| > I'd still rather have the original than the AI's un-attributed regurgitation. If what you need happens to be exactly what the library provides — nothing more, less, or different — then I see where you're coming from. The drawback is that the dependency itself remains a liability. With such an obscure library, you'll have fewer eyes watching for supply chain attacks. The other issues are that 1) an obscure library is more likely to suddenly become unmaintained; and 2) someone on the team has to remember to include it in scope of internal code audits, since it may be receiving little or no other such attention. > On the other hand, I would be shocked if I had ever used more than 5% of the standard library in the languages I work with regularly. Hence "non-core". A robust stdlib or framework is in line with what I'm suggesting, not a counterexample. I'm not anti-dependency, just being practical. My point is that AI gives developers more freedom to implement more optimal dependency management strategies, and that's a good thing. > unlikely to be improved by that team replicating the parts of the library they need into their own codebase At no point have I advised copying code from libraries instead of importing them. If you can implement a UI component that does exactly what you want and looks exactly how you want it to look in 200 lines of JSX with no dependencies, and you can generate and review the code in less than five minutes, why would you prefer to install a sprawling UI framework with one component that does something kind of similar that you'll still need to heavily customize? The latter won't even save you upfront time anymore, and in exchange you're signing up for years of breaking changes and occasional regressions. That's the best case scenario; worst case scenario it's suddenly deprecated or abandoned and you're no longer getting security updates. It seems like you're taking a very black-and-white view in favor of outsourcing to dependencies. As with everything, there are tradeoffs that should be weighed on a case-by-case basis. |
Maybe I didn't argue this well, but my point is that it's a spectrum. What about libraries in the java ecosystem like Google's Guava and Apache Commons? These are not stdlbibs, but they almost might as well be. Every non-trivial java codebase I've worked in has pulled in Guava and at least some of the Apache commons libraries. Unless you have some other mitigating factor or requirement, I think it'd be silly not to pull these in as dependencies to a project the first time you encounter something they solve. They're still large codebaes you're not using 99% of though.
I don't feel like my position on this is black-and-white. It is not always correct to solve a problem by adding a new dependency - and in the situation you describe - adding a sprawling UI framework would be a mistake. Maybe the situation is different in front-end land, but I don't see how AI really shifts that balance. My colleagues were not doing the bad or wrong thing by copying that incorrect code - tasked with displaying a human-readable file size I would probably either write out the boundaries by hand or copy-paste the first reasonable looking result from stack overflow without much thought too.
> At no point have I advised copying code from libraries instead of importing them.
I didn't say copying, though. I said replicating. If you ask AI to implement something that appears in its training data, there is a high probability it will produce something that looks very similar and even a non-zero possibility it will replicate it exactly. Setting aside value judgements, this is functionally the same as a copy, even if what was done to produce it was not copying.