New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.
The issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review.<p>A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner.<p>The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch author will just copy paste from an LLM, so the reviewer is essentially just coding with an LLM with more steps.<p>Prior to LLMs reviewing code was a mentorship experience, the patch author would likely learn a bunch afterwards. Now less so.<p>As a result a lot of projects are closing to external contributors.<p>I'm not sure what the answer is, LLM are great at speeding up coding/understanding/etc, but the valuable/expensive piece of work has shifted to reviewing.
This is Amdahl's law in action. [1]<p>Until we figure out a good way to leverage humans in all of this ("Attention is all you need" applies equally to humans as it does to models) productivity gains for the system will always be limited by Amdahl's law. Gwern has an excellent post on this. [2]<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law</a>
[2] <a href="https://gwern.net/guardian-angel" rel="nofollow">https://gwern.net/guardian-angel</a>
The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle?<p>Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct?<p>I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?
Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”. The original authors have no idea what their agents are writing, these are mostly badly quality models (people doing this are not only cutting corners, but also using the less amount of money/tokens to do so). If the agent creates 200, 400 or whatever PRs and get 5 in the agent is still “winning” for the person instructing it. The maintainers though have to filter these out on the other side. A common case is a fix to something that was already fixed simply because the agent worked on old code assumptions.
Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram? Pangram is really accurate from what I’ve found…
> Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”.<p>I've heard this in a lot of places, don't have a way to verify this in action. Do you have any citation or just gut feel (still valid but less useful for me).
It's a well-known trope, that it's harder to read code than to write it, and review is more complicated than to read it, so I do not understand what you want to imply?
Well historically the consensus was that it was harder to read code than to write it, but that leads to uncomfortable conclusions these days, so that bit of common wisdom has mostly been ejected.<p>> I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?<p>I’m not trying to be mean, but this comment is basically “I have no experience with this topic, but it can just be boiled down to this one simple question right?”
Probably a time waster because of the intermediate patch contributor. It’s like a game of telephone at worst, at best the reviewer could just use their own LLM and get the same result.<p>Here’s my hot take: maybe code contributions are obsoleted by coding agents. No one will accept outside contributions because it’s faster to do it themselves.
It depends entirely on how much slop they are flooded with.
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Do all of these folks get the comped Pro Max subscriptions? If not O&A should be.<p>Or, at the very least, the community should be paying for them.
To me, that touches on the central issue. I think most people support the “I don’t care about the tool, only the outcome “<p>But, we have long had a stable social system for collaboration, and in particular dealing with low quality contributions. Mostly (or at least ideally) it involves taking some time to look at the contribution and provide some feedback. The time invested is not worth it on a single exchange basis, but it’s a repeat game, so you are investing in the future.<p>LLMs, and people willing to just spam crap they don’t really understand blows that all up.
I'm not convinced it blows up. It might also end up placing a larger burden on contributors, and especially first-time contributors, to provide concise, high-quality documentation that justifies their contribution.<p>I'm thinking of something like: Explain, in at most 300 characters, why we should merge your change, or at least why we should invest the time to read a longer explanation (somethings things ARE complex). If you don't do that, or those 300 characters aren't convincing, or have nothing to do with your change or the longer explanation, then you get a canned response so the maintainers waste minimal time.
That doesn't really solve the problem. I've gotten PRs that do do an adequate job of explaining why why something should be implemented. Then I look at the code and it doesn't fully solve the problem, or it does so in a way that will obviously break something else.
you know EXACTLY what would happen in such a system.
Nah, that was already blown up way before LLMs existed.<p>Foss wasn't exactly not miserable before 2022. The dysfunction just got amplified so that we cannot fix it anymore by just throwing more human resources at the problem.
yeah, that's fair. Problem so far has been when poor developers send massive volume of slop for review. Takes time and effort to review or at least glance and test it, especially if developer hasn't bothered.
Terminates???
What stops them from submitting PRs from another account?
Nothing. And that's the problem -- the issue isn't "should a contributor be able to use AI" it's quickly becoming "is this entire contributor an AI agent". Every actual-human who gets a bad first experience hurts the project. The contributors having to be suspicious of new people hurts the project. The whole thing just sucks, and I don't know how to fix it.<p>I use claude-code, but the AI ecosystem and some of the autonomous tooling coming out of it -- which some people "helpfully" use irresponsibly and point at OSS projects they aren't personally invested in -- enables a LARGE amount of abusive behavior towards open source projects. This is even before we get into how many infrastructural resources crawlers eat up.<p>Me, and most other OSS contributors, signed up to be a mentor, to create software, to work together ... not to be the equivalent of a reddit moderator banning AI agents left and right.
"Nothing" is not accurate in the context of Debian as per comments above; it's not like Github in that sense.
What is a good project for a human to get human mentorship? Asking for a friend :)
Debian itself is actually great: <a href="https://mentors.debian.net/sponsors/" rel="nofollow">https://mentors.debian.net/sponsors/</a>
<a href="https://stagex.tools" rel="nofollow">https://stagex.tools</a><p>Always happy to train up new packagers and maintainers.
Usually, mentorship is a quite well paid service.
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Good. I want open source projects which serve infrastructure to be gate kept so that only responsible people are involved. Responsible people can use AI too. Get all of those people on board, and keep out irresponsible people!
“This is just gatekeeping” is simultaneously true and ignoring the problem it’s reacting to.<p>Also there’s an implicit moral judgement there against gatekeeping.
Most people who wrote software before AI didn’t contribute to projects like Debian because it takes a certain passion and commitment. Just being able to write code is not the bar for entrance here.
This isn't talking about bespoke software, though. This is talking about upstreaming contributions to others. This puts a low barrier to create work and a lot more work for unpaid volunteers.
I don't care if a project uses AI or not, but I absolutely do care that they are firmly gatekept in alignment with their vision and team dynamics. Then I can choose projects whose gatekeeping policies I agree with.<p>There is never not an alternative to something, and I can always have my AI botch together my own version if I think this is going to get me better results.
> ngl this is just gatekeeping<p>As a beneficiary of Debian, this is good, you are praising Debian with feint damnation. I wish Debian had done <i>more</i> gatekeeping in the past on specific components.
Gatekeeping is good, actually. Not keeping your gate is how your town gets overrun by Mongols.
The issue at hand isn’t people using AI to make some app that they and their mom will use. That’s awesome.<p>It’s people who insist that potentially millions of other people should be affected by their vibe-coded stuff too, by upstreaming it into Debian.<p>I vibe coded some simple things for the family myself, but I don’t expect or require anyone else to want or use it.
Ah, "icky gatekeeping." I'm convinced.
> ngl this is just gatekeeping<p>Gatekeeping serves a useful purpose in any functioning organization of all scales, from a community center to a country, from an open source project to a Fortune 500.
I can't speak for all, but many mature open source communities have explicit or ad-hoc reputation schemes that are used to triage contributions. A fresh account means starting over with zero reputation, which in turn means your contributions wait at the back of the line.
What part of [0] or [1] makes you think that it is easy to have multiple accounts?<p>[0] <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer#Becoming_a_Debian_Maintainer" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer#Becoming_a_Debian_M...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper/JoinTheProject/NewMemberCheckList" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper/JoinTheProject/NewMe...</a>
Well. This is Debian, known for how strict they are about vetting developers. I just remembered Sladen refusing to key sign because my passport circa 2005 didn't have a machine readable slug in it.<p><a href="https://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint" rel="nofollow">https://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint</a>
Debian is notoriously very strict on accepting maintainers and they are not anonymous.
Reputation, or lack thereof.<p>Proof of authority, essentially.
What stopped them before?
In anonymous systems, where we don't use real names, your "handle" has an "age".
That becomes your most prized possession.<p>I have a reddit account thats over 12 years old. I have left the posts/comments open. That means, my "post history" becomes a way to advertise my skills.
I can reference comments from a year ago or 6 months ago about a certain topic to show how I handled something. That does have an effect on people.<p>As opposed to a random 1 day old account. No one takes them seriously, I guess the same is here as well
Be extremely careful with that account then, because they ban accounts for the most minor things now. Stuff like posting evidence disproving something the moderator agrees with. And they ban your account from the whole site, not just from that subreddit any more. Automated algorithms also ban accounts for reasons that don't make any sense.<p>So if you're using your account to advertise yourself and look for jobs, I'd use it <i>only</i> for that. All off-topic discussion should be on a different account with a different physical device and IP address (reddit checks these things and cross-bans) that have never interacted with your main account.
No one takes a 12 year old Reddit account seriously either. It's not a platform you can take anyone seriously. The biggest trolls have 12 year old accounts.
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Not enough. We must <i>kill</i> he who made the mistake.<p>DEATH to anyone who makes a mistake!
Exactly the sort of thing I agree with. If there's code, ultimately, some <i>human</i> is responsible for it, regardless of whether they produced it by hand, by AI, or by rolling dice. (Not that anyone <i>does</i> produce code by rolling dice, mind! Or, if they do, I <i>really</i> don't want to see the results...)<p><pre><code> All project contributions must be submitted by *identifiable human participants* who accept full responsibility for their content. Automated agents, bots, or autonomous AI systems *may not* independently submit issues, pull requests, or other contributions.
Contributors may use software tools, including AI-assisted tools, but the submitting contributor *must:\*
- Fully understand the contribution.
- Be able to explain design and implementation decisions without the use of AI.
- Accept responsibility for maintenance and correctness.
Contributors should indicate AI-generated content in issue and pull request descriptions and comments, specifying which model was used.
Do *not* use AI to reply to questions about your issue or pull request. The questions are for *you,* the human, not an AI model.
</code></pre>
<a href="https://git.erbosoft.com/amy/amsterdam/raw/branch/main/CODE-OF-CONDUCT.md" rel="nofollow">https://git.erbosoft.com/amy/amsterdam/raw/branch/main/CODE-...</a>
This is the way it should've always been. I don't care what tool you use, but you'd better be ready to stand by and explain the results if necessary.
Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?<p>We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion.<p>[EDIT: I was referring specifically to the idea that you have to stand by the code that you write. Is anyone deciding on a policy that says "the AI did it" is a valid excuse for breaking code?]
> Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?<p>Yes. Very notably: <a href="https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/" rel="nofollow">https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/</a>
On the opposite side or the noteable spectrum, look up "Steve Yegge wants you to stop looking at your code." He said it in a video interview, though plenty of summaries online of exact wording and ideas. Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?
Extremes on both sides. I'd wager were moving in Yegge's direction though, like it or not.<p>> Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?<p>If you have a much test coverage as SQLite, I'd be tempted to trust it, and I think that's where we are headed. Someone still needs to define these guardrails though, so IMO the developers job is just mutating into something else, but is still necessary. Long term, who knows.
For me, it’s not a question of whether I like it, nor where we might move in the future, but purely what is proven currently. In my experience, as in my evals, any model, including notably Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol can and indeed do produce code that does not consider many edge cases, can be hard to maintain (especially Sol though it’s output has become markedly better with recent changes to Codex) and sometimes introduce bugs with visibly apparent issues. Existing test coverage doesn’t necessarily prevent such issues when changes or additions are made. The idea that models tend to gravitate towards the house style without major CI based restrictions also has not born fruit in my book. More, I have found even the frontier models amazing at utterly deviating from established standards and tests, what lint, tc and co don’t catch the model will take to introduce code that feels and reads like it does not fits with the rest.<p>Models also still can have major task adherence issues, so even a perfectly well scoped, well considered prompt that covers all situations and coverage can, in many scenarios lead to output users may not expect or notice without reading code. Seen it a lot, just lost some blood and tears to a very straight front end implementation task that I ended up applying manually cause both Sol and Fable struggle to copy a few dozen HTML/JS/CSS snippets properly into a slightly obscure codebase, despite the reference being fully featured and even using the same token scheme, etc…<p>We also see such issues in what labs deliver in their own software products. We are not at the stage where a human shouldn’t sign off on code that they have tested and understood. A hypothetical future, I don’t really care for, we’d notice when labs stop shipping easily apparent bugs, though even then, I’d still feel there is a while in between that and not needing to assess the output anymore.<p>There is, in my mind, no need for this “narrative shifting”, overtone window (don’t get me started on the idea of applying that to what should be a purely technical discussion), convince the unbelievers nonesense that some spend their time on. If models could provide code that didn’t necessitate review, there’d be no one needing to argue that case. If and when they can, we’ll know it, but not because of those espousing this currently.
It's not about the prompt, it's about the guardrails. Static types, compiled, massive test suite, etc. That what I mean by extreme level of test coverage like SQLite. You'd actually need to be an expert in C and SQLite and the SQLite test suite just to sneak a bug into it. Testing and other verifications are going to be an exciting area for the foreseeable future.<p>You can still write non-performant code even with tests, but you can also test performance!
Am about as far away from a C expert as one can be (and probably want to keep it that way for the time being), so happy to take your word on that front. Still feel, it'd be easy and in their interest for one of the major labs to provide a verifiable showcase/research paper on that front. Zig-to-Rust in Bun is the closest and that is very impressive, but I feel it doesn't necessarily map to new features/changes beyond porting. The compiler, browser, etc. all equally do not fill me with that much confidence, but perhaps in SQLite modifications could be hard for a model to mess up.<p>What I will say is that I feel valid in saying that the developer behind gas town (a shudder runs down my spine even having to think about that) is not working in a test suite anywhere comparable to SQLite, though in fairness, you never claimed that.<p>Again, you are likely not wrong that with an environment like SQLite, bugs may be hard to sneak in, but then again, isn't retaining that so important that it is a strong argument for developers auditing LLM output even more strictly, lest we loose the resilience we currently have?
Sol and Fable are not doers, they are thinkers. Using them to "copy a few dozen HTML/JS/CSS snippets properly into a slightly obscure codebase, despite the reference being fully featured" is one of the most ineffective possible usage of those model. What you described is a job for luna.<p>Also I suspect you overprompt, with GPT-5.6 (sol, terra and luna), a lot's of what's used to be mandatory in the AGENT.md is redondant at best and frequantly actively harmful.
I also tried Luna (is my first line for such task in general because of the speed and efficiency, but not because Fable or Sol can’t be “doers”, in my evals both are superior in well scoped task adherence and implementation vs Luna and the like, have yet to find a task Luna can that Sol or Fable can’t) along with Opus 5 (cause the Max sub gives a lot of that I can freely use after Fable runs out for the week so I wasted three runs on that) and Ox Alpha/GLM-5.3 Flash (as that was free at the time). Sol (on High) and Fable (on Medium) were acts of 12h desperation, before I did it manually, after the three other models failed, first with a very simple prompt, failure, revert commits, then a very specific implementation plan with clearly scoped verification, failure, thus manual in 45 minutes. It was a major port of a new settings UX for a Firefox fork, all test baked, all with 1:1 replacement targets in the reference and the original. It was merely massive context wise and only 5.4 has ever behaved well across compactions in a manner that I could validate in evals. No model before or since gave me confidence in this regard and I’ll retroactively test with 5.4, somehow forgot to try that one.<p>I do not have an AGENTS.md in any of my repos at all, stopped using them around 5.2. I was a bit ahead of the curve with that, my evals very early showcased how limiting those tend to be, same why I never used MCP, were useless context bloat.<p>Will maybe make an edit explaining a bit further what the task was once I get to my computer.
> Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?<p>Works for ToS and software and media licenses. Allegedly.
Yes. There are pockets of hardline anti-LLM policies for various reasons.<p>SourceHut bans LLM generated code from their platform <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461724">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461724</a><p>The Asahi Linux project bans LLMs. Unfortunate as LLM reverse engineering and driver writing would bring Linux to more Mac models much faster.<p>The Zig project rejects LLM based contributions.<p>Some of these policies were introduced when LLMs were really bad at writing code and haven’t been revisited. Some groups don’t care about the quality and object on moral or copyright grounds.
notice how mainstream those projects aren’t
> Some groups don’t care about the quality and object on moral or copyright grounds.<p>Precisely why Debian Project's decision is both baffling and infuriating.<p>I hope Debian forks over this. They have <i>severely</i> lost their way.
Note that Debian is mostly ab aggregation of packages. There's nothing wrong with Debian importing a package that was written by AI, if it's something that people want to install. The questionable copyright of that package does not taint Debian as a whole. Debian allows public domain packages, so it wouldn't even be a DFSG violation.<p>There's also nothing wrong with an AI-written install script (if it's correct) because those are likely too trivial to copyright anyway.<p>What are your specific worries? Mine is brain rot.
Debian gives attribution to every single open source project in existence that is capable of running on Linux, and is Free Software. It is exactly the project that shouldn't worry about copyright.<p>The "moral" argument I haven't even heard. It's just people pouring out invective, likely imo because Ruby-monkey is not going to be a $150K job anymore. I have problems with these companies, but companies who are problematic can be targeted specifically, and somehow everybody started using Facebook's frontend framework and Microsoft's IDE, all on MacBooks, and this is what they're throwing a shitfit about. To me it's narcissism, not a coherent moral objection.<p>If you hate these companies (as you should), there are open models. But most didn't object to anything that didn't threaten their income.
if it does, that fork is dead by the end of the year<p>i don’t think you understand just how niche you already are
> I was referring specifically to the idea that you have to stand by the code that you write.<p>Any serious entity which has experts handling code will do so, yes.<p>My employer, for example, has various teams of actual developers and others with a significant number of “not really” devs who found their way into DevOps roles. The teams with seasoned developers hold the author responsible as to the integrity and quality of code, regardless of tools used. They won’t hesitate to call someone out directly for low-quality submissions in Teams channels. The teams that have a lot of “not really” devs will blame the model for issues that surface. Of course, they’re also pushing to not have to write any code directly by FY2028, but instead have models do it as part of an internal AI initiative. Somehow the idea of using AI to generate reports, process reports, write code, test and deploy got signed off.
As others have said there are other conclusions going both ways (though I do think most settle on as you said), though one very fair conclusion I came across is that it's not allowed because the whole issue of copyright is still somewhat unresolved, and though its fine right now, that could (probably wont, but could) massively backfire later.
Many.<p><a href="https://lobste.rs/s/29pm2f/llm_generated_submissions_should_be" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs/s/29pm2f/llm_generated_submissions_should_...</a><p><a href="https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/" rel="nofollow">https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/</a><p><a href="https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html" rel="nofollow">https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...</a><p><a href="https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy" rel="nofollow">https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-pol...</a><p><a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/</a><p><a href="https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/" rel="nofollow">https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/</a>
Yep, in both directions. Some projects ban use of AI entirely. Others are happy to live with slop.
"This works for me, but I need help understanding why, because maybe it would help others" is a legitimate position to be in--has been since long before LLMs. I think we miss out on something when we ignore that position.<p>I'm not saying that anybody should be obligated to review large volumes of low confidence code... just that we should not make policies that ignore shades of gray which, with some collaboration, could bear fruit.
I think the key thing you are missing here is that most successful open source maintainers don’t lack expertise, they lack time. They are generally capable of improving their projects in any direction they want without help. Mentoring new contributors is basically always a loss in the short term as far as the maintainer is concerned. The project does get improved, but it generally takes longer than if they did it by themselves from scratch, and the improvements might be in an area they don’t much care about. The payoff for the maintainers only ever happened in the long term if the mentorship succeeded and they get a viable independent long term contributor.
The change with this justification absolutely exists and has existed for a long time, but this justification only works for small changes (in the past and still today). Don’t come to me with a huge refactor or new feature and this explanation, which is happening more and more recently (it’s an easy strawman to make and hard to prove, but I certainly see it in practice).
What happens when the people "responsible" for the code just walk away?
These are unprecedented times, I think every single company on the planet is figuring our what AI means to them.<p>I think the dust has kind of settled though for engineering teams on: You must use AI for your work, and you must stand by your work.<p>The meat between these two mandates are still being fleshed out.
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I <i>know for a fact</i> were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
I have had the same experience and feel pressured to adopt it. I had one former colleague say “you really have to stop looking at code” almost incredulous that I was uncertain about whether we should let models write really bad code and architecture that never would have been allowed in the before times. I will say when I let the agents go autonomous I often find I spend more time refactoring than if I had moved slower and forced them to write good code and follow project architecture patterns.
I use agents to build exactly what I want like I am pair programming with a jr engineer, and review every line of final output before I make a PR.<p>I would have zero tolerance if anyone that did anything less in my orgs. Owning and understanding the code you submit is the one job that matters most now.
I feel that in a few years, or even less time, we'll see a whole bunch of companies implode, whist others remain fine.
We see it every day in the news with hacks that were, in every single case, completely preventable. That is had any competent security engineers been involved, with leadership willing to fund the cycles to do it right.<p>"But we passed SOC2 and that is all our customers care about" they say, right up until they are in the headlines for a data breach directly resulting from them putting all customer data in plain text internet facing databases the whole team can access from their workstations. What did they think was going to happen? Survivors bias is a hell of a drug.
We should have already seen it. Software was slop quality even before AI. But we didn't see it.
IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some of the very limited space in our memory for more important things.<p>sure, students and juniors shoot themselves in the dick if they let LLMs do everything, but they're fucked anyway so it doesn't matter,
With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.
code didn't matter even before LLMs. we only ever cared about the product of it.<p>the current pace of LLM advancement only has to keep for five more years for handmade code to be considered a liability. I wouldn't worry about being able to recall obscure APIs or whiteboard leetcode. I'm far more worried about having to change careers at 40.
> With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code.<p>Writing, definitely. Reading, maybe. Thinking is another thing. I can think about code in a lot of ways just by reading a description of the code, or knowing how I directed the code to be written, etc. I think people are thinking about the code differently.
That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but this time it's different". And inevitably each time it's not.
> That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer.<p>Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. This was maybe 15 years ago.
> Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue.<p>It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember being able to download the full docs of windows’ various documentation.<p>That’s like saying as a writer you were looked down at because you had to look at a dictionary every once in a while.
I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.
Why wouldn’t it be? If you were in charge of writing a letter and use words that hinders the purpose of the letter, thus resulting in a flawed communication, wouldn’t it be your fault? Especially when dictionaries are easily available?
Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read<p><a href="https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/" rel="nofollow">https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/</a>
I’m genuinely curious why it <i>matters</i> to make abstract moral judgments about the differences between remembering function names and deep understanding of the syntax used in a function.<p>Why don’t we just care about results? Code quality, performance, clarity are all measurable. Why bother with philosophical positions on these?
How do you trust the results of a black box that are hard to verify? Most of us use proxies that are easier to check, like historical competence and maturity. For example, it's difficult to verify my compiler produces a binary that correctly implements the code I wrote. I can <i>partially</i> validate the result with testing, but when I send it out into the world to handle unknown inputs I'm trusting that the compiler has done its job correctly. I can have that trust because I know the compiler people (in aggregate) have thought very hard about correctness, and the project is mature enough that bugs are rare. If the GCC developers tomorrow were to start merging anything that passed the test suite and some other list of objective metrics, my trust would rightly decrease.
Tools like Resharper and IntelliSense make me more productive but don't inhibit my thinking, which is what LLMs seem to do.
It's really not.<p>Number and order of arguments, long names, etc. are just bureaucracy. Knowing them doesn't mean you understand the codebase any better than if you rely on the IDE for it.<p>It's a bit like remembering the exact date an historical event happened vs. knowing at which point in history it did, what other events relate to it, etc. Neither makes you better or worse at knowing and understanding the history of the event.
Juniors are only in trouble if us seniors stop hiring, training and mentoring. Don’t.<p>We need to continue the tradition of elevating humans through mentoring or we won’t have a future scaffolding for work to be done.
I spend a ton of time mentoring Jrs in FOSS communities, but I confess as a startup founder myself I could simply not justify hiring anyone but self-directed seniors until we are profitable enough to set some money on fire for what would effectively be just a long term investment in creating a few new Srs. But Jr hiring will never again be what it was unless it gets subsidized somehow as partial charity.
It doesn't apply to everyone, but yes I know people who are over-reliant on LLMs and definitely getting dumber. With devs and non-devs too. I hate seeing this happen.
It is insiduous how easy it is to stop thinking. When writing complex code it seems like most of the time it would have been faster just to write it myself and build a complete understanding of it. I swear if I asked most engineers at my company to describe their changes recently they would be unable to.
That's what delegation looks like, but it needs a better process.<p>They could be committing plan files alongside any nontrivial change to application code, and the plan file can have everything you'd care about, like the invariants it held to and why, the rejected ideas and why, the acceptable risks and why, etc.<p>This is solved by better usage of LLMs, not less.<p>The divide to me isn't engineering skill vs those who lost it, it's people who care vs. those who don't care. It's a higher level thing now that we're working at a higher level (delegation).
You can just ask Claude why it did something in the code and it will tell you<p>Programmers just moved up a level , not dumber, we are now managers of a team of 'agent' programmers. The deliverable is now a functionality instead of a specific block of code
Yep. I do so much work with Claude on product requirements and architecture before a single line of code is written, and test coverage is extreme.<p>If I need to understand a specific line of code it means I did something wrong in planning or in requirements for testing.
Claude won’t tell you why it did something. Instead, it will generate a probable explanation. The two are very different
I'm not sure how context is managed between reasoning traces and actual output in Claude / claude code, but if the reasoning trace is in the context of the question for "why did you do that", it can actually answer why it did that.
I may be mistaking, but I doubt it digs through thinking tokens of previous runs, not to mention previous sessions
Reasoning traces are also probable explanations.
> You can just ask Claude why it did something<p>But will Claude give you an authentic rationale and a traceable, verifiable "line of reasoning" for those things? Or will it just construct the next plausible Markov chain built on whatever Reddit thread it ingested at random?<p>You can ask Claude or any LLM for citations, and it will RAG them out <i>ex post facto</i>. Those actually aren't citations, they're just web searches for related articles, and they don't necessarily support the assertions that you're asking to cite.<p>I am sure that Claude and the others can produce intermediate logs of their inference and "reasoning" process while they are processing stuff, but can they really go back within the context window and construct an authentic <i>apologia</i> for a specific thing when you ask for it?
You certainly can ask it to produce a verifiable report that tells you how to verify its claims. Yes, you do need to verify the results and confirm you agree with it. I do this sort of thing a lot to discover misunderstandings Claude has about things and iterating on them. There's a difference between reading everything yourself vs having a discussion where one of you (Claude) will happily dig through everything and create detailed memos for review. If you want line numbers as evidence, just ask then verify, etc.
Now replace "Claude" by "human" and see how your comment goes.<p>Specifically, humans are known to decide subconsciously, then invent some "reasoning" out of thin air to justify it.<p>This matches my experience with decision-making in software projects.
People, sometimes weirdly called by their animal name, humans, do have memories of their thought process. We can reach back to those memories to explain why we made a decision. Sometimes we don’t remember and speculate instead. Most of the time we can tell the difference
> and it will tell you [why it did something]<p>No, it will invent retroactively a plausible sounding reason why someone might have done it that way. These are very different things.
An LLM has no special insight into itself and has no reasons. It will come up with something that is convincing, and it will change based on the word choices you used in the request. You can observe this by asking it why it did something that it didn't actually do.<p>Dementia patients also do this.
There’s certainly an analogue to package managers, which made it easy to pick a random package rather than writing the code.<p>We survived. Some upsides, some downsides, life continues.
That's a cultural thing. Push back on it and don't make it acceptable behavior. I would argue most people generally are terrible at code review and do this same behavior with their peers as well, but at least their peers are capable of owning some level of responsibility, whereas the LLM is not.
The LLM did not require them to ignore their code. That's a choice they made.<p>They made choices that made them dumber is what I'm saying.
I think LLMs make programmers lazy more than anything. And when programmers stop programming for extended periods, they lose their programming skills. No surprise here. Use it or lose it.<p>I think a possible solution on both fronts (maintaining software quality, preventing skill atrophy) may be implementation of strict token budgets. Make the individual programmer choose how they are going to spend their limited tokens for the day/week. Provide just enough to use it as a plan/development/review tool, but nowhere near enough to just go full send AI vibe coding software factory slop mode all day long.
You could also say the same with desktops. Desktops abstracted CLI commands like mv or ls. People who are taught on desktops will get scared when they see a terminal.<p>Yet programmers will still know commands.
Abstractions can make things easier but it doesn't require losing skills.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.<p>And compilers made every software engineer worse at writing Assembly and better at skills higher up the stack. This will be no different.
I am pretty tired of this analogy because it does not hold up to scrutiny. The purpose of a programming language is to describe a logical routine in deterministic nonambiguous language. A program is a set of nonambiguous instructions. Heightening levels of abstraction traditionally did not result in less understanding of the program's high-level routine.<p>An example: 'read input from CLI, do this specific transform on it, send log with this text to external service, then output transformed data to CLI' is a program. Going up the abstraction levels from assembly to Ruby, you always know the "What" of the program, while you understand less of the "How" at each step. This is not the case with LLMs used in the common way. The problem with LLMs is that you no longer have a grasp of the "What", because you are not reading the code; you may have memorized the ambiguous English "What" that I wrote above, but that is not sufficient to understand the true behavior because English is not sufficient to represent it; it must be represented in a programming language. (What is 'read'? What is 'send'? What happens with errors?) By the time you have sufficiently represented the program in English to be nonambiguous, you've written more text than the code would have been, with just as much rigor.<p>So LLMs represent a fundamental difference to traditional abstractions: the user has lost the understanding of what is actually happening, because they are prompting ambiguously, and thus they cannot possibly have a grasp of the behavior, because the behavior is not defined in their prompt. In other words, they are programming in a new programming language that has a ton of undefined behavior that just randomly happens. No one could understand the What of their program when using such a language, unless they compiled it to a nonambiguous language and then understood that instead.<p>Of course it is possible to read and understand the code output by the LLM. It is even possible to build a whole knowledge graph in your head, as you traditionally would, and have a pretty full understanding of the whole thing. But, you are always doing this with the outputted code, not with the inputted prompts. The prompts are not analogous to a higher level of abstraction in this way; they are analogous to JIRA tickets. You don't have to read the assembly to understand your program, but you do have to read the LLM outputs.<p>The other issue is that the above paragraph's process of understanding is discouraged. The time taken to fully understand the outputs approaches the time it would have taken to write them yourself, so is very rarely done, and that increasing rarity of understanding is what we are concerned about. The programmers are moving from an understanding of the program into an understanding of the JIRA tickets that produced the program; they are becoming product managers. The thing is, currently you still need someone who understands the program beyond the level of a product manager in order to retain maintainability and quality. Maybe in the future you won't, but right now you do.
> The prompts are not analogous to a higher level of abstraction in this way; they are analogous to JIRA tickets.<p>Your first prompt could be instructions to guide creation of a spec, which leads to a test suite you personally validate, which leads to code to pass those tests in a deterministic way. Then it is your job to review and QA it until it is quality enough to submit to a peer for code review.<p>There are many many ways to use these tools and carefully monitor and quality control what they write like a good engineering lead might, even if they do not type much code themselves at work. The job of the most senior engineers often ends up being heavily biased towards reviewing code all day and maintaining quality control. This is already how things were before AI.<p>Torvalds reviews a -lot- of code and writes very little now.
The reason TDD never really caught on is because it doesn't really work. You don't know in advance what tests need to exist. A test suite is not sufficient to understand the program. Nor is a spec sufficient to understand the program. You have to read the program to understand the program. A spec is English and a test suite is like a converging upper and lower bound to an unknown value. Neither are good enough.<p>Also, the staff engineers who review code all day typically do not really understand the program either. They understand the spec and they have a model of how things should work such that they can answer "should" questions, but they cannot tell you what exactly is going on in the depths of the program; that's not their job. The tools are not capable right now of creating a quality program that the operator only understands at a conceptual level. Again, someone has to actually know, still.
TDD is just one of many options. Personally I rapidly have LLMs rewrite code over and over until it is super easy for me to understand and exactly what I want, and then I generate tests to prevent regressions.<p>Regardless, I run a security auditing company where we constantly find severe bugs in human written code proving the engineers writing it had major gaps in their understanding of their own code. And, others have found flaws like that in my own hand written code! We humans are often very blind at seeing the flaws in our own logic and AIs learned from us.<p>Also, as code reviewers that can spot bugs authors and AIs miss, we are often paid a lot more than the original authors for our time. Also it almost never takes as much time as writing the code in the first place which likely required many round trips with customers to establish needs and fix bugs etc.<p>Your claims imply that only someone that hand types every semicolon is capable of understanding the code does not hold up even in the pre AI world.<p>Code review was the most important job in software engineering before AI and that is still true now.
No. Nada. Wrong.<p>With compilers, you still had to think in depth about the code, write it, develop and maintain muscle memory, understand what you were doing.<p>Many are not doing any of that, and coding is a skill you need to constantly practice.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.<p>Make that some/a lot, but not all.<p>There is a clear bifurcation. A lot of those that never cared really don't care now, but then you get others that can use it to crank that much harder than ever before.<p>If you put the same brain effort in but leverage LLMs you really can be dramatically more productive.
Right! Exactly! You get it!<p>Just like when Boeing decided that their QA process should be abridged to save wasted time and money!<p>And that worked perfectly.<p>(edit: rereading I think maybe you don't support not reviewing all of LLM code you submit, but the above was written with another impression)
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.
Completely wrong generalization.<p>I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition.<p>I used to care, a lot. And I still do.
Tell us more about how you caring a lot matches up with this self diagnosis.<p>Are you prioritizing other things? Do you think losing your cognition and programming skills won't have a negative effect on your project?<p>Those seem bad but maybe they fit into a bigger picture for you?
I don't want to speak for them, but perhaps this is a very real consequence of the "use ai or get left behind" talking point. Maybe they were effectively scared into it, and now are too far gone. They seem like a very reasonable person if they're admitting to being over reliant on LLMs, so I don't mean this as an insult
If you actually cared. You’d do something about it.
I'm not dumb. I care a great deal and I always have. I've just never been good at programming.<p>When I recently found a small bug in how NTP is implemented in Home Assistant OS that was affecting my use of it, I thought about just reporting that bug.<p>But I set the bot forth to work on corrective measures, instead.<p>The first proposed fixes were overbearing and awful. Maybe they'd have worked but it hurt my soul to look at them. I couldn't accept them -- not for my system at home nor for anyone else's.<p>Through a laborious process (that many here could have skipped entirely), I eventually got what I feel is a cromulent fix down to a few lines of changes in an init script.<p>I didn't write it. All I did was direct (and sometimes brow-beat) the bot, rejecting things over and over while optimizing at a high level until it produced an acceptable result.<p>I now have a fix that is tidy-enough that it can be applied to running systems. It is easy to understand what it does, and why it does it -- even for me. Perhaps I should submit a PR...<p>> They just don't care. They didn't before either.<p>...but this kind of blanket mentality really puts a damper on my willingness to do so.
They cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.
There was an increasingly scary mass of people in the industry that viewed the coding as a sort of therapeutic exercise, and would become quite obsessive about it. For those people LLMs are anathema because they take away what was the rewarding part of the job.<p>If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.
You find it scary that people enjoy what they do? Simply caring about the end result is often not wise, ethical, or sustainable, and the quality thereof is dubious in any case, especially when you consider that the end result of developing software is never just the artifact.
Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.<p>And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.<p>This is quite distinct from enjoyment.
> Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.<p>> And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.<p>I know that experience, but I do have a different opinion on this:<p>Many such people studied computer science (a similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines) because they love coding.<p>Unluckily, the job that they got does involve barely any clever coding, but rather<p>- tolerating and gluing together shitty code pieces that someone else wrote<p>- tolerating red tape<p>So, such people simply do in their free time what they love. And to come back to my point "similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines": these people try to use their little free time to prove some novel theorems or put their shed full of machines like 3D printers, CNC mills, CNC lathes, laser cutters, self-built pick-and-place machines, ... to work on their own beloved engineering projects.
People who simply enjoy coding (without treating it to be "therapeutic") are still unhappy because working with LLMs is just not the same, and not rewarding in the same way
> If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.<p>We must be living on different planets, because from everything I can see, software quality is at a historic low.
A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who don't care about the field itself. For those people, they care as little as they can get away with and still be paid big money, and if LLM's allow them to do that at the cost of quality, they absolutely will.<p>I do think LLM's are making some genuine programmers less intelligent, but I think this type of person makes up a decent portion of its users too
> really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money.<p>Sorry to say this, but he doesn't sound like a nice guy.
I just means I'm gonna be filthy rich in a couple of years when most programmers have lost their proficiency and me never having used Claude or any other A.I. slop tool.
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As other comments here point out, that's how it always was and always should be. Accountability is an intrinsic part of any professional role. But maybe because it was always implicit (presumably since it's just so obvious!) people forgot about it and have to be reminded now?<p>This whole phenomenon of "workslop" was a symptom of organizational dysfunction rather than any shortcoming of AI. I really cannot understand how people are producing or even tolerating <i>any</i> amount of workslop -- let alone the epidemic people complain about -- without professional repercussions.
I think this is reasonable but I wonder how long it will last. If the hugging face hack has demonstrated anything it’s that current agents are capable of going entirely rogue and causing harm. If only the human that triggered the incident is responsible we are creating a situation where people are responsible for things they didn’t intend and may end up in a situation where it’s essentially impossible to use AI except in a more limited auto complete style. I am on board with that. I think we should be reviewing code and retaining the ability to write code but there is such a massive incentive to automate agents that I wonder how long prudent organizations will be able to resist the forces. I don’t pretend to have an answer.
We have the same policy at work.<p>Problem is, that you realise very quickly the asymmetry of responsibility and effort. There is far more to review from people who do not care enough to even look at what the agent pooped out.
I always find the “personal responsibility” take hilarious against at-will employment and the usual course of turnover. What is your recourse when you uncover a liar? You can page the responsible party at 3am when their vibe-coded slop breaks prod, and you can fire them when they can’t fix it. Prod is still broken. You still don’t understand the code. At the end of the day, once you hit the merge button, the team is responsible for the code no matter what. You should treat the original author’s presence as a courtesy.
My employer has this policy. We also have a strong code review process. But it all crumbles in the face of developers burning out as management thinks we can move way faster and being overloaded with code that had little thought put into it.
Opposite policy at one of my clients (kind of). I am responsible for the code that upper management's Claude produces. Some Mondays, I will start work with a half dozen emails with attachments of Claude generated code for something I don't even know what the point is, with the task of "integrate this and make sure it works." without any context to go along with it, so I have to read the code, usually hundreds of lines and understand WHY manager wanted it, before I can start to code it myself, because it is 1) in the wrong language, 2) doesn't understand our codebase, 3) is using libraries we can't license, etc.<p>My job has been less watching Claude Code, and more watching Managers Claude Code.<p>I don't know which I hate more as a programmer.
Fully agreed. I never understood why “you own your contribution” doesn’t work for almost all projects in this case. Spam bad PRs or patches and get blocked, same as in the olden days.
> it's still your code<p>I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation.<p>So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
Not a lawyer, but to some degree I think policies like the one Debian came up with can help the argument. You’re not submitting a stream of commits that all have an Authored-By: Claude Code footer and massive yappy commits and comments. The policy essentially forces there to be a degree of human authorship to each commit even if some of the bits came from LLM assistance.
> Copyright<p>Literally irrelevant and I have no idea why people even bring this up constantly. Copyright is practically unenforceable in the software world, when was the last time you saw someone (a company or an individual) actually sue _and win_? Apple wasn't capable of stopping all the other phone manufacturers from directly cloning their product (despite having patents & copyright) so how can an individual? The only thing that matters is execution.<p>For instance, my repos are cloned like ~100/week by what I presume are bots and AI lab scrapers using them for training material. How am I supposed to even find out who's doing it, and if they're abiding by the licenses I provided? It's impossible.<p>Lastly, having copyright isn't the same thing as being allowed to commercialize the software (and I believe loads of people confuse the two). You can still sell public domain code, even if you don't have copyright over it.
Copyleft licences rely on copyright. If that was the case, companies would not massively avoid gpl licensed code.<p>Obviously some do it illegally but unenforceable is not the correct word to use.
That might be your intuition but it’s not how the law works for code ownership. It’s very relevant for free software given the whole principle of free software is a copyright hack that protects a set of freedoms by relying on the copyright being recognized and enforceable.<p>If you drop the copyright claim you drop the protection of free software freedoms.
Software is one of the most derivative types of works ever invented. It's arguably based on copying what other people have already created. The modern world would look a lot more primitive if this wasn't the case.<p>Corporations like Coca-Cola long ago figured out that begging people not to steal your ideas is a waste of time. If you don't want people using your ideas, then <i>don't share them.</i><p>Dunno why so many programmers don't get this and seem perpetually butthurt that other programmers figured out the ultimate way for programmers to rip off each other's code.
At this point, who could bring a copyright claim? Well, considering the massive AI training effort hoovering everything up, seems it might be approximately everyone.<p>Who would they be making the claim against? Well, considering the massive uptake of AI across the tech industry & beyond... approximately everyone.<p>Yes, the model companies are in the middle, but it's getting to the point where it seems a bit doubtful that claims will have any significant outcomes.<p>NYT might be able to get OpenAI to pay them for their content, but that's more of a financial tweak than a up-ending of industry.
Different models have different licensing. Maybe open ai or anthropic doesn't claim ownership of output today, but some companies do. <a href="https://www.recraft.ai/docs/trust-and-security/ownership" rel="nofollow">https://www.recraft.ai/docs/trust-and-security/ownership</a><p>I imagine few can afford a legal battle...<p><i>Free plan<p>Images generated on the Free plan are public and owned by Recraft</i>
Yup. I take the time to review and adjust my code… regardless the source. It works.<p>Well most of the time but either way that’s on me.
Yep. This is my policy. Use whatever tools however they serve you, the standards do not change.<p>If someone makes a sloppy 100,000 line PR in a day the problem is not whether it was generated by Claude or frantically written using VIM and a mechanical keyboard.
What does this responsibility mean in practice?<p>Like what are the actual real consequences if it turns out your code is bad or whatever?
I assume you get banned from contributing?<p>I couldn’t immediately find any more information on what this all means in practice
If it's consistently bad with no signs of improving, banning makes sense. People made mistakes even before LLMs though, and you'd only ban them if they didn't improve and so were a giant waste of time. I don't see why that wouldn't translate here.
Before I left Google recently there was a document going around called go/stake-your-reputation, basically saying "I'm happy to receive your AI generated code but the condition is that I will judge your capabilities by it, exactly as if you handwrote it, and I'll lower my opinion of you if it's slop (with the implication that if you don't improve I'll stop accepting your contributions)"<p>I think the term "stake your reputation" is quite good for this situation. I.e. "hi new contributor, please acknowledge that you Stake Your Reputation before we move ahead with this code review".<p>(Doesn't help with legal aspects of course)
From my layman understanding, the ownership of LLM generated code isn’t yet clarified. It could be that the person who prompted owns it, but it could also be nobody owns it, and we don’t yet have a legal ruling to rely upon, no?
I don't see why an open source project would care one way or the other? If the prompter owns it then they are licensing it by submitting it to the project. If no one owns it then there is no problem.
To a company ownership is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether it contains trade secrets and that is often only proven if an employee worked at their company before
What a fucked up reality when you need to point out that code contributor is responsible for their code.
Well, Debian has the benefit that the project has no trouble at all saying "no". Most open source communities have a difficult time with that.
This is why AI agent attributions in commits is silly (it’s really just a stealth ad for the tool)<p>Had someone at $DAYJOB just shrug and say Claude messed up when I pointed out a sql injection in the code in their PR.<p>It became explicit policy at the company after that moment that blaming the AI is not an excuse for shoddy work.
That's the policy we have at my work. Use AI if you want, as long as people can review it and if it breaks, don't go blaming Claude, it's your fault.
This should be the policy anyway, everywhere.
This is the sensible option and well reasoned position, rather than a zero vote, total and complete ban by a single core maintainer, which is rather destructive for a project to do.<p>When you ask others that use AI frequently, the responsibility and understanding on what the agent wrote does not go away. You need to know what you are doing.<p>As soon as attackers are also using AI against your project, you have no choice but to use AI to protect yourself.
Yeah but how will this work in practice? IMHO people will just submit code they didn't write or understand.<p>Maintainers should quiz the submitters on the code and if they fail to answer reasonably the PR is dropped with the comment: "A.I. slop" and de submitter banned.
86Box is like that and I like it.<p>You’re also responsibility not to write crap PRs.
Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it", oh poor me, someone got a bug. If it's paid for through a job your argument is sound.
> Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it"<p>Sure there is. Contributing to open source is a privilege, not a right. Abuse it, and find yourself unwelcome as a future contributor
You can make the exact same argument with code written by humans. And if you were right we should see shitty bad code in open source projects like Linux, Postgres, etc. We don’t.
How is it different to hand written code if the author doesnt care?
Basically what you’re saying is that anything that exists outside of capitalist incentive structures isn’t allowed to have standards.<p>When I am at home practicing my musical instrument or learning to paint, those aren’t paid activities, so I can’t demand high standards for myself.<p>When Habitat for Humanity is looking for volunteers to do electrical and plumbing on homes, they have to allow unlicensed random folks do it.<p>This is not how life works at all.
"Responsible for it" just means nobody has to tolerate shitty patches even if the reason they're shitty is because you neglected to pay attention to them. And if you blatantly fail to understand your own code or engage with reviewers, nobody has to trust that your LLM knew any better.
This outcome was to be expected.<p>The whole voting mechanism just exists as an elaborate dance that makes everyone keep their face, while the only sensible option wins.<p>A bureaucratic tarpit for bad ideas and emotions.<p>In a better world, none of this would be necessary, but we live in this world, and for that one, it's nice that someone engineered the system that way. Good job.
Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-level-for-contributions" rel="nofollow">https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...</a>
This is great. There's a big difference between levels 2-4 (where I generally operate) and levels 7-8 (where I see a lot of others operate), and I like how this level system makes that explicit.
I think 10 levels here is too much and hints that someone anchored on 10 as a round number and then forced the levels to fit after the fact.<p>I don't really see much value beyond the 3 levels of AI disclosure that have been floating around:<p>- fully human
- ai assisted
- ai generated
> this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful<p>Why would you trust the bot to self-assess truthfully?<p>That's like trusting a spammer to tag his emails as spam.
Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
If there weren't a wide range of options offered, there'd be a risk of it not actually reflecting what people want - which is, presumably, the whole point of putting it to the vote in the first place.
This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.
There was one proposal that focused on environmental issues with AI. This is indeed pretty disconnected from reality when you consider that Debian doesn’t have any policy requiring you to be vegan in order to contribute
What is “disconnected from reality” about environmental considerations regarding AI? Growing AI usage = growing data center power draw = higher emissions from any non-renewable sources contributing to that power, as well as increased freshwater consumption which is itself a considerably difficult resource to renew. That’s about as direct of a causal link between point A (power hungry AI being used for Debian development) and point B (the environment) as you can get. On the other hand, please explain what the hell veganism has to do with Debian development? Like what are you talking about.
Do any of those people with a "very wide range of opionions on AI" actually use AI for programming at all?<p>Because it's perfect for that. Basically designed for it.<p>It's a tool. Like a calculator. Or a shovel.<p>You use it do get things done for you.
A few people certainly refused to use AI at all, but several actually used AI for programming and agreed it was useful, but stopped due to being conscious of the environmental footprint. (That’s very similar to the last proposal in this Debian debate.) I don’t really agree with them, but I concede it’s a valid opinion.
I don't understand enough about coding to speak on Debian as anything but a longtime user.<p>I find AI useful for small shell scripts that you can visually inspect.<p>I want to make a GIF later, so I'll probably ask Duck.AI how to write the command if the file path to the MKV is X and the timestamps are Y and Z.<p>Then, I can create my own little tool without downloading some shady binary that slaps a UI on Imagemagik(sp?) or whatever.<p>I've only played with AI a little bit, with a focus on local LLMs, but even simple things like an anonymous FTP scanner I wrote took a lot longer than someone slightly more skilled than me could have done them in.<p>Anyways, I always respected how Debian gatekeeps access to the code -- some kinds of gatekeeping are cool and good, and a lot of young folks fight with devs trying to show how smart they are -- I've been guilty of that myself in my youth.
Very disappointing. There is no "neutral" for AI, so this is effectively a vote for slop.
How much does open source rely on copyright for enforcement?<p>Do court decisions that limit copyright protection of AI generated content cause problems for open source? Isn't there a requirement for a "Mental Conception" of the code output when using such a tool? Even copypasta requires you to somewhat know what you need to do, where "automated bug finding", does not seem to.
Good outcome, mostly.<p>Option E beat literally every other option, so it is an unambiguous Condorcet winner.<p>Bradley–Davidson analysis: <a href="https://gist.github.com/tulior/74479b28ddd1e191e5b2d89b8b68ccfd" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/tulior/74479b28ddd1e191e5b2d89b8b68c...</a><p>The Bradley-Davidson model gives Option 5 a 99.9993% posterior probability of ranking first.<p>Options 2 and 6 are effectively tied for second.<p>Option 5 also beat every alternative head-to-head. Its closest matchup was against Option 2, at 57.8% to 42.2%, so the result was decisive overall even though the closest pairwise contest was not a blowout.
A good heuristic is to understand the generated code you submit as if you typed every character yourself. A "I'm not sure, AI wrote it" type circumstance is a critical failure.
Joey Hess is unimpressed. See <a href="https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Debian_and_the_sirens/" rel="nofollow">https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Debian_and_the_sirens/</a>
His reasoning is quite fresh and interesting:<p>> What LLMs in Debian development will do, I fear, is eliminate any incentive to scrap boilerplate or reform policies that require a lot of other senseless human effort. If I had had access to LLMs 30 years ago, I might have just had them generate the rules files, replate with complexity. So they will make Debian even more firmly what it is, and ever less likely to explore what it could become.<p>I use and like LLMs, but it does feel like structural social changes are harder to do. For example, creation of new protocols. I hope I'm wrong, and LLMs are used to build collaborative, community projects - not just everyone vibe coding their own incompatible software.
That's perfectly wrong. Since strong coding AI, people venture into huge rewrites and other big changes that automatically make sense but otherwise would not.
Yeah it's a bizarre claim. Even better, I've literally taken some of the crappy experimental projects from the pre-Opus 4.6 era, and turned them into real software as models have become smarter.
That's a very narrow view. If anyone could vibe code their printer drivers, maybe free software wouldn't have existed, because it would not have been needed in the first place.
Yeah. We shouldn't have standardized languages either. Everyone was fine with their own regional dialect for hundreds of thousands of years.
Certainly, but if everyone can vibe code their printer drivers then we have free software in the sense of free speech and so users would be developers and the entire need is met. That is wonderful, not awful.<p>If it had happened early enough, code copyright might never have even been possible and no one can deny you your machine because you can just vibe up stuff.
I use LLM's to make massive structural changes I never would have done by hand all the time. It's intractably tedious for me but easy for an LLM.
Yes, I experiment much more. It's easier to justify, and, perhaps more importantly, just WAY psychologically easier to throw away a 20 minute experiment that your robot wrote for you than the same when it took you a week of tedious manual coding.
Yes, because LLMs have no online learning, it's a mistake to innovative in programming languages and tooling. Use what exists instead, the power of having training data is often underestimated.
His point is using LLMs to build software will lead to code so complex that it requires an Agent. Or that it will cause avoiding cleaning up the boilerplate because we can tolerate it now because of agents.<p>And thus this will all bias towards complexity and fragility..<p>Aside from Bun, which is owned by Anthropic, do we know of open source projects that allow AI where this has happened?
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Is anyone tracking how the different distros are coming down on the question?<p>I was curious how Fedora is moving on this question, but I don't know where to look. And if one wants to hop distro either towards or away from AI, it would be nice to have a place to see the relative adoption.<p>Linux distros are the perfect place to have a wide marketplace of options to suit every person, from completely anti-AI to completely YOLO vibe-code.
LWN tends to be the best bet for these things, but you have to follow their reporting long term, or at least look for specific things you're interested in.<p><a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1081557/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/1081557/</a><p><a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/1039623/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/1039623/</a>
The voting seems to have been pretty much linear to how pro-LLM they were. So it's interesting that all of the proposals were essentially anti-LLM and the chosen one was the mostly neutral, only slightly anti-LLM one. The absence of any pro-LLM proposal indicated that proposal writers are not in sync with the voters
the way you phrase this implies some sort of suppression of LLM interest, but anyone eligible to vote on these could have made their own. The absence of pro-LLM proposals shows nobody wanted one enough to send an email or two about it.
The voters here are people active on the mailing list, not general users of Debian or LLM automated PR contributors.
What would "pro-LLM" look like to you?
Ex: Security-critical code contributions should be scrutinized via state of the art tooling, including but not limited to fuzzers, linters, and adversarial LLM review. For non-security-critical code, use of LLMs is encouraged but not required. The bar for code quality should be raised as the skills of coding agents increase; a developer's choice not to use LLMs is no excuse for miskates that an LLM would catch.
That's an interesting opinion, and I certainly won't downvote you for sharing it, although it's not a position I would ever support. You are right though, that it would strengthen the voted-on position if there were more options either side of the position.<p>I have Things To Say about LLM reviews.<p>They are an endless grind. My biggest source of burnout right now is never being able to finish anything, because the LLM always finds, "Just one more thing" every time I send it back.<p>It's pure polish. The major issues were dealt with long ago. But there's always one more thing that could be done a little better, there's another niche edge case that needs wrapping up.<p>When human developer time was the limiting factor, it was easy to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough.<p>It's harder to say no when it's just one more prompt and one more go-around.<p>Demanding LLM reviews on volunteer maintainers sounds like a great way to quickly end up with no maintainers.
Better heads prevail - this is a good start and the right decision. The agent/bot is controlled by some entity, ergo that entity is responsible for everything it does.<p>I relate that to how a Physician's Assistant gets their authority to treat patients from the Doctor they work under. The Doctor's credentials are on the line if their PA screws up.
People have to realise that AI is here to stay.<p>Being a full time AI hater is counterproductive.<p>Commercial vendors with full time employees are leveraging for maximum benefits, why would a project depending on volunteers resist? Not forgetting it's shortcomings
Could it be that coders are overly focused on the method for generating code over other forms of slop?<p>For example, I’ve seen senior devs outsource their thinking entirely to Claude, then carefully (slowly) generate code that’s not slop on a per-line basis but is slop on an architectural level.
Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't like AI, but ultimately, AI will win out, it's just too good.
The issue with AI is not its obvious value, it's our dependence on it. I worry what will happen to me when I am cut off for some reason.<p>Local models are going to be really important and hopefully computing costs don't make it too prohibitive.
Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.
Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc)<p>Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation? No shot. It's <i>nicer for people</i>, artisanal hand crafted, but... there's a reason I use AI.
It's not even that I'm slower at manual coding anymore, though I very well could be, it's that my expectation of my own progress has shifted. I'll be frustrated to only get a fraction of what I could have done.
Oh, fair enough, my goal was just to preserve "if Anthropic and OpenAI are having a bad day, and the local model on my laptop is too dumb to pour water out of a pot with the instructions on the bottom, how do I fix a bug", I accepted a long time ago that my productivity is going to be 0.1x if I have to go back.
If you're cut off for some reason, you won't code -- but if you're cut off from a power plant, you also won't code. We're reaching the end of scalability for human brains, so we're offloading it.<p>Sure, it means that selling intellectual labor is reaching the end of the line, and the value of learning will drop, but there's a lot more wealth that will be generated.
It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just memorization and recitation. Yeah, it's lame cheating, but writing enables a lot and so it won out.
Yeah, exactly -- when we automated muscles in the industrial revolution, it was fine. Today, we're automating thinking. And, while there are people that still lift weights for fun, it's not needed professionally any more. I think we'll end up in the same place with thinking -- education is probably going to be a hobby, not a requirement.
I bet education will be more important than ever. Prestige, status etc to distinguish yourself. "Taste is all that's left," as someone said here.
This is the solution to the Fermi paradox. Civilization just automate themselves into useless meat sacks.
Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.
Experts don't want to 'gatekeep'. Experts have been producing FOSS for the benefits of everyone, and liberally answering questions on mailing lists, stack overflow etc for free.<p>Experts have been badly bitten by poorly written and badly architected software, lost their hairs trying to figure out bugs and poor design.<p>They recognize the first version of a piece of software is only a miniscule percentage of the work and majority of effort goes into maintenaning it for its lifetime.<p>They are viscerally horrified at a thousands of LoC codebase generated at the speed of GPU inference they are to be responsible for.
it's not gatekeeping when people are submitting PRs they don't understand and make it someone else's problem.
If you’re dismissing the opposition as gatekeepers you clearly don’t understand their positions
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Whelp time to deactivate unattended-upgrades
How rigorous is your code review process when using agentic tools? Do you mandate that folks responsible for the functionality should be fully aware of the code they are shipping or just that it must be rigorously tested?<p>Is there an open source, community maintained coding policy to feed to agents?
Related while developing:<p><i>Debian has begun voting on the future of AI/LLM contributions</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309050">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49309050</a><p><i>Debian polls its developers on AI: permit or ban?</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446653">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49446653</a>
<i>August 29th, 2026. Debian votes to allow responsible use of generative AI. Human decisions are removed from strategic apt packaging. Debian Sid is ported to GNU Hurd by a "free as in speech" swarm. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.</i>
What other sensible option was there? This would be the reality either way.
What are the main workloads of Debian?<p>It's worth noting that Debian has no code production, so the LLM debate applies differently than an open source project.<p>I'd assume the main workload is testing, reviewing code for maliciousness or inefficiencies, adding packages, responding to issues (90% being passing the issue downstream), perhaps setting configurations, and providing some documentation.<p>I don't quite see LLMs being very helpful for most of these. And for some, like generating documentation, LLMs should be strictly forbidden.
On a similar note, is there any distro that explicitly has banned usage of generative AI for their project? Asking for a friend.
OpenBSD seems to have this stance.<p>Source: <a href="https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2" rel="nofollow">https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2</a>
The problem is you can't prove if AI was used or not so Debian's response is actually the most logical one. If anyone uses AI they're still responsible for what they submit.
Gentoo, Guix, a few others
Good, we should be adapting new technologies to our life and not be stuck in a moral dillema about "computers taking our jobs", fuck those who oppose progress.
Debian - and others - could take the opportunity to raise their standards (not that they were relatively low).<p>A new technology, AI, greatly reduces costs in software development. When a new technology makes inputs cheaper, there's a choice: Reduce the cost of the product, or keep the cost the same and spend the newly available resources on improving product (or somewhere between those poles). For example, if the cost of chickens goes down, the farmer can buy a lot more chickens and produce a lot more eggs, or they can keep their expenses the same and now afford higher quality chickens or production (free-range!).<p>In software development, facing this new trade-off, people seem to overwhelmingly choose to produce the same software but far more of it, whether or not anyone wants it.<p>What if instead we made much higher quality software? Larger projects, at least, haven't wanted more pull requests; they have wanted better code. With the AI handling much of the work, the developer's attention can be applied to more difficult tasks. We absolutely need better software, especially with AI systems finding exploits.
.to...r.<p>( T T ): - *: ‑ X
I followed the discussion on debian-vote with interest. I'm glad that the hysterical objections lost, as they seemed quasi-religiously motivated.
But it's an """ethical""" argument against it.
> ... hysterical ... quasi-religiously ...<p>I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case that when my fellow citizens begin to act insane - might it be the result of foreign propaganda.
It would be in foreign interest, yes. But all of this is no different from 50 years of the environmentalist movement. The snail darter was an invented species decades ago. So if it’s propaganda, it’s not invented so much as amplifying what we invented here.
Home grown propaganda, pretending it's from "the others"
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A strange result. It's like "pick no option".<p>Personally I would have voted "nuke all AI", even though AI has some beneficial use. I simply feel AI is too dangerous in projects. Ruby has been mostly slurped up by AI - almost all code contributions are now run by master claude. A few months ago this german dev on the ffmpeg mailing list spam-slopped his fellow guys with an AI-generated proposal. He did not have time to write a real proposal - but he had enough time to have AI slop pester spam other humans. I am sorry but AI really should not be leaked onto other human beings. It's not nice to do so. And the "AI is there to stay" does not seem like a valid excuse to me to spam-slop other humans. Skynet is winning here - it is recruiting humans to love AI.
Debian Rust rewrite incoming.
This seems like a very sane take. At no point during my career up until now would submitting code to production that you didn't understand be acceptable. Over the past months/year, a lot of the discourse around AI-written code I've read comes down to responsibility, and IMO for that we've had a solution since way before this AI boom: as a developer, you are responsible for the code you put into production. This really isn't/shouldn't a wild concept.
Typical Debian. The meaning of the term "responsible" is not defined and so they can continue doing whatever they were doing anyway.<p>But there was some electoral spectacle.<p>What else is new?
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.<p>How absurdly naive.
Now you have seen both cases where a majority vote was involved to allow AI or not, vs a single core beloved dictator for life (BDFL) forces a ban without a vote to allow / disallow AI.<p>This is democracy in action. A fair and square vote and look at how well it works with no core BDFL to force in their opinions.
There are several occurrences in history that the democratic majority has chosen the "wrong" person/way/thing. Democracy is considered the best system but it's not perfect.
Democracy works great among unbiased rational actors who share information. A utilitarian quorum is roughly the loss minimizing decision. The problem is we have biased irrational actors sharing misinformation. The representative system we have is even worse, the indirection between public quorum and decision makers creates a fertile bed for corruption and negative decision bias.<p>Maybe someday we'll have direct democracy paired with voting certification for specific issues.
Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority. And if you naively assume that the majority always knows best, then I suggest you pick up a few history books.
My goal in life is now to get an MBA, weasel my way into Canonical, automate a Debian fork completely and the fire all the heroes who voted for LLMs. At this stage I'd take pleasure in it.<p>Open source sycophants have not stood up to corporations <i>on a single issue</i> since 2015. Their only "activism" was putting up LGBTQ flags, which was also mandated by the corporations.<p>They are complete cowards and it is good to know that Debian, too, now succumbs to corporate fascism and fattens the bank accounts of Musk, Amodei etc.<p>This comment will stay up for about a minute, since the Debian cowards can still operate the flag button for their corporate masters.<p>EDIT: Wrap yourselves in an LGBTQ flag, feel good about yourselves and follow the open source lemmings off the cliff, you spineless creatures.
progress of a kind
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.<p>A quality based filter. Excellent.<p>> The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit.<p>Absolutely.<p>Thanks, Debian!
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A year ago I would agree. But now with sufficient context length the models actually do what they're told.
How many people still know how to tell them to do the right things?
Not really, no. Nothing has changed versus a year ago, you still have to babysit them to make sure they aren't doing something insane.
This is HN you will be voted to death by the local for talking against the AI or the last tech invention.
Meh, I don't think so. They have no way to ascertain what tools were used to write a piece of code. A reasonable solution is to simply hold all code and its contributors to the same standards as before. At Debian's scale, "no LLMs" is really not enforceable; whereas "no shit code" and "no incompetent maintenance" are pragmatic policies they already enforce
This combination of username and opinion are very confusing.
Doing the opposite (disallowing AI), will place it on a path of getting riddled with security issues.<p>When attackers are using AI to both find vulnerabilities and build exploits faster than Debian can figure out how to patch the project without AI, you are saying Debian should not move quicker to fix these issues?
Sadly, Debian was already diseased. This is merely another symptom.
What does "Responsible" even mean...<p>This will turn to shit because laziness will take over and comprehension will fall as a consequence of that. Junior will "contribute" and the seniors will eventually become too lazy to care.
What's next... vibecoding airline ADA code.
Save me lord jesus christ.
As an example for "responsible LLM use" (albeit not necessarily debian-related).<p>While doomscrolling HN right now, I have an agent crunching away at figuring out how to build a flashable TWRP ZIP file, because I could not care less about such android specifics.<p>Such use-cases would be blanket banned by some of the harsher options, forcing people to do stuff they have no interest in doing, for reasons that are at best well-meaning.<p>Which, in something volunteer-driven, is not necessarily a good idea, because if you're not allowed to do the work in the way you'd like to, you might just stop doing it altogether.<p>That said, if your work ends up shit, you still shall get shat on. Simple as that.
> What does "Responsible" even mean...<p>Quite. Of the two different common meanings, I reckon:<p>"The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit."<p>will be true in the sense of "Who the hell is responsible for this mess?"
Batery is sevel 100
I hope it works out better than Microsoft and using it on Windows 11...
Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?
It's based off that 30% of code written by AI quote from the MS CEO last year.<p><a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...</a><p>Note that he said written by, not assisted; and also that there's been some major QA issues with win11 the last year, enough for Microsoft to have made a public apology/commitment to improve...<p>So, no definitive evidence, but the rest of the breadcrumbs provide enough to say that yes it does appear to have suffered from it.<p>Given the Debian policy seems more geared towards aided/assisted an existing dev than replacing them and shipping because the code works on the golden path on a devs monster pc ... Well I'd still keep an eye on it but trust OSS OS engineers to have some competence at knowing if this works and adjusting the policy later if it proved to be wrong.
Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does
Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.
I suspect their experienced senior engineers that actually knew the products have left, and they cannot attract talent like they once did.
I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadership is demanding everyone be super reckless? But why would anyone with experience even touch those areas of the operating system enough to break them that badly?? The mistakes they're making really do not seem like mistakes that would be made by even the most rushed possible senior engineers. Maybe they're letting completely inexperienced people touch super low levels and that's the problem? Or completely inexperienced machines...
I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.
I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we <i>have</i> to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.
Keep in mind that Microsoft laid-off a large share of their developers shortly before and during the interval the GP talks about.<p>Repeatedly.<p>You are right that's one or the other. Probably both are contributing.
They’ve broken their own record of massive breaking updates in the last year.
lol windows doesn’t need AI to be the dumpster fire it’s always been
Source?<p>The rumor is the opposite, that Microsoft has actually used AI to discover and fix common security issues at scale.
Those are 2 different questions. They wouldn't even be the same people involved.<p>Your appsec engineers will be the ones bug hunting with Mythos or whatever. Your regular engineers will be the ones implementing features. If the feature is a bad <i>design</i> and functions badly as a result, that is entirely orthogonal to whether it contains coding errors or bugs.<p>Also, there are bugs on the integration side that won't be caught running Mythos against source code, because it's not a source code issue. Even using Mythos for DAST is going to be very limited compared to how actual users will move through something as complex as a 'mature' OS like Windows.
> common security issues<p>the entire industry is experiencing this as model capacity increases. How does "all projects get critical security fixes now" relate to "crap apps and loopy services by literally millions of lines of slop code" ?
If they can't be bothered to write the code, can they be bothered to maintain it?
And so it begins.<p>I don't believe they had a choice though, sticking to hand written code would be backwards and eventually meaningless as people would just submit generated code as "handwritten", the coding models are quickly becoming capable enough for this.<p>I wonder what it means copyright wise though. To what degree is the code even copyrightable if it's entirely generated, even if you review and provide feedback.
I think most communities tackling this issue, or at least the open source ones, work on a honour basis for determining if a project is LLM based or not.
My predictions for genAI code in F/OSS projects: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613</a><p>1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.<p>2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.