10 ms·

I understand what experienced developers don't want random AI contributions from no-knowledge "developers" contributing to a project. In any situation, if a hum

• Eisenstein 1y ago
  If AI can generate software so easily and which performs the expected functions, why do we even need to know that it did so? Isn't the future really just asking an AI for a result and getting that result? The AI would be writing all sorts of bespoke code to do the thing we ask, and then discard it immediately after. That is what seems more likely, and not 'so much software we have to figure out rights to'.
• amake 1y ago
  > #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.
  • viraptor 1y ago
    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.
    • alganet 1y ago
      Can you show these 3 things to us?
      • WD-42 1y ago
        For some reason these fully functional ai generated projects that the authors vibe out while playing guitar and clipping their toenails are never open source.
        • dcow 1y ago
          Except this one is (see your sibling).
        • fc417fc802 1y ago
          > the authors vibe out while playing guitar and clipping their toenails I don't think anyone is claiming that. If you submit changes to a FOSS project and an LLM assisted you in writing them how would anyone know? Assuming at least that you are an otherwise competent developer and that you carefully review all code before you commit it. The (admittedly still controversial) claim being made is that developers with LLM assistance are more productive than those without. Further, that there is little incentive for such developers to advertise this assistance. Less trouble for all involved to represent it as 100% your own unassisted work.
          • EGreg 1y ago
            Why would you need to carefully review code? That is so 2024. You’re bottlenecking the process and are at a disadvantage when the AI could be working 24/7. We have AI agents that have been trained to review thousands of PRs that are produced by other, generative agents, and together they have already churned out much more software than human teams can write in a year. AI “assistance” is a short intermediate phase, like the “centaurs” that Garry Kasparov was very fond of (human + computer beat both a human and a computer by itself… until the computer-only became better). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess
  • luqtas 1y ago
    that's like driving big personal vehicles and having a bunch of children and eating a bunch of meat and do nothing about because marine and terrestrial ecosystems weren't fully destroyed by global warming
    • lynx97 1y ago
      Ahh, there you go, environmental activists outright saying having children is considered a crime against nature. Wonderful, you seem to hit a rather bad stereotype right on the head. What is next? Earth would be better of if humanity was eradicated?
      • luqtas 1y ago
        go inform yourself [0] 0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/...
  • mcoliver 1y ago
    80-90% of Claude is now written by Claude
    • 0x457 1y ago
      And whose lunch is it eating?
      • AStonesThrow 1y ago
        [dead]
      • rvnx 1y ago
        Your lunch, the developers behind Claude are very rich and do not need their developer career since they have enough to retire
    • amake 1y ago
      Using AI tools make AI tools is not the impact outside of the AI bubble that people are looking for.
    • brahma-dev 1y ago
      Cigarettes do not cause cancer.
      • brulard 1y ago
        Exactly. People cause cancer to themselves by smoking.
        • brahma-dev 1y ago
          And nicotine is not addictive. https://senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-statement-to-congress https://senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-statement-to-congress
  • ben_w 1y ago
    How can you tell which project is which? I mean, sure, there's plenty of devs who refuse to use AI, but how many projects rather than individuals are in each category? And is Microsoft "traditional"? I name them specifically because their CEO claims 20-30% of their new code is AI generated: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-30-of-the-companys-code-was-written-by-ai/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-3...
    • throwawayoldie 1y ago
      He's the CEO of a large corporation. You have to allow for the significant possibility that he's either lying or doesn't know what he's talking about.
      • ben_w 1y ago
        Sure. But what's the alternative way of finding out? Most (perhaps all) places I've worked have had NDAs, which means statements like this are one of the few ways most of us find out what companies like MS are doing internally. The only other ways I can think of are when hackers leak their entire commit history, or if a court case reveals it. (I don't expect a whistleblower to do so unless they're also triggering one of those other two categories).
        • int_19h 1y ago
          My former colleagues at Microsoft have a few things to say about Satya's statement, but none of them are SFW.
          • ben_w 1y ago
            I can very much believe it, but that doesn't really fix the problem of public vs. private information.
    • VGHN7XDuOXPAzol 1y ago
      This claim just seems like sensationalist marketing BS. If you find the real quote: > “I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software,” Nadella said during a conversation before a live audience with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. — https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a... 'maybe', 'probably', 'some of our projects', 'by software' 'software' would include many sorts of tools that are not AI. Either the CEO talks like a primary school child unintentionally or it's on purpose to drive some clicks without saying anything 'technically' wrong. And this is the CEO of a company that benefits from the doubt. Am I too cynical?
• blibble 1y ago
  > #2 Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects "competitive", meaning: "most features/lines of code emitted" might matter to a PHB or Microsoft but has never mattered to open source
• alganet 1y ago
  Quoting them: > The policy we set now must be for today, and be open to revision. It's best to start strict and safe, then relax. So, no need for the drama.
• A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I am of two minds of it having now seen both good coders augmented by AI and bad coders further diminished by it ( I would even argue its worse than stack overflow, because back then they would at least would have had to adjust code a little bit ). I am personally somewhere in the middle, just good enough to know I am really bad at this so I make sure that I don't contribute to anything that is actually important ( like QEMU ). But how many people recognize their own strengths and weaknesses? That is part of the problem and now we are proposing that even that modicum of self-regulation ( as flawed as it is ) be removed. FWIW, I hear you. I also don't have an answer. Just thinking out loud.
• rapind 1y ago
  > 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. Yeah I don’t think so. But if it does then who cares? AI can just make a better QEMU at that point I guess. They aren’t hurting anyone with this stance (except the AI hype lords), which I’m pretty sure isn’t actually an anti-AI stance, but a pragmatic response to AI slop in its current state.
• basilgohar 1y ago
  I feel like this is mostly proofless assertion. I'm aware what you hint at is happening, but the conclusions you arrive at are far from proven or even reasonable at this stage. For what it's worth, I think AI for code will arrive at a place like how other coding tools sit – hinting, intellisense, linting, maybe even static or dynamic analysis, but I doubt NOT using AI will be a critical asset to productivity. Someone else in the thread already mentioned it's a bit of an amplifier. If you're good, it can make you better, but if you're bad it just spreads your poor skills like a robot vacuum spreads animal waste.
  • galangalalgol 1y ago
    I think that was his point, the project full of bad developers isn't the competition. It is a peer whose skill matches yours and uses agents on top of that. By myself I am no match for myself + cline.
    • Retric 1y ago
      That’s true in the short term. Longer term it’s questionable as using AI tools heavily means you don’t remember all the details creating a new form of technical debt.
      • linsomniac 1y ago
        Dude, have you ever looked at code you wrote 6 months ago and gone "What was the developer thinking?" ;-)
        • ringeryless 1y ago
          yes, constantly. I also don't remember much contextual domain info of a given section of code about 2 weeks into delving into some other part of the same app. So-called AI makes this worse. Let me remind you of gyms, now that humans have been saved of much manual activity...
          • 1y ago
• XorNot 1y ago
  A reasonable conclusion about this would simply be that the developers are saying "we're not merging anything which you can't explain". Which is entirely reasonable. The trend of people say, on HN saying "I asked an LLM and this is what it said..." is infuriating. It's just an upfront declaration that if your answer to something is "it's what Claude thinks" then it's not getting merged.
  • Filligree 1y ago
    That’s not what the policy says, however. You could be the world’s most honest person, using Claude only to generate code you described to it in detail and fully understand, and would still be forbidden.
• heavyset_go 1y ago
  Regarding #1, at least in the mainframe/cloud model of hosted LLMs, the operators have a history of model prompts and outputs. For example, if using Copilot, Microsoft also has every commit ever made if the project is on GitHub. They could, theoretically, determine what did or didn't come out of their models and was integrated into source trees. Regarding #2 and #3, with relatively novel software like QEMU that models platforms that other open source software doesn't, LLMs might not be a good fit for contributions. Especially where emulation and hardware accuracy, timing, quirks, errata etc matter. For example, modeling a new architecture or emulating new hardware might have LLMs generating convincing looking nonsense. Similarly, integrating them with newly added and changing APIs like in kvm might be a poor choice for LLM use.
• safety1st 1y ago
  It seems to me that the point in your first paragraph argues against your points #2 and #3. If a project allows AI generated contributions, there's a risk that they'll be flooded with low quality contributions that consume human time and resources to review, thus paralyzing the project - it'd be like if you tried to read and reply to every spam email you receive. So the argument goes that #2 and #3 will not materialize, blanket acceptance of AI contributions will not help projects become more competitive, it will actually slow them down. Personally I happen to believe that reality will converge somewhere in the middle, you can have a policy which says among other things "be measured in your usage of AI," you can put the emphasis on having contributors do other things like pass unit tests, and if someone gets spammy you can ban them. So I don't think AI is going to paralyze projects but I also think its role in effective software development is a bit narrower than a lot of people currently believe...
• devmor 1y ago
  None of your claims here are based in factual assertion. These are unproven, wishful fantasies that may or may not be eventually true. No one should be evaluating or writing policy based on fantasy.
  • brabel 1y ago
    Are you familiar with the futures market? It’s all about what you call fantasy ! Similarly, if you are determining the strategy of your organization, all you have to help you is “fantasy”. By the time evidence exists in sufficient quantity your lunch has already been eaten long ago. A good CEO is one that can see where the market is going before anyone else. You may be right that AI is just a fad , but given how much the big companies and all the major startups in the last few years are investing on it, it’s overwhelmingly a fringe position to have at this point.
    • devmor 1y ago
      Both the futures market and resource planning are based on evidential standards (usually). When you make those decisions without any reasoning, you are gambling, and might as well go to the casino. But notably, FOSS development is neither a corporation or stock trading. It is focused on longevity and maintainability.
• otabdeveloper4 1y ago
  > Software projects that somehow are 100% human developed will not be competitive with AI assisted or written projects. There is zero evidence so far that AI improves software developer efficiency. No, just because you had fun vibing with a chatbot doesn't mean you delivered the end product faster. All of the supposed AI software development gains are entirely self-reported based on "vibes". (Remember these are the same people who claimed massive developer efficiency gains from programming in Haskell or Lisp a few years back.) Note I'm not even touching on the tech debt issue here, but it is also important. P.S. The hallucination and counting to five problems will never go away. They are intrinsic to the LLM approach.
• gadders 1y ago
  I am guessing they don't need people to prove that contributions didn't contain AI code, they just need the contributor to say they didn't use any AI code. That way, if any AI code is found in their contribution the liability lies with the contributor (but IANAL).
  • graemep 1y ago
    AFAIK in most places it might help with the amount of damages, but does not let you off the hook.
• conartist6 1y ago
  #2 is a complete and total fallacy, trivially disprovable. Overall velocity doesn't come from writing a lot more code, or even from writing code especially quickly.
• kylereeve 1y ago
  > #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. ?? "AI" code generators are still mostly overhyped nonsense that generate incorrect code all the time.
• furyofantares 1y ago
  Much of that may be true in the (near) future but it also makes sense for people to make decisions that apply right now, and update as the future comes along.
• sidewndr46 1y ago
  I guess the AI-fueled demise of left-pad is inevitable then. AI will be able to produce superior versions in no time at all