I wanted to include a diagram in that documentation I might give AI a try. It can't be worse than my zero talent attempts to make something in OmniGraffle or worse a photograph of my attempt to draw a nice diagram on paper.
I'd have expected this to be the least concerning use of AI.
At the Zulip open-source project, we've had a significant onslaught of AI slop in the past few months. It gets as absurd as PR descriptions with AI-generated "screenshots" of the app to "demonstrate" the changes. We've had to start warning contributors that we won't be able to review their work if they continue misusing AI, and occasionally banning repeat offenders. It's feels draining -- we want to spend our time mentoring people who'll actually learn from feedback, not interacting with contributors who are just copy-pasting LLM responses without thought.
Our evolving AI policy is in the same spirit as ghostty's, with more detail to address specific failure modes we've experienced: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/contributing/contribu...
Honestly, yours looks nothing like Mitchell's to me, and that's a good thing.
It's actually reasonable and the guidance you provide on how to best use Ai when contributing to Zulip is :chef's kiss:
truly, I'm going to copy yours as a thank you!
it's really strange, I maintain a lot of OSS and I just don't see it. I've had a bit of slop, and the # of PRs I receive has 10x'ed, but the quality is generally quite good. I wonder if maybe it's because I make dev tool CLIs that are just easier for AI to work with?
A well crafted policy that, I think, will be adopted by many OSS.
You'd need that kind of sharp rules to compete against unhinged (or drunken) AI drivers and that's unfortunate. But at the same time, letting people DoS maintainers' time at essential no cost is not an option either.
Until now code was something costly to make and could only be created by our monkey brains.
But now we have some kind of electronic brains that can also generate code, not at the level of the best human brains out there but good enough for most projects. And they are quicker and cheaper than humans, for sure.
So maybe in the end this will reduce the need for human contributions to opensource projects.
I just know that as a solo developer AI coding agents enable me to tackle projects I didn't think about event starting before.
It is important to write the code yourself so you understand how it functions. I tried vibe coding a little bit. I totally felt like I was reading someone else's code base.
Sanitization practices of AI are bad too.
Let me be clear nothing wrong with AI in your workflow, just be an active participator in your code. Code is not meant to be one and done.
You will go through iteration after iteration, security fix after fix. This is how development is.
sounds reasonable to me. i've been wondering about encoding detailed AI disclosure in an SBOM.
on a related note: i wish we could agree on rebranding the current LLM-driven never-gonna-AGI generation of "AI" to something else… now i'm thinking of when i read the in-game lore definition for VI (Virtual Intelligence) back when i played mass effect 1 ;)
I recently had to do a similar policy for my TUI feed reader, after getting some AI slop spammy PRs: https://github.com/CrociDB/bulletty?tab=contributing-ov-file...
The fact that some people will straight up lie after submitting you a PR with lots of _that type_ of comment in the middle of the code is baffling!
I think a social norm of disclosing AI use at all times would be great. People and companies should also be held 100% accountable for anything created using AI.
I wish HN had a title tag for AI-generated posts, like it used to have for PDF’s and still does for year-of-publication.
How about autocomplete with LLMs? Should it be disclosed too? (scratching my balding head).
nah, this is just rhetorical polemic..
Ultimately what's happening here is AI is undermining trust in remote contributions, and in new code. If you don't know somebody personally, and know how they work, the trust barrier is getting higher. I personally am already ultra vigilant for any github repo that is not already well established, and am even concerned about existing projects' code quality into the future. Not against AI per se (which I use), but it's just going to get harder to fight the slop.
the endless issue with coding policy statements like this is that the people who need to read them the most are the ones who couldn't care less and don't read anything.
A good PR using IA should be impossible to distinguish from a non-AI one.
The problem is that most aren’t good, and bad ones can take a lot of effort to distinguish, if they look plausible on the surface. So the potentially good ones aren’t worth all the bad ones.
I agree with most of them being bad, I disagree with them taking lots of effort to distinguish, and I am maintainer unfortunately receiving receiving more and more using AI.
These are unbelievably reasonable terms for AI.
I might copy it for my company.
I think that a warning of public ridicule may be fine. However, actually doing it is quite low brow IMO. I'm sad to see more and more otherwise admirable projects step down to that (assuming they actually do it).
An unenforced threat is toothless. Publicly stating we do not appreciate XYZ pr that was ai generated, low effort and in bad faith is perfectly acceptable.
I agree with the second statement but public ridicule can be understood to have a stronger effect, and be in bad faith itself.
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> Issues and discussions can use AI assistance but must have a full human-in-the-loop. This means that any content generated with AI must have been reviewed and edited by a human before submission.
I can see this being a problem. I read a thread here a few weeks ago where someone was called out on submitting an AI slop article they wrote with all the usual tells. They finally admitted it but said something to the effect they reviewed it and stood behind every line.
The problem with AI writing is at least some people appear incapable of critically reviewing it. Writing something yourself eliminates this problem because it forces you to pick your words (there could be other problems of course).
So the AI-blind will still submit slop under the policy but believe themselves to have reviewed it and “stand behind” it.
Honestly I don't care how people come with the code they create, but I hold them responsible for what they try to merge.
I work in a team of 5 great professionals, there hasn't been a single instance since Copilot launched in 2022 that anybody, in any single modification did not take full responsibility for what's been committed.
I know we all use it, to different extent and usage, but the quality of what's produced hasn't dipped a single bit, I'd even argue it has improved because LLMs can find answers easier in complex codebases. We started putting `_vendor` directories with our main external dependencies as git subtrees, and it's super useful to find information about those directly in their source code and tests.
It's really as simple. If your teammates are producing slop, that's a human and professional problem and these people should be fired. If you use the tool correctly, it can help you a lot finding information and connecting dots.
Any person with a brain can clearly see the huge benefit of these tools, but also the great danger of not reviewing their output line by line and forfeiting the constant work of resolving design tensions.
Of course, open source is a different beast. The people committing may not be professionals and have no real stakes so they get little to lose by producing slop whereas maintainers are already stretched in their time and attention.
> It's really as simple. If you or your teammates are producing slop, that's a human and professional problem and these people should be fired.
Agree, slop isn't "the tool is so easy to use I can't review the code I'm producing", slop is the symptom of "I don't care how it's done, as long as it looks correct", and that's been a problem before LLMs too, the difference is how quickly you reach the "slop" state now, not that you have gate your codebase and reject shit code.
As always, most problems in "software programming" isn't about software nor programming but everything around it, including communication and workflows. If your workflow allows people to not be responsible for what they produce, and if allows shitty code to get into production, then that's on you and your team, not on the tools that the individuals use.
I mean this policy only applies to outside contributors and not the maintainers.
> Ghostty is written with plenty of AI assistance, and many maintainers embrace AI tools as a productive tool in their workflow. As a project, we welcome AI as a tool!
> Our reason for the strict AI policy is not due to an anti-AI stance, but instead due to the number of highly unqualified people using AI. It's the people, not the tools, that are the problem.
Basically don't write slop and if you want to contribute as an outsider, ensure your contribution actually is valid and works.
I’m starting to think AI will kill open source... and maybe even platforms like GitHub/GitLab as we know them.
What I’m seeing: a flood of new repos appearing on GitHub with huge codebases and "extensive" documentation, often produced in two or three commits. The problem is that nobody uses them, nobody reads the docs, and many of these projects don’t provide real value. But the infrastructure cost is real: storing it all, indexing it, scanning it, backing it up, mirroring it....
Licensing is another issue. Licenses protect against copying, but AI changes totally the game: someone can download a repo, ask Claude to analyze and understand it, and then generate a similar solution with no verbatim copying. That’s likely legal... So GPL becomes irrelevant..
If that becomes normal, I can easily imagine companies pulling back from open source. Why publish your best work if anyone can cheaply reimplement it? Code will move back to closed source and become the "secret sauce" again. A black box is harder to vibe-code than an open source repo...
Another project simply paused external contributions entirely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46642012
Another idea is to simply promote the donation of AI credits instead of output tokens. It would be better to donate credits, not outputs, because people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.
>people already working on the project would be better at prompting and steering AI outputs.
In an ideal world sure, but I've seen the entire gamut from amateurs making surprising work to experts whose prompt history looks like a comedy of errors and gotchas. There's some "skill" I can't quite put my finger on when it comes to the way you must speak to an LLM vs another dev. There's more monkey-paw involved in the LLM process, in the sense that you get what you want, but do you want what you'll get?
Very quaint of them to exempt themselves because they've "proven themselves" already.
Surely they are incapable of producing slop because they are just so much smarter than everyone else so the rules shouldn't apply to them, surely.
At the moment I have 20 subagents fixing stuff throughout my own codebase.
But I've never had the gall to let my AI agent do stuff on other people's projects without my direct oversight.
This is the most well-informed and reasonable AI policy I've seen so far. Neither kneejerk-hostile nor laissez faire; just a mature understanding of the limitations of LLMs, and an insistence on transparency and accountability when using them.
with limited training data that llm generated code must be atrocious
shaming doesn't work.
TLDR don't be an asshole and produce good stuff. But I have the feeling that this is not the right direction for the future. Distrust the process: only trust the results.
Moreover this policy is strictly unenforceable because good AI use is indistinguishable from good manual coding. And sometimes even the reverse. I don't believe in coding policies where maintainers need to spot if AI is used or not. I believe in experienced maintainers that are able to tell if a change looks sensible or not.
As someone who has picked up recently some 'legacy' code. AI has been really good at mostly summing up what is going on. In many cases it finds things I had no idea was wrong (because I do not know the code very well yet). This is so called 'battle hardened code'. I review it and say 'yeah its is wildly broken and I see how the original developer ended up here'. Sometimes the previous dev would be nice enough to leave a comment or some devs 'the code is the comments'. I have also had AI go wildly off the rails and do very dumb things. It is an interesting tool for sure one you have to keep an eye on or it will confidently make a foot gun for you. It is also nice for someone like me who has some sort of weird social anxiaty thing about bugging my fellow devs. In that I can create options tables and pick good ideas out of that.
I'm not sure I agree it's completely unenforceable: a sloppy, overly verbose PR, maybe without an attached issue, is pretty easy to pick out.
There's some sensible, easily-judged-by-a-human rules in here. I like the spirit of it and it's well written (I assume by Mitchell, not Claude, given the brevity).
This doesn't work in the age of AI where producing crappy results is much cheaper than verifying them. While this is the case, metadata will be important to understand if you should even bother verifying the results.
The time needed for an AI patch written with the prompt "now make it as small as possible, clean, and human coded" is as big as reviewing the patch itself.
If this were so, we wouldn’t be seeing such reactions from open source maintainers. The reality is AI makes it cheap to create large PRs with little substance.
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That's really nice - and fast ui!
It gets even better when you click on "raw", IMO... which is what you also get when clicking on "raw" on Github.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, given that the original site is such a jarringly user-hostile mess.
Without using a random 3rd party, and without the "jarring user-hostile mess":
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/refs/h...
This option is pretty unreadable on mobile though
Is it? Just tried it in Safari, Firefox and Chrome on a iPhone 12 Mini and I can read all the text? Obviously it isn't formatted, as it's raw markdown, just like what parent's recommended 3rd party platform does, but nothing is cut off or missing for me.
Actually, trying to load that previous platform on my phone makes it worse for readability, seems there is ~10% less width and not as efficient use of vertical space. Together with both being unformatted markdown, I think the raw GitHub URL seems to render better on mobile, at least small ones like my mini.
Whatever your opinion on the GitHub UI may be, at least the text formatting of the markdown is working, which can't be said for that alternative site.
Banned I understand but ridiculed? I would say that these bad drive by spammers are analogous to phishing emails. Do you engage with those? Are they worth any energy or effort from you? I think ghostty should just ghost them :)
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted with no feedback, which is fine I guess, so I am just going to share some more colour on my opinion in case I am being misunderstood
What I meant with analogous to phishing is that the intent for the work is likely the one of personal reward and perhaps less of the desire to contribute. I was thinking they want their name on the contributors list, they want the credit, they want something and they don't want to put effort on it.
Do they deserve to be ridiculed for doing that? Maybe. However, I like to think humans deserve kindness sometimes. It's normal to want something, and I agree that it is not okay to be selfish and lazy about it (ignoring contribution rules and whatnot), so at minimum I think respect applies.
Some people are ignorant, naive, and are still maturing and growing. Bullying them may not help (thought it could) and mockery is a form of aggression.
I think some true false positives will fall into that category and pay the price for those who are truly ill intended.
Lastly, to ridicule is to care. To hate or attack requires caring about it. It requires effort, energy, and time from the maintainers. I think this just adds more waste and is more wasteful.
Maybe those wordings are there just to 'scare' people away and maintainers won't bother engaging, though I find it is just compounding the amount of garbage at this point and nobody benefits from it.
Anyways, would appreciate some feedback from those of you that seem to think otherwise.
Thanks!
PS: What I meant with ghostty should "ghost" them was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning
It always amazes me why image/videos/audio generated by AI are treated differently from code.
Are images somehow better? If one draws, is he better the one that writes code? Why protect one and not the other. Or why protect any form at all?
> You must state the tool you used (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, Amp)
Interesting requirement! Feels a bit like asking someone what IDE they used.
There shouldn't be that meaningful of a difference between the different tools/providers unless you'd consistently see a few underperform and would choose to ban those or something.
The other rules feel like they might discourage AI use due to more boilerplate needed (though I assume the people using AI might make the AI fill out some of it), though I can understand why a project might want to have those sorts of disclosures and control. That said, the rules themselves feel quite reasonable!