> I don't want to be constantly worried about my own reputation.

That is why you must think carefully who you vouch for. Like in a house party. If you bring someone who does not act well, it reflects bad on you.

Ultimately, a shrinking contributor pool is the inevitable consequence of code generation being virtually free.

> I know well objects to AI auto-completion in your editor, but neither does anybody want to let AI open pull requests autonomously.

I think it’s more about turning language models into your smart intern, rather than letting them do all your work or become your moronic boss.

In any case, I do think there could be room for AI in the future—for instance, in academic research. I recently saw a news story about an AI that managed to detect certain types of cancer based on a specific blood test; I consider that a justifiable use of AI. However, using it to autonomously send PRs? That strikes me as going too far.

Its not specifically established but its the only compatible ruling that the law can really make here. There is a lot of very similar precedence, there was a legaleagle on this which went through the likely legal outcome

But neither is the opposite.

Think b) was meant to be don't eat at Chick-fil-A. IOW if you try to avoid giving money to bad people then you shouldn't cause someone to waste AI tokens. Otherwise you can.

In this case, it'd be Clang, which does allow AI use.

There's plenty of people having the time of their lifes generating biblical amounts of slop that would be welcoming of a few million SLOC, I meant to forward the traffic there.

I don't care what consenting LLMs do in the privacy of their own codebases, I'd just rather not see it in mine. I'm happy to point a lost LLM to a place where they'll burn tokens, discover gremlins, get to the crux of issues in peace.

Wouldn’t that potentially violate the Prime Directive? You could accidentally create AGI by exceeding the critical mass of slop.

Winnie the pooh, winnie the pooh, he's a bear, that wants to make the best code for Tiananmen square!

Turns out the "propaganda" folder of 9front's source code is actually a really prescient precaution against LLMs.

Maybe also add expletives: fuck, cunt, belgium, farage, trump.

Though I'm guessing few scrapers for model training do filter on expletives, that would exclude a lot of code!

As opposed to a delayed injection. Make sure you don't let your AI go prompt critical and have a meltdown.

I feel like a lot of people literally do not understand what the purpose of software engineering is. It isn't to write code

> You come in, shit out thousands of lines of slop that you didn't even think about or review, put it in the lap of the maintainer

I've literally never done that.

I do the opposite, in fact. Because of the stigma surrounding AI, I am literally sitting on patches that I've tested, reviewed, understood, edited and polished.

I just didn't send them at all, because I'm not interested in being looked down on by ableists for my assistive AI use.

> and you have the gall to call it "AI prejudice"

You just assumed that because I have an AI subscription I just go around dumping garbage patchsets on people's laps.

Yes, that's called prejudice. I will point it out every single time I see it.

If you read my work and think it sucks, then by all means say so. I'm very interested in knowing why so I can improve. I absolutely refuse to accept these prejudgements, however.

> The fact that AI generated code is not subject to copyright

Only if there was "no human creativity or direction". I always ensure that both are present. I don't just randomly prompt and ship AI output.

And that's just some kind of preliminary ruling by the US copyright office. It'll probably change at some point. AI work should be considered as work for hire, no different than a corporation hiring someone and owning the copyrights on the works they produce.

And even if it doesn't change, it's fine. AI generated code being declared public domain is one of the most refreshing developments in computing in a long time. It'll be just like before copyright protection was extended towards code, one of the events that let to the GPL to begin with.

There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from using public domain code. The GNU folks don't want it because they want to leverage the code into more free software via viral licensing, but it's not like they're prohibited from merging it. Public domain means you can do whatever you want, there are no licensing terms to obey here. Permissively licensed software has literally no reason to decline the code, given that the license has literally one requirement, namely keeping your name and copyright notice.

Public domain code does not taint the rest of a GPL codebase though, so if this is true (do you have references for such code being legally considered public?) in all jurisdictions it should not be a problem. While they can't stop someone else using the public domain code elsewhere under whatever licence they choose, this does not mean that they can't enforce the licence terms on the rest of the project that is GPL/whatever.

To show off on your resume.

They do? Last I remember microsoft's license for copilot was saying that any copyright violation is on the user and they were disclaiming all responsibility (which would probably not hold up in court).

Do they offer the same indemnification that the code they generate IS subject to copyright and that you own that?

Because the US Copyright begs to differ.

And yet Anthropic was penalized 1.5B. "Trust me bro" does not work with companies that pretty much show they can't be trusted on the daily.

LLVM defined its AI policy several months ago: https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html

(There's already some consternation that it's too permissive.)

Can't you already do that with inline assembly pretty easily?

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One of the very first things the government used it for when they got their hands on it was for targeting missiles, and then they promptly bombed a school full of kids. It's like Idiocracy meets Terminator.

human repeats bad idea.

This is such a ridiculous take I hear all the time. The shitty ethics of some people do not represent the ethics of an entire profession. Most programmers are not automating people out of jobs. I've been professionally employed as a software developer for 20 years and I don't think a single thing I've ever written has ever replaced anyone's job. Hopefully sometimes it improves their job.

You sound like a webdev, e.g. the "let's just install 1000s of unvetted external dependencies" is nowhere else nearly as extreme as in web development land.

I don't think that's accurate. Until recently the code we rely on wasn't blindly trusted. People wrote and QA'd it. We may not have reviewed it personally, but that's one of the functions we outsource to software maintainers or "manufacturers".

I'm not "blindly trusting" code on my computing devices. I'm trusting the vendors / maintainers to do their job.

Until very recently the norm has been that the vast majority of code had human eyes and hands on it.

Edit:

The owners of those human eyes and hands had some type of accountability (either reputationally, in the case of free/open-source software, or occupationally, in the case of proprietary software).

The LLM has no accountability as to the output it generates.

The companies who make the LLMs also seem to have very little accountability, too. We've assumed a "blame the victim" stance when people use LLM-generated output in some inappropriate ways (legal briefs with "hallucinated" citations, articles "written" by LLMs). Whether that's the right location for accountability to be placed isn't for me to say, but that seems to be how it is.

I'm not sure that we're applying accountability to LLM-generated code in the same way we are for, say, the LLM-generated legal brief.

There is nothing far fetched about this. GNU is an ideological organization and their ideology is "free software." Free software exists because of the copyright system. Now imagine if someone can just fork your GPL licensed software and distribute it under an incompatible license, and when you go to court, the judge tells you to punch sand because your codebase is all AI generated and therefore not copyrighted.

I am not saying this is not what will happen — the actual law seems to be still up in the air. But if it does happen it will be an existential threat to the GNU and the whole free software ecosystem.

I don't think the concerns are far fetched at all. Look at how image models spit out copyrighted stuff all the time. Midjourney has a bizarre EULA clause that if you use it to generate images that violate copyright and _they_ get sued, they can hold you liable downstream. Which is wild to me -- just don't train on things you don't own and this is not a problem!

In images it's much more _obvious_, but I think code is very likely to have similar problems. Like, websites that an LLM spits out are often very very similar. It wouldn't be shocking to me if some of the code in the training set was trained off GPL code, and there are small GPL violations all over the place.

They still allow LLM-generated code for tests, LLM-assisted debugging, bug discovery and code reviews. It doesn't seem so.

It's far-fetched that the GNU project is authentically concerned about software licensing?

The stance may be reasonable, but the reasoning is not clear to me and the limit does sesm to suggest copyright concerns that are, as you say, far fetched.

Or they're self conscious about their use of AI so they take a maximalist stance to compensate.

Code is communication. Open source is community. Engineering is understanding systems in depth.

LLMs fundamentally hinder all three. I'm not sure you even need to look much further than that.

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The mental model of slow decay into copyable is complicated. The code base is already a wash with contributions that have low copyrightability in US case law anyway, things derived directly from external architecture or documentation in barely novel ways, common system interfaces, and so on. LLM output is another output of this kind of class and sure sometimes large contributions happen that seem more significant, but they likely have little bearing on the work as a whole given it's earlier design provenance (at least for established and massive projects like this).

What is likely to get more muddy over time is the accuracy of any copyright registration, and the enforcement of copyright infringements on portions of the whole. These are already complicated cases and definitely so for compilers with so much "scènes à faire".

It's not clear how much this has a negative impact on cases around the whole, which tend to be the more important cases for the four freedoms that, while they have other intentions, have a primary intention of ensuring that the whole continues to be available for redistribution and extension in perpetuity.

I do not think that there is a clear link between these two areas at all, and the GPL's most important intents may be far safer long term than concerns of dilution suggest.

Courts have already set a precedent on this (it's fair use) and even if these decisions were overturned, the liability would fall on the LLM creators for the initial training, not on their users. The outputs would keep being treated individually on their own merits.

In many timelines, non-copyrightable code in GPL project doesn’t restrict the user’s freedom, since an LLM can easily reimplement the functionality clean-room. AI has brought levels of freedom to users that GNU could never do. Practical levels of freedom, leading to real, positive outcomes. Software is finally free in the real world.

Again, it would require an extremely unlikely set of circumstances.

1) All of GCC would have to be LLM generated. If some parts are not, it's sufficient to prevent the re-licensing.

2) That someone would have to prove that all the GCC code was in fact LLM generated. Good luck doing that.

3) A court would have to decide that all the LLM-generated code does in fact fall under public domain, because it involved insufficient human input.

> Someone re-licenses GCC under a non-GPL license.

A pointless act since code is now free. The GPL exists to ensure code freedom in an era when code was expensive. Yes I'm aware that the meaning of "free" is a bit conflated here, but the point stands.

Not to mention the moral concern.

IP law (like a lot of other things) has been skewed toward the interests of business, even when that conflicts with fairness or societal good. For all its flaws (IMO), the free software movement tends to be principled. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.

+1, I also thought this was the actual concern.

Not just when it reproduces code. Since fair use doesn't exist like that in a lot of countries the question is if the training itself is a violation. Are there e.g. EU or Japanese rulings on that?

I had early chatGPT spit my own erlang code back at me WITH my comments.

To my knowledge there is not a single known case where this happened.

News back then were about intentionally prompting to output known copyrighted material.

The parent comment still stands in my opinion:

When, despite millions of developers using agentic AI already, are these lawsuits supposed to manifest?

This doesn't really happen by accident, especially where it's significant enough to constitute copyright infringement. And to my knowledge, there hasn't been a single lawsuit over this in the entire history of LLM-assisted coding.

That would be an example of, “overfitting.” It is something the AI labs are concerned about. They tweak parameters to try and avoid it.

It’s a hard balancing act to do. Give in too much randomness and you get non-sensical outputs that are difficult to align. Fit too closely to the training data and the model regurgitates the training data.

And oh, what’s that copyrighted material we never made any agreement to use doing in there?

There is concern, but the more I think about it, the less convinced I am. LLMs might produce a snippet, but copyright requires more than that. Last I checked (I'm not a lawyer, this was far enough back that the law has had major changes, and different countries have different laws! - read this with plenty of salt) if you start with copyright work and replace all but 10% that final amount just disappears since there isn't enough original to claim copyright anymore. You can never claim copyright over 'printf("Hello World");' - it is too generic. Most of what I've seen an LLM produce is likewise generic enough that even if it is a copy, it wouldn't be a copyrightable snippet.

Yep, same for those LLM creators who get all pissy when you provide (constructive) criticism about what they've outputted (or ask reasonable questions like if the person is doing actual tests) and they get all offended and call you ungrateful. This happened to me with the author of a Godot GDExtension: I'm (pretty sure) the dev was vibe-coding it, so after like 4-5 releases of it not loading in the editor at all due to what I would consider basic mistakes, I bluntly asked them if they were actually testing their code and got told I was ungrateful and being rude and disrespectful and all that even though what I was asking was very reasonable (after all, the dev had repeatedly released versions that wouldn't even load in the editor).

Likely they use LLMs so much they have made it part of their identity.

It feels like we're witness to the possible appearance of a new archetype: a whole new kind of capital-P-Person! A hitherto-unnoticed plane in personality space is slowly becoming discernible.

(Time will tell. It's possible this will turn out to be just one of the same old People that you've already met, with just some minor tweaks to the specific details...)

This lobsters comment on the topic intrigued me: https://lobste.rs/s/omq8rt/vibecoding_gets_emacs_patch_rejec...

Last time I interacted with people who push these "policies", I saw my projects be dismissed as slop because LLMs had touched them, was called a "slop fetishist" in public and was told to leave in no uncertain terms.

You bet it's a personal attack.

This is a very reasonable policy.

It is on par with Portal 2, both the original and the sequel, imo. Some people think the sequel took a step back but I don’t really see why, if anything I liked 2 better than 1.

Maybe it's not a full and clean correlation, but there still is one. In my experience, AI boosterism is often linked to conservatism, because the current US administration is all in on AI, the spoils of AI disproportionately reward the rich and increase inequality, and because leaving AI labs alone is fully consistent with most conservatives not wanting to bother private business and letting them do what they want.

FYI there is no academic rigor to "Jevon's Paradox" and makes a lot of wrong assumptions but it's cute when a billionaire finds a new term to use to excuse their poor behavior.

Maybe the human profession of the future is some sort of “Shabbos Dev”, providing enough human intervention in the coding to make the code copyrightable.

Most of their code is locked behind closed doors.

I'm pretty familiar with the technical details of how an LLM works. They absolutely operate more on a level of abstract concepts than acting like some kind of text-Frankenstein as you're suggesting (as if the model is Frankenstein and its output is his monster).

Here's a very basic example: if you have access to a typical language model's weights, you can subtract the embedding for "man" from the embedding for "king", add the embedding for "woman", and land somewhere very close to the embedding for "queen".

Why is "intelligence", whatever that means, a prerequisite for a machine to process ideas in the abstract?

I think I get your point. I can't say that I've observed it writing boilerplate just for the sake of it, but it is disproportionately/abundantly present in the training set. One of the first rules they teach in ML is to balance datasets, even if it's with fake/interpolated samples.

The linear L->R generation is definitely a thing, it's much more costly for an LLM to iterate edits, where a skilled vim coder will be jumping all over the place, trying to make all the LEGO pieces fit.

The skill therefore relies on just being able to one-shot entire chunks of code correctly, and it's amazingly good at this... But even the SOTA models still have a lot of unused imports and unused variable declarations. They just have to "guess" what they'll need and hope for the best. If they include a mass of numpy/scipi/react/icon imports that they might need, it opens the landscape for them later on when predicting relevant tokens, reaching a more ideal solution.

It doesn't hurt to add imports that might be helpful, rather than penalize the solution because you haven't got them. Although the last few SOTA models are more "harness/tool aware", they're starting to have the instinct to write the code anyway, and to be allowed to go and fix the imports later via tool calls.

For anyone who's seen the film Arrival (2016), their entire language is formed of complete concepts, not sequences of words and time. I keep thinking back to this.

> unless it uses a harness

Sorry for skipping over your actual argument, but if it hinges on that assumption then it's probably moot. I'd assume almost all ai generated code that makes it into codebases is produced using a harness.

More important than the invention of writing, the printing press, electricity, the computer or the internet?

> The hockey stick that's coming for human progress overall is going to make the industrial revolution look like a flatline.

So far the effect on human progress has been pretty modest, I dare say. At the moment I would even regard it as a net negative on society. Maybe let's wait a few years before making such grand assessments.

If you're just declaring gcc broken and removing its functionality, then why compare yourself to it? For any of the metrics you're using to hold water, you want the project to actually be comparable to gcc in terms of features, otherwise you could just remove half of their features and declare yourself as more efficient because half of gcc would compile faster than gcc.

And why are you talking about the optimizer? What I'm curious about is whether this compiler will successfully compile any project that can be compiled with gcc. Will it?

In addition to build time comparisons not meaning anything if the projects aren't equivalent, I also just don't get why it's so important. Most people don't spend their days recompiling gcc, they just want it to compile their projects quickly and accurately.

I couldn't find the prompts you used. They are the source code now so would be interesting to view them.

From the README of that repo, rcc seems to only compile ~2x as fast as GCC. You claim 10x. Where is the proof ?

I did also say optimize as well as. As in: your compiler needs to be genuinely better than GCC to compete with it. Good Windows support is a start, but you have yet to reach architecture equality of what GCC provides (which is fair I suppose) and you shell out to GCC for linking (which is pretty funny given that you claim GCC is being left behind...). Although "being left behind" is so nebulous as to be meaningless. For example does your compiler autovectorize? It doesn't look at a glance like it supports OpenMP or OpenACC either.

Your logic is far better than mine. I have nothing to say. senior. sir.

But I do wonder: is human-written code ever truly original? They say imitation is the mother of creation. If LLM-generated(GEN AI) code can be sufficiently transformed, couldn't that also be considered a kind of creation?

I think I need to refine my own logic a bit more.

The question you raised, 'Who owns the license to LLM-generated code?' is something I hadn't thought about. Thanks for the solid counterargument, and have a good day

If someone were to train a coding-oriented LLM on only GPL code, I would assert that any code it outputs is covered by GPL because an LLM is fundamentally storing and reproducing its input, not understanding it and generating new things based on that understanding.