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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I doubt the fact they use a monorepo has any impact on this thinking. A versioned sourced repository is no different from a file server. If some "ai copyright infringed" code made it into the monorepo it doesn't compromise the whole thing. There are still clear distinct projects and products.

But exactly, this is a hygiene thing. Staff will still be using these tools anyway.

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I agree that monorepo does not make a fundamental difference. Still it makes it easier for some undesirable things to happen.

The tainted code can become a critical dependency. It can get copy-pasted elsewhere. An engineer could look at the code before writing their own (obviously not illegal per se but makes it harder to repeal bullshit claims later). An engineer can just write similar code and then have no way to prove they didn't look (ditto).

> It can get copy-pasted elsewhere.

I have no experience working with a monorepo but I've read Google has "an army" of people maintaining the monorepo. I would have imagined with enough support like this, you wouldn't need to copy paste code everywhere in a monorepo?

I'd appreciate any insight anyone can share on monorepo. I am fascinated by the idea but I've never had a chance to work with it and people who I've met who have either don't want to or can't talk about their experience with it.

as a google swe I find bard almost useless. it doesnt understand any of our internal tooling or context.

So you broke your company’s policy and Fed code to it?

That's reaching. You don't need to put code in to get code out. And you're allowed to have it generate code, just as long as it's not used.

He said he put code in

Can you quote where he said he fed it internal code?

“ as a google swe I find bard almost useless. it doesnt understand any of our internal tooling or context.”

How would he know it doesn’t understand if he hasn’t used it?

It's really easy to use it without violating policies.

In fact, we were literally asked to.

He likely asked it a question.

*in violation of policy.

That wasn't said, but the goalpost keeps moving in this thread.

...where?

You can’t break a policy which didn’t exist at the time.

Sounds like they got curious and asked a simple “hello world” type of question to see if it had any value.

Is this "hello world", or is this "Hello World, Inc."?

Remember: swift fingertips sink ships.

If they were concerned about that as a risk, the thought that came to my mind was exposing the whole codebase to subpoenas.

Is that one of the big risks of a monorepo? That a request for 'the source' will lead to all code in a monorepo to be exposed? I'm sure that's not necessarily the case, but still.

The other one I'm thinking of; I know this isn't the case with Google because their repo is too big, but, if a piece of copyrighted code would end up in an average repository, it would quickly be distributed to all users that have a copy of that repo, so they can't take it back again.

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