6 ms·

So contributions to OpenJDK have to be hand-written, while internally, Oracle uses AI generated code... I guess the logic is that employees who use AI generated

So contributions to OpenJDK have to be hand-written, while internally, Oracle uses AI generated code... I guess the logic is that employees who use AI generated code (theoretically) review their code better? The whole thing still seems a little strange.

bpodgursky 2mo ago
No I'm sure they are just paranoid about license rights.
- sandeepkd 2mo ago
  I believe thats the real reason, its not just Oracle, it would eventually be everyone in this kind of boat. No business would publicly use (or claim) AI to write code with recent verdict over the IP rights of AI generated code. It would be interesting to see how this effects the copyleft Licences with contributors are using AI for the PRs
  - mhitza 2mo ago
    > AI to write code with recent verdict over the IP rights of AI generated code. Which recent verdict? > It would be interesting to see how this effects the copyleft Licences with contributors are using AI for the PRs I know Linux and GCC have been diligent about tagging and tracking LLM based contributions. In the worst case they can chuck it all out and handwrite it back.
    - sandeepkd 2mo ago
      https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 There is this old one around contents like images and all, the ripple affect is pretty much everywhere. Its sort of coupled with the recent penalty of $1.5B on Anthropic. The catch 22 is that some portion of the LLM training data can be classified as IP theft. Even though Anthropic has been fined the data still exists and can be used by LLM to generate code for you. So if you are claiming something as an IP and it has stolen part in it then it leaves you in a hard place. Language translations may save you in some cases, though the whole definition of cleanroom has been in debate recently too where people are trying to rewrite opensource/famous libraries in different language and claiming IP rights over them.
      - robocat 2mo ago
        > penalty of $1.5B on Anthropic Settlement not penalty. Anthropic will have judged the benefits of the settlement, not just the headline cost. It could have been a strategic move by Anthropic: we can't know without information we don't have. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49014389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49014389 1.5B looks like ~2% of funding/income.
        sandeepkd 2mo ago
        I understand the legal terminology is different, however at the same time I am not entirely sure if the optics change by calling it Settlement or Penalty. There is only one party paying money here and they are not getting any service after paying this money so its indeed a penalty for what they did before. Any article describing the details has both the key words, its a legal settlement where Anthropic is penalized. Secondly the future is still not here yet, the people who came forward to sue are mostly in the category of book publishers/authors. The tech companies are are not actively searching for copyright thefts as of yet, however I am sure its just a matter of time when the big blobs of codes get rediscovered specially in case of any publicly visible code
        robocat 2mo ago
        The legal team in the Bartz v. Anthropic case was a coalition of three law firms, funded on a contingency fee basis, which ended up earning them $187 million (12.5%). Other copyright lawsuits against other major companies are happening. If a similar lawsuit costs OpenAI more than 1.5B then perhaps Anthropic is better off in their competitive race? > the people who came forward to sue are mostly in the category of book publishers/authors Irrelevant. The financially savvy parties are the lawfirm L.L.P.s trying to win money for themselves.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- eddieroger 2mo ago
  I don't know, Oracle historically has a very chill, almost laissez-faire point of view on licensing.
  - ghaff 2mo ago
    That's hilarious. Why do you think ZFS isn't more broadly adopted in Linux?
    - prmoustache 2mo ago
      You should send your sarcasm detector for revision.
      - ghaff 2mo ago
        Given enough ignorant comments it can be hard to tell what is satire and what is not.
        eddieroger 2mo ago
        This one was sarcasm. Sorry for making you work so hard to detect it.
  - bpodgursky 2mo ago
    you should do standup
- dan_q 2mo ago
  This constitutes an admission on the part of one of the largest AI investors that AI generated/"assisted" code is inadequate (in part) because it is produced in flagrant violation of license rights.
- cbm-vic-20 2mo ago
  Definitely. Internally, Oracle is very strict about the use of code written outside of Oracle- there is a very strict set of rules and procedures to incorporate open source libraries into their products and services. As for AI, certain core teams, notably the Database team, are forbidden from using LLM coding tools.
Contient 2mo ago
It is not when you stop kidding yourself : using AI has nothing to do to improve the quality of the code. It is a vanity status, at this point.
- fancyfredbot 2mo ago
  Using AI is vanity? I've never heard that before. Why is that? Refusing to use AI honestly seems more like vanity to me. Like "no machine could ever do what I do". That said I would not necessarily accuse people who don't want to use AI of vanity - there are good reasons not to want to use it - but if someone else did it I'd find it easier to understand.
  - iammrpayments 2mo ago
    Of course they could, it is just that sometimes they decide to do something totally broken, that if I did it I would be called stupid, but we just say they hallucinated. Imagine if I exposed my API keys and just said “sorry boss, I took a pill before the job and I hallucinated”
  - Contient 2mo ago
    Vanity in the sense that it is expected of any forward thinking company or individual in those companies to display that they are "embracing AI". Like Allbirds, a shoes company that somehow now does AI.
    - fancyfredbot 2mo ago
      I think what you are describing is people being performative or superficial, not vain. Allbirds is definitely not vanity. That's a scam.
jknoepfler 2mo ago
No, their internal PRs have the same problem, but they are pushing an AI narrative from the c-suite and can hide the reality of their private code bases. The "limited ROI on AI investment" articles will continue to percolate slowly into the brains of the LinkedIn hive-mind until we hit a tipping point, and then we'll finally shut up about how a handy dev tool with some decent use-cases is the dawning of the singularity that will replace all white collar labor and get back to actually building business value.
- asdfman123 2mo ago
  You can get your coworkers to stop sending you slop (I've done it already on my team) but it's probably much harder to stop an onslaught of open source contributors.
  - octoberfranklin 2mo ago
    Nonsense, it's easy: you just need a social process like Linux has. Patches are ignored unless you've proven yourself to somebody. Start by participating in technical discussions on IRC or the smaller mailing lists; do that for a while before you submit patches. For smaller projects: "if I don't know you, I don't merge you". Linux's LLM policy allows AI-generated code because the project was never vulnerable to this DoS attack in the first place. They kept the social defense they've had for decades. The killzone here is Github culture, where people decided it was normal to accept code from anonymous randoms with anime avatars. They're doomed.
- tokioyoyo 2mo ago
  Out of curiosity, do you use frontier AI dev tools on a daily basis professionally?
  - dan_q 2mo ago
    Let me guess: AGI is 2-6 weeks away, software development is solved, and anyone who disagrees with your enlightened perspective is a backwards-looking luddite.
cheeze 2mo ago
I don't know. I think it makes sense to have a policy like this. I haven't written a line of code myself in 6 months, but the point is that _you shouldn't be able to tell_ What I tell people at work: Using AI is good. AI can help you do things that you otherwise wouldn't have. It shouldn't be a crutch for thinking. In that sense, people shouldn't be able to tell that you're using AI unless the tell is that it's _higher quality_ than if you had implemented it by hand. A good example here is a well-written document that has a _ton_ of deep research behind it. Or code that has extensive tests that would have taken too long to write by hand for the task at hand. It's bad when it's just "do this thing and post a PR" but I write my code with AI, look at it as a reviewer, offer suggestions, put those into my steering if needed, and I refine it. The way I see it, I'm the first reviewer on everything now before passing it off to another human for review. There have been points where having AI rewrite something was slower than me doing it, but I'm already in the harness. The cost of waiting is almost zero. What stops me from contributing to the JVM using AI written code that I understand and spent time manicuring? Can a human really tell that it's AI written?

bpodgursky 2mo ago

No I'm sure they are just paranoid about license rights.

sandeepkd 2mo ago
I believe thats the real reason, its not just Oracle, it would eventually be everyone in this kind of boat. No business would publicly use (or claim) AI to write code with recent verdict over the IP rights of AI generated code. It would be interesting to see how this effects the copyleft Licences with contributors are using AI for the PRs
- mhitza 2mo ago
  > AI to write code with recent verdict over the IP rights of AI generated code. Which recent verdict? > It would be interesting to see how this effects the copyleft Licences with contributors are using AI for the PRs I know Linux and GCC have been diligent about tagging and tracking LLM based contributions. In the worst case they can chuck it all out and handwrite it back.
  - sandeepkd 2mo ago
    https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922 There is this old one around contents like images and all, the ripple affect is pretty much everywhere. Its sort of coupled with the recent penalty of $1.5B on Anthropic. The catch 22 is that some portion of the LLM training data can be classified as IP theft. Even though Anthropic has been fined the data still exists and can be used by LLM to generate code for you. So if you are claiming something as an IP and it has stolen part in it then it leaves you in a hard place. Language translations may save you in some cases, though the whole definition of cleanroom has been in debate recently too where people are trying to rewrite opensource/famous libraries in different language and claiming IP rights over them.
    - robocat 2mo ago
      > penalty of $1.5B on Anthropic Settlement not penalty. Anthropic will have judged the benefits of the settlement, not just the headline cost. It could have been a strategic move by Anthropic: we can't know without information we don't have. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49014389 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49014389 1.5B looks like ~2% of funding/income.
      - sandeepkd 2mo ago
        I understand the legal terminology is different, however at the same time I am not entirely sure if the optics change by calling it Settlement or Penalty. There is only one party paying money here and they are not getting any service after paying this money so its indeed a penalty for what they did before. Any article describing the details has both the key words, its a legal settlement where Anthropic is penalized. Secondly the future is still not here yet, the people who came forward to sue are mostly in the category of book publishers/authors. The tech companies are are not actively searching for copyright thefts as of yet, however I am sure its just a matter of time when the big blobs of codes get rediscovered specially in case of any publicly visible code
        robocat 2mo ago
        The legal team in the Bartz v. Anthropic case was a coalition of three law firms, funded on a contingency fee basis, which ended up earning them $187 million (12.5%). Other copyright lawsuits against other major companies are happening. If a similar lawsuit costs OpenAI more than 1.5B then perhaps Anthropic is better off in their competitive race? > the people who came forward to sue are mostly in the category of book publishers/authors Irrelevant. The financially savvy parties are the lawfirm L.L.P.s trying to win money for themselves.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
eddieroger 2mo ago
I don't know, Oracle historically has a very chill, almost laissez-faire point of view on licensing.
- ghaff 2mo ago
  That's hilarious. Why do you think ZFS isn't more broadly adopted in Linux?
  - prmoustache 2mo ago
    You should send your sarcasm detector for revision.
    - ghaff 2mo ago
      Given enough ignorant comments it can be hard to tell what is satire and what is not.
      - eddieroger 2mo ago
        This one was sarcasm. Sorry for making you work so hard to detect it.
- bpodgursky 2mo ago
  you should do standup
dan_q 2mo ago
This constitutes an admission on the part of one of the largest AI investors that AI generated/"assisted" code is inadequate (in part) because it is produced in flagrant violation of license rights.
cbm-vic-20 2mo ago
Definitely. Internally, Oracle is very strict about the use of code written outside of Oracle- there is a very strict set of rules and procedures to incorporate open source libraries into their products and services. As for AI, certain core teams, notably the Database team, are forbidden from using LLM coding tools.

Contient 2mo ago

It is not when you stop kidding yourself : using AI has nothing to do to improve the quality of the code. It is a vanity status, at this point.

fancyfredbot 2mo ago
Using AI is vanity? I've never heard that before. Why is that? Refusing to use AI honestly seems more like vanity to me. Like "no machine could ever do what I do". That said I would not necessarily accuse people who don't want to use AI of vanity - there are good reasons not to want to use it - but if someone else did it I'd find it easier to understand.
- iammrpayments 2mo ago
  Of course they could, it is just that sometimes they decide to do something totally broken, that if I did it I would be called stupid, but we just say they hallucinated. Imagine if I exposed my API keys and just said “sorry boss, I took a pill before the job and I hallucinated”
- Contient 2mo ago
  Vanity in the sense that it is expected of any forward thinking company or individual in those companies to display that they are "embracing AI". Like Allbirds, a shoes company that somehow now does AI.
  - fancyfredbot 2mo ago
    I think what you are describing is people being performative or superficial, not vain. Allbirds is definitely not vanity. That's a scam.

jknoepfler 2mo ago

No, their internal PRs have the same problem, but they are pushing an AI narrative from the c-suite and can hide the reality of their private code bases. The "limited ROI on AI investment" articles will continue to percolate slowly into the brains of the LinkedIn hive-mind until we hit a tipping point, and then we'll finally shut up about how a handy dev tool with some decent use-cases is the dawning of the singularity that will replace all white collar labor and get back to actually building business value.

asdfman123 2mo ago
You can get your coworkers to stop sending you slop (I've done it already on my team) but it's probably much harder to stop an onslaught of open source contributors.
- octoberfranklin 2mo ago
  Nonsense, it's easy: you just need a social process like Linux has. Patches are ignored unless you've proven yourself to somebody. Start by participating in technical discussions on IRC or the smaller mailing lists; do that for a while before you submit patches. For smaller projects: "if I don't know you, I don't merge you". Linux's LLM policy allows AI-generated code because the project was never vulnerable to this DoS attack in the first place. They kept the social defense they've had for decades. The killzone here is Github culture, where people decided it was normal to accept code from anonymous randoms with anime avatars. They're doomed.
tokioyoyo 2mo ago
Out of curiosity, do you use frontier AI dev tools on a daily basis professionally?
- dan_q 2mo ago
  Let me guess: AGI is 2-6 weeks away, software development is solved, and anyone who disagrees with your enlightened perspective is a backwards-looking luddite.

cheeze 2mo ago

I don't know. I think it makes sense to have a policy like this. I haven't written a line of code myself in 6 months, but the point is that _you shouldn't be able to tell_ What I tell people at work: Using AI is good. AI can help you do things that you otherwise wouldn't have. It shouldn't be a crutch for thinking. In that sense, people shouldn't be able to tell that you're using AI unless the tell is that it's _higher quality_ than if you had implemented it by hand. A good example here is a well-written document that has a _ton_ of deep research behind it. Or code that has extensive tests that would have taken too long to write by hand for the task at hand. It's bad when it's just "do this thing and post a PR" but I write my code with AI, look at it as a reviewer, offer suggestions, put those into my steering if needed, and I refine it. The way I see it, I'm the first reviewer on everything now before passing it off to another human for review. There have been points where having AI rewrite something was slower than me doing it, but I'm already in the harness. The cost of waiting is almost zero. What stops me from contributing to the JVM using AI written code that I understand and spent time manicuring? Can a human really tell that it's AI written?