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And why do you want to know that? So you can call our projects slop? Ostracize us?
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Because LLMs are not humans, and the code they produce will have a different distribution of failure modes than human written code, so attribution is useful info while reviewing?

> while reviewing

As I said, disclosure is polite when contributing code to third party projects which will undergo human review.

No need for such things in one's own projects.


>which will undergo human review

This can be largely assumed to be true for any open source code. It's kinda the point of open source.


Nope. It cannot be assumed at all. Maintainer could just as easily tell Claude to review the hand written code you sent instead of spending any effort on it. Maintainer could sit on the patch for months on end only to swoop in later and rewrite it instead of engaging with you, thereby erasing your contribution and attribution. Maintainer could just ignore you entirely despite the pervasive "patches welcome" attitude.

If there's one thing I learned not to do in open source, it's to assume nonsense like that.


I'm referring to the fact that "open source" quite literally means "readable by humans [and machines]", and anything beyond that is a subject of debate. There are more users than readers in nearly all cases, but being able to read the code as a user is a significant benefit at times, and it's one of the reasons it's such a large ecosystem in terms of both users and contributors. (it usually being free is another big reason, of course)

Even with coding agents gaining popularity, many humans still look at the code at some point.


I see. That depends on how much I care about the project. My favorite ones get weeks of review and refinement, to the point I still consider them to be more or less hand written. Not all projects get to be that important.

for the same reason we want to know who wrote an article, a book, a movie, a song, a play, a journal paper, a painting, and on and on.

why do you so many people want to hide who the real author is?

we should be very weary of anyone claiming they’re the author of something when they’re absolutely not. if jon wrote a book and i take credit, that’s shady as hell.


Ghostwriting is a thing.

Yes, and I respect ghostwritten work less than I do a work with a disclosed true author. Same would be true of unattributed AI-generated code.

yes because there's people who can't write but want to pretend that they can, just like the people who don't disclose they're using these tools. If you're the Gwyneth Paltrow of programming you're not making a great case for yourself, and I'd like to know before touching any of the software.

I don't know, am I? Why don't you check out my work and decide for yourself? Better than forming prejudiced opinions about others.

>Why don't you check out my work and decide for yourself?

because no person can read every line of code written in software they use, or track every commit made to a project. Integrity and authorship matters. If a person lies or obfuscates the origin of what they produce, an article, software, what have you they're doing it for a reason, otherwise they would be honest. That's not prejudice, that's recognizing deceit. And you don't eat fruit from a rotten tree.


> because no person can read every line of code written in software they use, or track every commit made to a project

Ask Claude to do it for you.

> they're doing it for a reason

And you concluded that the reason was they were pretenders who can't hack it.

That's your prejudice. Not interested in helping you categorize me, thanks.


That's fine; don't contribute to projects that ask for proper attribution, then, and I suppose everyone will be happy.

So that the AI model that generated code can get proper credit and we'll know to use (or not use it) next time.

That's not at all what someone who wants to "tell at a glance who used AI" actually wants to know.

You don't need an AI attribution tag to recognize slop. In my experience reviewing PRs, the slop-pushers are most aggressive about stripping the AI attribution anyway. It's the normal devs who use a little bit of AI who leave it in.

The tag is helpful because AI authorship is different than the human authorship. When you work with a project or team for long enough you start to trust certain people and their intuition, but when they start submitting AI-produced code you have to reset and review it like AI code.

I use these tools a lot, too. But I want to know where the code came from so I can review it accordingly. The source matters.

> Ostracize us?

I don't know why you're so defensive. If AI wrote the code just be honest about it.

If you outsourced the code writing to some guy named Bob on Fiverr, I'd want to know that too.



I'm not interesting in joining into some argument you're having with someone on lobste.rs

You're not supposed to join. You said you didn't know why I was defensive. I showed you those posts as evidence of the stigma attached to LLMs and their usage. Now you know why.

Maybe you should step back and see if there's a reason why there's a stigma, instead of stubbornly insisting that there's nothing different between submitting work that you wrote yourself, vs. work done by an LLM.

It doesn’t help your case that your response is to say “well I’ll just hide my use.” That’s fraud.


Yes.

You're not entitled to know what specific tools were used to produce something, generally speaking.

In the absence of such an entitlement, not volunteering to disclose the tools used is not fraud.


Don't think calling a PR written by AI is the same thing as using a "tool". If code is largely generated by AI means that AI was an author and not you with some tool.

At what point does it cease to be AI generated and become my own work?

If LLM generates some code but I edit it, does it become my own work? How much editing must be done?

How large is "largely" ? Exactly how many bits of information must come from my fingers tapping the keyboard in order for me to qualify for authorship? Be precise.

If I write something but the LLM polishes it up a bit, is it still my work? Or is it AI generated?


Consider the rules around copyright. If your part of it is substantive, then it's your own work. If it isn't, then it isn't.

I'm not going to define substantive for you. That's something you should feel obligated to research and learn about yourself; anything less is dishonest.


Some people prefer organic grown food for all kinds of reasons, does it matter to you they would want the same for code? (Also, I'm not picking a side here)

It matters when I'm contributing to their projects. In that case I'll go out of my way to be polite and learn their rules.

That's really all anyone is asking of you. It's odd that this is your position, and yet you seem to be arguing (in your other comments) in a way that seems like you think that you should be able to do whatever you want, with any project, their requirements be damned.

So we can know which commits will be infringing others’ copyright.



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