But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”
If it's exactly the same as what you'd have written manually, and you are confident it works, then what's the point of disclosure?
An LLM is regurgitating things from outside that space, where you have no idea of the provenance of what it’s putting into your code.
It doesn’t just matter that the code you’re contributing to a project is correct, it matters quite a lot if it’s actually something you’re allowed to contribute.
- You can’t contribute code that your employer owns to a project if they don’t want you to. - You can’t contribute code under a license that the project doesn’t want you to use. - And you can’t contribute code written by someone else and claim it’s your intellectual property without some sort of contract in place to grant that.
If you use an LLM to generate code that you’re contributing, you have both of the latter two problems. And all of those apply *even if* the code you’re contributing is identical to what you’d have written by hand off the top of your head.
When you contribute to a project, you’re not just sending that project a set of bits, you’re making attestations about how those bits were created.
Why does this seem so difficult for some supposed tech professionals to understand? The entire industry is intellectual property, and this is basic “IP 101” stuff.
Maybe because 99% of people that complain about this complain about problems that never occur in 99% of the cases they cite. My employer isn’t going to give a shit that code that I’ve written for their internal CRUD app gets more or less directly copied into my own. There’s only one way to do that, it was already in my head before I wrote it for them, and it’ll still be in after. As long as I’m not directly competing with their interests, what the hell do they care.
> When you contribute to a project, you’re not just sending that project a set of bits, you’re making attestations about how those bits were created.
You are really not. You are only doing that if the project requires some attestation of provenance. I can tell you that none of mine do.