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AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

(github.com)
728 points freetonik | 5 comments | 21 Aug 25 18:49 UTC | HN request time: 0.015s | source
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electric_muse ◴[21 Aug 25 18:54 UTC] No.44976627[source]▶
I just submitted my first big open source contribution to the OpenAI agents SDK for JS. Every word except the issue I opened was done by AI.

On the flip side, I’m preparing to open source a project I made for a serializable state machine with runtime hooks. But that’s blood sweat and tears labor. AI is writing a lot of the unit tests and the code, but it’s entirely by my architectural design.

There’s a continuum here. It’s not binary. How can we communicate what role AI played?

And does it really matter anymore?

(Disclaimer: autocorrect corrected my spelling mistakes. Sent from iPhone.)

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kbar13 ◴[21 Aug 25 19:00 UTC] No.44976688[source]▶
if you read his note i think he gives good insight as to why he wants PRs to signal AI involvement.

that being said i feel like this is an intermediate step - it's really hard to review PRs that are AI slop because it's so easy for those who don't know how to use AI to create a multi-hundred/thousand line diff. but when AI is used well, it really saves time and often creates high quality work

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1. spaceywilly ◴[21 Aug 25 19:11 UTC] No.44976818[source]▶
As long as they make it easy to add a “made with AI” tag to the PR, it seems like there’s really no downside. I personally can’t imagine why someone would want to hide the fact they used AI. A contractor would not try to hide that they used an excavator to dig a hole instead of a shovel.
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2. victorbjorklund ◴[21 Aug 25 19:25 UTC] No.44976950[source]▶
I guess if you write 1000 lines and you just auto tabbed an auto-complete of a variable name done by AI you might not wanna say the code is written by AI.
3. ineedasername ◴[21 Aug 25 19:28 UTC] No.44976988[source]▶
>I personally can’t imagine why someone would want to hide the fact they used AI.

Because of the perception that anything touched by AI must be uncreative slop made without effort. In the case of this article, why else are they asking for disclosure if not to filter and dismiss such contributions?

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4. showcaseearth ◴[21 Aug 25 21:13 UTC] No.44978170[source]▶
Did you actually read the post? The author describes exactly why. It's not to filter and dismiss, but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't actually understand anyway. If you can articulate how you used AI, demonstrate that you understand the problem and your proposed solution (even if AI helped get you there), then I'm sure the maintainers will be happy to work with you to get a PR merged.

>I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

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5. ineedasername ◴[22 Aug 25 00:02 UTC] No.44979655{3}[source]▶
>did you actually read the post?

Yes.

>but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't

This is very much in line with my comment about doing it to filter and dismiss. The author didn't say "So I can reach out and see if their clear eagerness to contribute extends to learning to code in more detail".