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No LLM Code in Dependencies
- skybrian 3mo agoMaybe an LLM could be used to check for this :)
- neutrinobro 3mo agoWas this done by manually reviewing commit messages? I think it would be interesting/useful to have a tool that could use some basic heuristics about LLM generated code to detect code-blobs even if they are not explicitly called out in a commit message.
- api 3mo agoJust like with writing, any kind of AI detection is going to be inaccurate to the point of snake oil. LLM detection in writing is basically today's polygraph test pseudoscience. There was a blog a while ago where someone fed classic literature into one and it was detected as probably AI.
- neutrinobro 3mo agoI'm not sure that is the case in this instance. Certainly general writing is a lot more variable and harder to classify, and on the other extreme certain one-line code changes don't have enough information to say anything. However, a blob with a 500+ line code change and 200+ lines of comments is a dead ringer for some of the current class of LLMs. That isn't to say it this behavior couldn't be obfuscated, but some basic categorization could probably separate the majority of human authored commits vs. AI commits. Heck, you could probably train an AI to detect commit-style just by using pre-2022 code archives and existing known-to-be-AI edits/commits.
- verdverm 3mo agoAn agent doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. If it can find clear examples of stuff you don't want to see in a (potential) dependency quickly, that will save you time. Give it search tools and some policies, then have it go find things. You then check them out, ask followups. Agents as a super powered (re)search assistant is underrated.
- perrygeo 3mo agoIt's not just "the code itself looks LLM generated" - it's also LOC/hr by a particular author which suggests vibe coding. You could look at the author's github contributions to identify time periods when the author was generating code at super-human speeds. Combine the two signals and you might get something better than a pseudoscience?
- zahlman 3mo agoThe heuristics that would be used to "detect AI" here would be things that shouldn't be happening anyway, so false positives wouldn't matter.
- dijksterhuis 3mo agowhen i was reading this i thought of writing some quick and dirty cli tool that checks commit co-authors. wouldn't be perfect, but would eliminate a good chunk of low hanging fruit.
- jonathrg 3mo agoThe diff of the linked commit in git is completely trivial, clearly it just got tagged because of the signoff in the commit message: https://github.com/git/git/commit/d7971544fe17378f44f49983010dbfc1834f7bef https://github.com/git/git/commit/d7971544fe17378f44f4998301... I would be surprised if there is no LLM-assisted code in there prior to this commit, this is just the first where the author chose to disclose it.
- wrs 3mo agoApparently, though not very carefully. The "particularly large LLM generated code churn" in the ram library, for example, is the LLM being used to simply git-revert a change that was not originally done by an LLM.
- joeyh 3mo agoThe commit it reverted has a high probability of also being generated with an LLM, though without disclosing that in the commit message.
- verdverm 3mo agoWe are all figuring this new technology out and people will make mistakes. Would seem overreactionary to swear things off completely because of a single commit and reversion. Look for patterns in dependencies and your own work.
- botfriendsarent 3mo agoI think this is a fair and normal reaction to AI slop. Alot of work though. I think OSS projects are at serious risk of implosion due to the vigilance required which honestly may end up being a fool's errand anyway. But maybe we are thinking about it backward. Have you ever wondered why there is so much "free software"? Beware of strangers bearing gifts. I have always wondered and been suspicious of people who are so eager for you to use their software. Which isnt to say OSS isnt high quality. Im just saying that maybe when people are pushing free software on you they are kind of in it for themselves. As for whats next, me personally, last year I pulled all my personal repos about 80 of them off of bitbucket and self host that all now. I think OSS projects should setup a paywall and charge money to create PRs. Like 10-100 bucks per PR to cover the cost of the extra vigilance. Also I could see migrations away from github, to AI free dependency hosting or something like that. Its an interesting challenge. But its not insurmountable. Either paywall OSS projects or take them off the interwebs. Also one option the OP didnt explore I dont think is forking and freezing the dependencies. Huge maintenance burden, but its better than source corruption. Also use fewer dependencies. Maybe set a limit of 5.
- haywalk 3mo ago> when people are pushing free software on you they are kind of in it for themselves I strongly disagree with this. The free (as in both freedom and as in free beer) software movement was to provide an alternative to proprietary and closed-source software, which is developed by people and corporations who are openly in it for themselves. > Like 10-100 bucks per PR to cover the cost of the extra vigilance. Also I could see migrations away from github, to AI free dependency hosting or something like that. Its an interesting challenge. But its not insurmountable. You could just leave your project where it's at, keep it open source, and simply not accept outside contributions. Lots of open source software operates this way. The Ladybird browser notably switched to this model recently as a reaction to AI pull requests.
- scotty79 3mo agoPaywalling contributions is an interesting idea. You could auction maintainer capacity. I'm super cutious how much people would pay to get their code into a popular oss project.
- StableAlkyne 3mo agoClicking through to https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/ https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/ It looks like git after 2.22 was dropped because it took an LLM commit. Same with ghc. If I have to choose between this or git and the latest ghc, I think I'm going to just wait for someone to fork annex. I don't even feel strongly one way or the other on AI stuff; pragmatically, I'm just not going to stop using the most widely used version controller, or Haskell, just for some guy's (forkable, AGPL licensed) hobby project.
- zahlman 3mo agoTFA is about the dependencies of this project. How does that prevent you from using those things yourself?
- remywang 3mo ago> This will probably prevent git-annex from taking advantage of most new improvements to the Haskell language going forward. That is deeply unfortunate. This is the main reason why git-annex is not guaranteed to never change to depend on LLM generated code, because cutting it off from all future Haskell language improvements may be worse than the alternative. Looks like they are aware, and git-annex has been around for decades written by one of the best Haskellers. “Some guys hobby project” is not fair
- pseudalopex 3mo agoThey said the non LLM dependency build was not default and could become untenable. They said git-annex supports git back to 2.22. Not git after 2.22 was dropped. An incompatible change in ghc would break compilation of other software also.
- kstenerud 3mo ago[flagged]
- tuvix 3mo agoThey will absolutely be missed, maybe not by any individual but the impact of them leaving will be felt. People willing to go to bat for code quality and who are also careful about copyright and the community aspect of open source is why this whole thing worked in the first place.
- kstenerud 3mo agoCopyright won't be a problem. There's enough big business wrapped up in AI usage that the laws will bend towards them. Code quality and community don't die just because people haven't quite figured out how to use the new tools properly yet; quality merely dips for awhile, and the community continues as before. We survived PHP. We can survive this.
- theLiminator 3mo agoIf anything I think discipline and rigor will go up. I think it will force us to adopt stronger type systems, formal methods, and more automated verification.
- kordlessagain 3mo ago5 years ago, I would agree with you. But when you go ALL IN on LLM development, and use annealing with multi-agent harnesses, these issues disappear. One caveat: I build everything off other things that originated with my own hand written code. Auth for my site, for example. Also, most of my current projects are packed with advice I've rendered to the LLM on how git commits go down and cadence of those commits into deployments. Claude Code rarely fucks this up, and has memories and plan files that it updates if we find a hole. So, I'm comfortable with an occasional hiccup in the process. It'll get caught, eventually. Maybe. ;) A recent analysis on my Claude Code prompts showed 1.5B input tokens over the last few months. I use 4-5 provider agents (all CLI) DAILY, so this is a small subset. I spend a lot of time using transcription services to drone on about how some agent fucked things up and how I want it fixed and how to do it. To assist with that process, I'm currently building out a search engine that is exposed via MCP to allow auditing of the dev runs. I already have the foundation of file changes (ala Splunk style) that let me keep an eye on the agents, and an agentic terminal that allows one agent to keep an eye on what the other agent is whacking on. Combined with my constant badgering for proper systems development, these things are improving the process at an acclerated rate. Look, I get being an "engineer" on these types of things, and I think there is an absolute purity in pushing LLM generated code out of a codebase you control. That said, that's not the ONLY way to do things, and your milage will vary based on your systems thinking hat. I prefer to push hard on getting the outcomes and sacrifice the exhaustive process of reviewing every single line of code. Consider frameworks. They make things easier to do, if they are complete and stable. There's an argument here that LLM harnesses should probably not ALSO be maintained by LLMs (something I'm completely ignoring so probably ironic I'm mentioning it). But the point being is the harnesses SHOULD have eyes on most lines of code. Eyes on every package though? Hard to say. I've settled on doing most stuff in Rust nowadays, just because it keeps the LLM more honest. And, we can build most "packages" by hand so we can change them to match our outcomes without code bloat. By bitching at it about code refactoring constantly, annealing the codebase by high level overview, not exhaustive review, I've found things get easier to work on as I go and still stay sane. I do catch the LLMs occasionally hard coding things that belong in their own file or configs, and am a hardass about that and file length. I do read some code and hate it being overly long (and it sucks for burning tokens). FWIW, I typed all this out on my keyboard myself. However, if I ran it through an LLM for cleanup or whatever, the very wall of text itself helps FORCE the LLM to stick to the substantive argument and steers it away from slop prompts. The same applies to code, if you are careful.
- jsnell 3mo agoIt's nicely symmetrical, because conversely I prefer my LLM-generated code to have no dependencies.
- peteforde 3mo agoBingo. These days, my only deps are TinyUSB and LVGL - stuff that would be completely pointless and absurd to recreate.
- chollida1 3mo ago> It's nicely symmetrical, because conversely I prefer my LLM-generated code to have no dependencies. How do you get your code to the point where it has no dependencies? How do you do any sort of database writing without a library, or web access without sockets from an os library? What sort of code has no dependencies? I'm now very curious as I can't see how you can do anything without altest including the std lib from your OS to do any file i/o.
- tayo42 3mo agoWrite assembly to do the syscall instruction with whatever params you need.
- jaggederest 3mo agoRelevant, reader mode recommended: https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nancyminusone 3mo agoYou mean aside from previous work it was trained on?
- 20k 3mo ago
- InTheArena 3mo agoThis is completely infeasible in the age of mythos. The reality is that the velocity is just not going to feasible from a security PoV without leveraging these tools.
- 20k 3mo agoAnalysing codebases with LLMs to find security vulnerabilities is completely unrelated to committing code generated with LLMs
- alchemism 3mo agoIt's a fair comparison. There's a fair amount of plausible-sounding bullshit being peddled as a transparent advertisement for an ai-driven "code security" firm.
- bsamuels 3mo agoand how do you propose fixing the hundreds, if not thousands, of valid, impactful security bugs that frontier models will find?
- slopinthebag 3mo agoThat seems like an unfounded assumption. Why should one assume that Git Annex has hundreds or thousands of critical, exploitable security vulnerabilities?
- bsamuels 3mo agoThis isn't a problem that is isolated to Git Annex. There are many maintainers out there taking anti-LLM stances, and you don't have to look very far to find OSS projects drowning from the wave of bugs. https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/26/the-pressure/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/26/the-pressure/
- slopinthebag 3mo ago
- gravatron 3mo agofunny enough if you spent just a few minutes with a LLM working on the design of your website it wouldn't look like complete shit.
- bitbasher 3mo agofunction > form
- hombre_fatal 3mo agoIf you had to pick one, sure. But it's trivial to have both which is the point of those cringey websites like http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com
- NooneAtAll3 3mo agowdym? looks like a normal html-only website to me
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bwestergard 3mo agoGit annex is a remarkable piece of software and I've been inspired by lead developer joeyh's approach to both FOSS and life. For example: https://joeyh.name/offgrid/ https://joeyh.name/offgrid/
- jaapz 3mo agoI am unreasonably irritated by their use of kw instead of kW
- bitbasher 3mo agoI agree we need to address the elephant in the room, but our community is about as polarized as politics in America.
- hypfer 3mo agoWhat confuses me about this stance is that LLMs are basically indistinguishable from any mid-to-low-tier dev. And those we've let into our codebases with no concerns. Hell, some even threw parties inviting in more of them. At least LLMs don't call HR on you when you rightfully tell them that they're full of shit. Though.. well. Claude probably might.
- sscaryterry 3mo agoThis. So many assumptions. If you disclose you used an LLM, it is immediately assumed all of it is done by an LLM. If there is a bug, its because you are a lazy piece of shit, not because humans make mistakes, and you missed it. It is branded slop. We're living in interesting times, socially, OSS will die because of this. Contributors are dwindling, and will continue to do so. If you want to play in your sandbox, please do. Don't open-source, keep it to yourself.
- gspr 3mo agoI think you're wrong. And I think that FOSS is our last best hope to keep software under the control of the individual. The sloppers are diving head-first into a world where not knowing how a basic idea translates to code is embraced. This is not true of every slopper, but it is true of enough that sloppers are a threat.
- sscaryterry 3mo agoI hear you, but again there are a lot of assumptions in this statement: "sloppers are diving head-first into a world where not knowing". The problem is you've redefined LLM-coding as slopping. "This is not true of every slopper".
- lsaferite 3mo agoI find your comment here interesting. The parent never called out LLM-coding, they said "sloppers". If we take that choice of word as deliberate, it stands to reason there's a distinction there between "sloppers" and LLM assisted coding in general. You quoting "This is not true of every slopper" as proof they are equating the two seems like a weakly defended assertion. It's entirely possible there are 3 broad classes of LLM users in the parent's explicit and implicit beliefs. The thing is, you don't know any more than I know. You are attributing a held belief to someone that you inferred from incomplete information. That being said, if you based your assertion on external, unreferenced knowledge, then you could potentially know they hold that belief. I'd venture to say that a large number of developers are using LLM tooling at this point. Not all of those developers are out there generating massive, poorly engineered PRs and wasting project maintainer time. For me there are at least those 3 broad categories of user of LLMs for software development, maybe more if I sat and thought about it for a while.
- porphyra 3mo agoHow come all the open source projects are fretting over the copyright status of LLM code but big companies are just vibe coding slop all day for their internal closed source projects without a care in the world?
- dehugger 3mo agoRisk exposure of "internal closed source" vs "open source". No one (external) cares nor can inspect a companies pile of internal utilities and code. As long as the code works than there's no problems. Everyone and their cat can look at open source projects, which can and will result in being called out publicly. This can also have legal ramifications on the project itself.
- scotty79 3mo agoBecause open source community is idealistic and corporations are pragmatic.
- pull_my_finger 3mo agoIt's almost like the big companies are playing by a totally different set of rules. How else could Sam, Zuck and co, just blatantly rip pirated, copyrighted, copylefted material and just call whatever repercussions they do (or don't) receive the "cost of doing business". I'm not "anti-AI", I think it's incredible what can be done, but HOW it was produced, and how it's being used is wrong on so many levels. Spotify is running ads for a design "thing", that's basically a generative AI logo creator. Isn't that one of the few instances that's already been clearly put into law - that you can't copyright AI generated stuff? How can you create a business that's selling uncopyrightable logos (which definitely would need/want to be copyrighted/trademarked)? It's the Wild, Wild West out here.
- bioninf_n_door 3mo ago[flagged]
- periodjet 3mo agoThese arguments are increasingly smelling strawman-ish to me. The authors seem to pick the absolute worst possible examples of LLM usage in software development, ignoring the fact that it is ultimately just a tool, and that all the blame for a shitty product continues to lie at the feet of the one wielding it like a giant doofus.
- waterTanuki 3mo agoI sincerely hope people taking the side of the LLMs get everything they ever asked for. When $llm_company begins asking you to open your wallet to fix every vulnerability, bug, or other breaking issue, instead of the guy in Nebraska doing it for free because someone mentored him, will the economics change? Probably not.
- heliskyr2 3mo ago[flagged]
- madikz 3mo ago[flagged]