What happens when the PR is clear, reasonable, short, checked by a human, and clearly fixes, implements, or otherwise improves the code base and has no alternative implementation that is reasonably different from the initially presented version?
It's similar to how I can't implement a feature by copying-and-pasting the obvious code from some commercially licensed project. But somebody else could write basically the same thing independently without knowing about the proprietary-license code, and that would be fine.
Like, this should be enshrined as the quintessential “they simply, obstinately, perilously, refused to get it” moment.
Shortly, no one is going to care about anyone’s bespoke manual keyboard entry of code if it takes 10 times as long to produce the same functionality with imperceptibly less error.
Well that day doesn't appear to be coming any time soon. Even after years of supposed improvements, LLMs make mistakes so frequently that you can't trust anything they put out, which completely negates any time savings from not writing the code.
1) Most people still don't use TDD, which absolutely solves much of this.
2) Most poople end up leaning too heavily on the LLM, which, well, blows up in their face.
3) Most people don't follow best practices or designs, which the LLM absolutely does NOT know about NOR does it default to.
4) Most people ask it to do too much and then get disappointed when it screws up.
Perfect example:
> you can't trust anything they put out
Yeah, that screams "missing TDD that you vetted" to me. I have yet to see it not try to pass a test correctly that I've vetted (at least in the past 2 months) Learn how to be a good dev first.
No one is going to care about anyone’s painstaking avoidance of chlorofluorocarbons if it takes ten times as long to style your hair with imperceptibly less ozone hole damage.
There are plenty of good reasons why somebody might not want your PR, independent of how good or useful to you your change is.
If the submitter is prepared to explain the code and vouch for its quality then that might reasonably fall under "don't ask, don't tell".
However, if LLM output is either (a) uncopyrightable or (b) considered a derivative work of the source that was used to train the model, then you have a legal problem. And the legal system does care about invisible "bit colour".
For one simple reason. Intention.
Here's some code for example: https://i.imgur.com/dp0QHBp.png
Both sides written by an LLM. Both sides written based on my explicit prompts explaining exactly how I want it to behave, then testing, retesting, and generally doing all the normal software eng due diligence necessary for basic QA. Sometimes the prompts are explicitly "change this variable name" and it ends up changing 2 lines of code no different from a find/replace.
Also I'm watching it reason in real time by running terminal commands to probe runtime data and extrapolate the right code. I've already seen it fix basic bugs because an RFC wasn't adhered to perfectly. Even leaving a nice comment explaining why we're ignoring the RFC in that one spot.
Eventually these arguments are kinda exhausting. People will use it to build stuff and the stuff they build ends up retraining it so we're already hundreds of generations deep on the retraining already and talking about licenses at this point feels absurd to me.
It doesn't matter if the "change this variable name" instruction ends up with the same result as a human operator using a text editor.
There is a big difference between "change this variable name" and "refactor this code base to extract a singleton".
It sounds like you really can’t handle being told “no, you can’t use an LLM for this” by someone else, even if they have every right to do so. You should probably talk to your therapist about that.
Whether it's an OSS license or a commercial license, both are dependent on copyright as the underlying IP Right.
The courts have so far (in the US) agreed with the Copyright office's reasoning.
Use an LLM as a tool, mostly OK.
Use it to create source from scratch, no copyright as the author isn't human.
Use it to modify existing software, the result is only copyright on whatever original remains.
CLEARLY, a lot of developers are not reasonable
The unreasonable ones are the ones with the oppositional-defiant “You can’t tell me I can’t use an LLM!” reaction.
The simplest refutation of your point of view is, who or what is responsible if the work submission is wrong?
It will always be the person’s, never the computer’s. Conveniently, AI always acts as if it has no skin in the game… because it literally and figuratively doesn’t… so for people to treat it like it does, should be penalized
Who vetted the output?
Who ensured there was adequate test coverage?
Who insisted on a certain design?
Who is to blame if it's bad code? That is the same entity that is responsible, and the same entity that "did it"
tl;dr your stance is full of poop, my dude
That’s what you sound like.
There are a thousand and one ways that I participate when building something with LLM assistance. Everything from ORIGINATING AN IDEA TO BEGIN WITH, to working on a thorough spec for it, to ensuring tests are actually valid, to asking for specific designs like hexagonal design, to specific things like benchmarks... literally ALL OF THE INITIATIVE IS MINE, AND ALL OF THE SUCCESS/FAILURE CONSEQUENCES ARE MINE, AND THAT IS ULTIMATELY ALL THAT MATTERS
Please head towards a different career if you now have a stupid and contrived excuse not to continue working with the machines, because you sound like a whining child
And you're not answering the question, because you know it would end your point: WHO OR WHAT IS RESPONSIBLE IF THE CODE SUCCEEDS OR FAILS?
You sound like someone who’s deeply in denial about exactly how the LLM plagiarism machines work. You really do sound like a student defending themselves against a plagiarism charge by asserting that since they did the work of choosing the text to put into their essay and massaging the grammar so it fit, nobody should care where it came from.
and I’m 53 and well remember Symbolics from freshman year at Cornell, in fact my application essay to it was about fuzzy logic (AI-tangential) and probably got me in, so I too am quite familiar
i’m also quite good at debate. the flaw in your logic is that plagiarism requires accountability and no machine can be accountable, only the human that used it, ergo, it is still the work of the human, because the human values, the human vets, the human initiates, and the human gains or loses based on the combined output, end of story; accelerated thought is still thought, and anyway, if a machine can replicate thought, then it wasn’t particularly original to begin with
human prompting != human production
Lots of people try to get away with perfect crimes and sometimes do. That doesn't make the rule unenforceable, it just highlights the limits of human knowledge in the face of a dishonest person. Hence the escalations for trying to destroy evidence of crimes or in this case to work around the AI policy. Here, instead of just closing your PR, they ban you if you try to hide it.