| > it's because of copyright concerns? Nominatively, yes. But I think I would describe it as risk tolerance. I'm going to be one of those bad cosplayers and assert that the two rulings mentioned even if they were precedent setting, don't actually apply to the risks themselves. Could you win a case is much less important than if you could survive the court costs. There's no doubt some value in LLM based code generation to many individuals. But does it's value outweigh the risks to a community? > and we will probably need to have very harsh punishments for people who try to skirt the requirements. I would need to spend hours of time to articulate exactly how uncomfortable this would make me if I was working along side you. So please forgive this abbreviated abstract. One of the worst things you can do to a community, is put it on rails towards an adversarial relationship. There's going to be a lot of administrative overhead to enabling this, it will be incredibly difficult to get the fairness correct the first time, and I assume (possibly without cause?) it's unlikely to feel fair to everyone if you ever need to enforce it. Is that effort and attention and time best spent there? I believe that no matter what you decide, blanket acceptance, vs blanket denial, vs some middle ground, you're going to have to spend some of the reputation of the project on making the new rule. If you ban it, you will turn away some contributions or new contributors, and a small subset of committers may see their velocity decrease. This counts for some value loss (some positive and some negative) But also accounts for decreased time costs... or rather it enables you to spend more time on people and their work instead. If you allow it, you adopt a large set of new poorly understood risks, and administrative overhead, and time you could have spent working with other people... It will also, turn away contributors. I'm not going to pretend like there was a chance in hell anyone should believe that I was likely to contribute to runc. It's possible in some hypothetical, but extremely unlikely in the current reality. And, if I cared enough about the diff I wanted to submit upstream, I still would open a PR... but, I saw an AGENTS.md in a different repo that I was considering using, was disappointed and decided not to use that repo. Seeing runc embrace AI code generation would without a doubt, cause me to look for an alternative, I assume a reasonable alt probably doesn't exist, and I would resign myself to the disappointment of using runc. I agree with your argument that it's commercial grade copyright laundering, but that's not my core ethical objection to its use. > In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. So the only real suggestion that I have is make sure you remember to optimize for how you want to spend your time. Calculate not just the expected value of the code within the repo, but the expected value of the people working on the repo. |
I think this came out a little wrong -- my point was that if we are going to go with a middle-ground approach then we need to have a much lower tolerance for people who try to abuse the trust we gave in providing a middle-ground. (Also, there is little purpose in having a policy if you don't enforce it.)
For instance, someone knowing that I will deprioritise LLM PRs, and instead of deciding to write the code themselves or accept that that what I work on is my own personal decision to make, they instead decide to try to mask their LLM PR and lie about it -- I would consider this to be completely unacceptable behaviour in any kind of professional relationship.
(For what it's worth, I also consider it bad form to submit any patches or bug reports generated by any tool -- LLM or not -- without explaining what the tool was and what you did with it. The default assumption I have when talking to a human is that they personally did or saw something, but if a tool did it then not mentioning it feels dishonest in more ways than one.)
I did see that lobste.rs did a fairly cute trick to try to block agentic LLMs[1].
[1]: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/pull/1733