AI tooling must be disclosed for contributions

I’m not a big AI fan but I do see it as just another tool in your toolbox. I wouldn’t really care how someone got to the end result that is a PR.

But I also think that if a maintainer asks you to jump before submitting a PR, you politely ask, “how high?”

We keep talking about “AI replacing coders,” but the real shift might be that coding itself stops looking like coding. If prompts become the de facto way to create applications/developing systems in the future, maybe programming languages will just be baggage we’ll need to unlearn.

Programming languages were a nice abstraction to accommodate our inability to comprehend complexity - current day LLMs do not have the same limitations as us.

The uncomfortable part will be what happens to PRs and other human-in-the-loop checks. It’s worthwhile to consider that not too far into the future, we might not be debugging code anymore - we’ll be debugging the AI itself. That’s a whole different problem space that will need an entirely new class of solutions and tools.

This fundamentally misunderstands why programming languages exist. They're not required because "we can't understand complexity". They were invented because we need a way to be very specific about what we want the machine to do. Whether it's the actual physical hardware we're talking to when writing assembly, or it's an abstract machine that will be translated to the hardware like in C or Java, the key point is that we want to be specific.

Natural language can be specific, but it requires far too many words. `map (+ 1) xs` is far shorter to write than "return a list of elements by applying a function that adds one to its argument to each element of xs and collecting the results in a separate list", or similar.