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Comment by baby_souffle | Hacker News Reader

> Does this mean Copilot tab complete is banned too? What about asking an LLM for advice and then writing all the code yourself?

You're brushing up against some of the reasons why I am pretty sure policies like this will be futile. They may not diminish in popularity but they will be largely unenforceable. They may serve as an excuse for rejecting poor quality code or code that doesn't fit the existing conventions/patterns but did maintainers need a new reason to reject those PRs?

How does one show that no assistive technologies below some threshold were used?

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> How does one show that no assistive technologies below some threshold were used?

In this case, you don't:

> immediately be banned without recourse

In other words, if the maintainer(s) think it's LLM-generated, right or wrong, you're banned.

Idk why anyone would contribute to a project with an attitude like this

that's fine, they probably don't want you then

I don't want them either. I'll find someone else who likes me the way I am. Plenty of fish in the pond.

Make useful, carefully reviewed contributions and you'll be fine.

That seems unlikely. Probably, what is going to happen, is if during a code review, you can't actually explain what your code is doing or why you wrote it, then you will be banned.

I don't know much about this project, but looking at the diff with their previous policy, it's pretty clear that people were abusing it and not declaring that they use llms, and they don't actually know what they're doing

Then a friendlier and clearer wording for the policy would work better. The current one says you will be "immediately" banned "without recourse" which implies that nothing like you are describing will happen.

Or arguably that's the point. If you Copilot generate a few lines of code or use it for inspiration you're still paying attention to it and are aware of what it's doing. The actual outcome will be indistinguishable from the code you hand wrote so it's fine. What policies like this do is stop someone generating whole pages at once, run it with minimal testing then chuck it into the code base forever.

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