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Define policy forbidding use of AI code generators

(github.com)
493 points todsacerdoti | 7 comments | 25 Jun 25 23:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.447s | source | bottom
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benlivengood ◴[26 Jun 25 00:21 UTC] No.44383064[source]▶
Open source and libre/free software are particularly vulnerable to a future where AI-generated code is ruled to be either infringing or public domain.

In the former case, disentangling AI-edits from human edits could tie a project up in legal proceedings for years and projects don't have any funding to fight a copyright suit. Specifically, code that is AI-generated and subsequently modified or incorporated in the rest of the code would raise the question of whether subsequent human edits were non-fair-use derivative works.

In the latter case the license restrictions no longer apply to portions of the codebase raising similar issues from derived code; a project that is only 98% OSS/FS licensed suddenly has much less leverage in takedowns to companies abusing the license terms; having to prove that infringers are definitely using the human-generated and licensed code.

Proprietary software is only mildly harmed in either case; it would require speculative copyright owners to disassemble their binaries and try to make the case that AI-generated code infringed without being able to see the codebase itself. And plenty of proprietary software has public domain code in it already.

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AJ007 ◴[26 Jun 25 00:53 UTC] No.44383229[source]▶
I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a human is review AI code line by line that would tie up humans for years, even ignoring anything legally.

#1 There will be no verifiable way to prove something was AI generated beyond early models.

#2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects. The only room for debate on that is an apocalypse level scenario where humans fail to continue producing semiconductors or electricity.

#3 If a project successfully excludes AI contributions (not clear how other than controlling contributions to a tight group of anti-AI fanatics), it's just going to be cloned, and the clones will leave it in the dust. If the license permits forking then it could be forked too, but cloning and purging any potential legal issues might be preferred.

There still is a path for open source projects. It will be different. There's going to be much, much more software in the future and it's not going to be all junk (although 99% might.)

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amake ◴[26 Jun 25 01:01 UTC] No.44383278[source]▶
> #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects

Still waiting to see evidence of AI-driven projects eating the lunch of "traditional" projects.

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viraptor ◴[26 Jun 25 01:18 UTC] No.44383368[source]▶
It's happening slowly all around. It's not obvious because people producing high quality stuff have no incentive at all to mark their changes as AI-generated. But there are also local tools generated faster than you could adjust existing tools to do what you want. I'm running 3 things now just for myself that I generated from scratch instead of trying to send feature requests to existing apps I can buy.

It's only going to get more pervasive from now on.

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alganet ◴[26 Jun 25 01:44 UTC] No.44383499[source]▶
Can you show these 3 things to us?
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1. linsomniac ◴[26 Jun 25 03:56 UTC] No.44384062[source]▶
Not OP, but:

I'm getting towards the end of a vibe coded ZFS storage backend to ganeti that includes the ability to live migrate VMs to another host by: taking snapshot and replicating it to target, pausing VM, taking another incremental snapshot and replicating it, and then unpausing the VM on the new destination machine. https://github.com/linsomniac/ganeti/tree/newzfs

Other LLM tools I've built this week:

This afternoon I built a web-based SQL query editor/runner with results display, for dev/ops people to run read-only queries against our production database. To replace an existing super simple one, and add query syntax highlighting, snippet library, and other modern features. I can probably release this though I'd need to verify that it won't leak anything. Targets SQL Server.

A couple CLI Jira tools to pull a list of tickets I'm working on (with cache so I can get an immediate response, then get updates after Jira response comes back), and tickets with tags that indicate I have to handle them specially.

An icinga CLI that downtimes hosts, for when we do sweeping machine maintenances like rebooting a VM host with dozens of monitored children.

An Ansible module that is a "swiss army knife" for filesystem manipulation, merging the functions of copy, template, file, so you can loop over a list and: create a directory, template a couple files into it, doing a notify on one and a when on another, ensure a file exists if it doesn't already, to reduce duplication of boilerplate when doing a bunch of file deploys. This I will release as a ansible galaxy module once I have it tested a little more.

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2. EGreg ◴[26 Jun 25 04:55 UTC] No.44384291[source]▶
I vibe-coded my own MySQL-compatible database that performs better than MariaDB, after my agent optimized it for 12 hours. It is also a time-traveling DB and performs better on all benchmarks and the AI says it is completely byzantine-fault-tolerant. Programmers, you had a nice run. /s
3. cess11 ◴[26 Jun 25 05:35 UTC] No.44384462[source]▶
Looks like two commits:

https://github.com/linsomniac/ganeti/commit/e91766bfb42c67ab...

https://github.com/linsomniac/ganeti/commit/f52f6d689c242e3e...

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4. linsomniac ◴[26 Jun 25 05:41 UTC] No.44384492[source]▶
Thanks, I hadn't pushed from my test cluster, check again. "This branch is 12 commits ahead of, 4 commits behind ganeti/ganeti:master"
5. amake ◴[26 Jun 25 05:59 UTC] No.44384571[source]▶
None of this seems relevant to the original claim: "Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects"

I don't feel like it's meaningful to discuss the "competitiveness" of a handful of bespoke local or internal tools.

6. alganet ◴[26 Jun 25 13:08 UTC] No.44387065[source]▶
All the features you mentioned are not coming from the AI.

Here it is invoking the actual zfs commands:

https://github.com/ganeti/ganeti/compare/master...linsomniac...

All the extra python boilerplate just makes it harder to understand IMHO.

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7. ziml77 ◴[26 Jun 25 15:13 UTC] No.44388207[source]▶
I can't imagine they ever even looked at what they checked in, because it includes code that the LLM was using to investigate other code.