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In my big tech company, you don't want to be dismissive of AI if you don't want to sound like a paria. It's hard to believe how much faith leadership has in AI.

In my big tech company, you don't want to be dismissive of AI if you don't want to sound like a paria. It's hard to believe how much faith leadership has in AI. They really want every engineer to use AI as much as possible. Reviewing is increasingly done by AI as well. That being said, I don't think that's why reviewers here were so cordial, but this is the tone you'd expect in the corporate world.

phendrenad2 11mo ago
This is a good point. There's a lot of cheering for the Linus swearing style, but if the average developer did that they'd eventually get a talking-to by HR.
robertheadley 11mo ago
I wouldn't say they were dismissive of AI, just that they are unwilling to merge code that they don't have the time or motivation to review. If you want AI code merged, make it small so it it's an easy review. That being said, I completely understand being unwilling to merge AI code at all.
- joelreymont 11mo ago
  Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Consider my other PR against the Zig compiler [1]... I was careful to make it small and properly document it but there's a strict anti-AI policy for Zig and they closed the PR. Why? Is it not small? Not carefully documented? Is there no value it int? I'm not complaining or arguing for justice. I'm genuinely interested in how people think in this instance. If the sausage looks good and tastes great, and was made observing the proper health standards, do you still care how the sausage was made?! [1] https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 [2] https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-using-the-non-llvm-arm64-backend/13221 https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-us...
  - heavyset_go 11mo ago
    > Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Because AI code cannot be copyrighted. It is not anyone's IP. That matters when you're creating IP. edit: Assuming this is a real person I'm responding to, and this isn't just a marketing gimmick, having seen the trail you've left on the internet over the past few weeks, it strikes me of mania, possibly chatbot-induced. I don't know what I can say that could help, so I'm dropping out of this conversation and wish you the best.
    - kcexn 11mo ago
      This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. The main reason for being unwilling to merge AI code is going to be that it sets a precedent that AI code is acceptable. Suddenly, maintainers need to be able to make judgement calls on a case-by-case basis of what constitutes an acceptable AI contribution, and AI is going to be able to generate far more slop than people will ever have the time to review and agree upon.
      - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
        > This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. Stares at facebook stealing terabytes of copyrighted content to train their models Also, even if code is trained only on FLOSS approved licenses, GPL based ones have some caveats that would disqualify many projects with including code
      - heavyset_go 11mo ago
        > This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. This depends on what courts find, at least one non-precedent setting case found model training on basically everyone's IP without permission to be fair use. If it's fair use, consent isn't needed, licenses don't matter and the only way to prevent training on your content is to withhold it and gate it behind contracts that forfeit your clients' rights to fair use. But that is beside the point, even if what you claim was the case, my point is that AI output isn't property. It's not property whether its training corpus was full of licensed or unlicensed content. This is what the US Copyright Office determined. If you include AI output in your product, that part of it isn't yours. It isn't anybody's, so anyone can copy it and anyone can do whatever they want with it, including the AI/cloud providers you allowed your code to get slurped up to as context to LLMs. You want to own your IP, you don't want to say "we own 30% of the product we wrote, but 70% of it is non-property that anyone can copy/use/sell with no strings attached, even open source licenses". This matters if you're building a business or open source project. If you include AI code in your open source project, that part of the project isn't covered by your license. LLMs can't sign CLAs and they can't produce intellectual property that can be licensed or owned. The more of your project that is developed by AI, the more it is not yours, and the more of it cannot be covered by your open source license of choice.
delian66 11mo ago
Please name it, so that we can know to avoid it and its products.

phendrenad2 11mo ago

This is a good point. There's a lot of cheering for the Linus swearing style, but if the average developer did that they'd eventually get a talking-to by HR.

robertheadley 11mo ago

I wouldn't say they were dismissive of AI, just that they are unwilling to merge code that they don't have the time or motivation to review. If you want AI code merged, make it small so it it's an easy review. That being said, I completely understand being unwilling to merge AI code at all.

joelreymont 11mo ago
Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Consider my other PR against the Zig compiler [1]... I was careful to make it small and properly document it but there's a strict anti-AI policy for Zig and they closed the PR. Why? Is it not small? Not carefully documented? Is there no value it int? I'm not complaining or arguing for justice. I'm genuinely interested in how people think in this instance. If the sausage looks good and tastes great, and was made observing the proper health standards, do you still care how the sausage was made?! [1] https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 https://github.com/joelreymont/zig/pull/1 [2] https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-using-the-non-llvm-arm64-backend/13221 https://ziggit.dev/t/bug-wrong-segment-ordering-for-macos-us...
- heavyset_go 11mo ago
  > Why would you be unwilling to merge AI code at all? Because AI code cannot be copyrighted. It is not anyone's IP. That matters when you're creating IP. edit: Assuming this is a real person I'm responding to, and this isn't just a marketing gimmick, having seen the trail you've left on the internet over the past few weeks, it strikes me of mania, possibly chatbot-induced. I don't know what I can say that could help, so I'm dropping out of this conversation and wish you the best.
  - kcexn 11mo ago
    This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. The main reason for being unwilling to merge AI code is going to be that it sets a precedent that AI code is acceptable. Suddenly, maintainers need to be able to make judgement calls on a case-by-case basis of what constitutes an acceptable AI contribution, and AI is going to be able to generate far more slop than people will ever have the time to review and agree upon.
    - PunchyHamster 11mo ago
      > This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. Stares at facebook stealing terabytes of copyrighted content to train their models Also, even if code is trained only on FLOSS approved licenses, GPL based ones have some caveats that would disqualify many projects with including code
    - heavyset_go 11mo ago
      > This is a position that seems to be as unenforceable as AI can't be trained on code whose copyright owners have not given consent. This depends on what courts find, at least one non-precedent setting case found model training on basically everyone's IP without permission to be fair use. If it's fair use, consent isn't needed, licenses don't matter and the only way to prevent training on your content is to withhold it and gate it behind contracts that forfeit your clients' rights to fair use. But that is beside the point, even if what you claim was the case, my point is that AI output isn't property. It's not property whether its training corpus was full of licensed or unlicensed content. This is what the US Copyright Office determined. If you include AI output in your product, that part of it isn't yours. It isn't anybody's, so anyone can copy it and anyone can do whatever they want with it, including the AI/cloud providers you allowed your code to get slurped up to as context to LLMs. You want to own your IP, you don't want to say "we own 30% of the product we wrote, but 70% of it is non-property that anyone can copy/use/sell with no strings attached, even open source licenses". This matters if you're building a business or open source project. If you include AI code in your open source project, that part of the project isn't covered by your license. LLMs can't sign CLAs and they can't produce intellectual property that can be licensed or owned. The more of your project that is developed by AI, the more it is not yours, and the more of it cannot be covered by your open source license of choice.

delian66 11mo ago

Please name it, so that we can know to avoid it and its products.