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I do write some niche open source projects, ones which: - Have been written with CoPilot enabled in my editor, and - which optionally use GPT 3.5 as a transla
by ekidd 3y ago
I do write some niche open source projects, ones which:
- Have been written with CoPilot enabled in my editor, and
- which optionally use GPT 3.5 as a translation API, and
- Which use OpenAI's text-to-speech model to generate spoken dialog files for testing.
I suppose I can try to mark my projects in a such a way as to inform Gentoo that it's against their policy to package them.
Overall, I would guess that my CoPilot-assisted code is slightly worse than code I hand-craft. The biggest difference seems to be that with CoPilot I write fewer tiny functions, and I tend to keep more related code in one place. On the other hand, CoPilot makes writing test code extremely quick. And I'm not talking about generic boilerplate here: CoPilot can write non-trivial parser or type inference code that relies heavily on internal project APIs that do not exist outside my project.
Overall, I'd guess that CoPilot allows me to produce twice as much code at 90-95% of the quality. Which since we're talking about open source projects that I maintain in my spare time (and that were painfully over-engineered to begin with), is probably a decent tradeoff.
- layer8 3y agoTFA is not about upstream content, as explicitly mentioned.
- ekidd 3y agoMy takeaway was that they weren't happy about upstreams, but didn't feel like there was anything that could actually be done: > We can't do much about upstream projects using it. As a potential upstream, I could potentially help them by adding some kind of metadata to my package, indicating, "Some portions of this code were written with CoPilot active." And this could allow them to automatically filter out and reject packaging requests from users. (As an open source author, I'm deeply ambivalent about distro packaging anyways. I release my software as pre-built, standalone binaries specifically to avoid the tarpit of distro packaging politics. If my software is packaged for a distro, it will almost always need to go through someone else, who may or may not do a good job, or keep the software up to date, or break the software in a way that creates more support requests for me.)
- layer8 3y agoThey may not like use of generative AI in general, but they are clearly only talking about a policy relating to original contributions to Gentoo specifically. This is tangential, but as a user I vastly prefer distributions, because I can rely on stuff working in context, on observing the distro conventions, and on automatically receiving security updates. It is a much more pleasant and convenient mode of software sourcing.