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Comment by mw888 | Hacker News Reader

Here are the actual policies, not a comment:

https://github.com/jyn514/rust-forge/blob/llm-policy/src/pol...

It's in-line with the 'nanny' stereotype of the Rust community that they give you permission to act in a way they would never be able to verify anyways:

> The following are allowed. > Asking an LLM questions about an existing codebase. > Asking an LLM to summarize comments on an issue, PR, or RFC...

Like seriously, what's the point of explicitly allowing this? Imagine the opposite were true, you weren't allowed to do this - what would they do? Revert an update because the person later claimed they checked it with an LLM?

The Linux policy on this is much superior and more sensible.

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> Like seriously, what's the point of explicitly allowing this?

Explicit permission can be useful to preemptively cut off some questions from well meaning people who, acting in good faith, might otherwise pester for clarification (no matter how silly / "obvious" it might otherwise be), or get agitated by misconstruing an all-banned list as being an overly verbose "no LLMs ever" overreach.

> It's in-line with the 'nanny' stereotype of the Rust community that they give you permission to act in a way they would never be able to verify anyways: [...]

Many of us work or have worked in corporate settings where IT takes great pains to help detect and prevent data exfiltration, and have absolutely installed the corporate spyware to detect those kinds of actions when performed on their own closed source codebases. Others rely on the honor system - at least as far as you know - but still ban such actions out of copyright/trade secret concerns. If you're steeped deeply enough in that NDA-preserving culture, a reminder that you've switched contexts might help when common sense proves uncommon.

While nannying can be obnoxious, I'm not sure that having a document one can point to/link/cite, to allay any raised concerns, counts.

> If you're steeped deeply enough in that NDA-preserving culture, a reminder that you've switched contexts might help when common sense proves uncommon.

What?

> If you're steeped deeply enough in that NDA-preserving culture

If you've throroughly absorbed a culture of honoring non disclosure agreements (NDAs), which are legal contracts demanding you keep secrets and avoid sharing sensitive data or code...

> a reminder that you've switched contexts might help

A reminder that rust-lang is a transparent, open source project, with no non-disclosure agreements or trade secrets to keep private unto itself might help [1].

> when common sense proves uncommon.

Because everyone misses the "obvious" sometimes. And because "obvious" is a subjective value judgement, meaning people will disagree what is or is not obvious.

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1. That said, if you've got a private, corporate-internal, closed source fork, you might still be bound by such concerns. For example, various people have ported rust's stdlib to work on various consoles (xbox, playstation, etc.) - and one of the reasons you don't see that upstreamed is because doing so would require violating console vendor NDAs, as well as possibly their company's NDAs - possibly for such banal reasons as not wanting to leak a hint of a console port or new title before their marketing plans are ready to go to capitilize on any hype.

> Like seriously, what's the point of explicitly allowing this?

I would have LOVED if the university course I took last winter had this. I had to take a very paranoid attitude to what was allowed.

What they're trying to avoid is a lot of unnecessary conflict with zealous anti-AI people calling for your exclusion for admitting to doing these things. There are people who would ban this too.

So then the Rust maintainers are going to give you an F on your report card?

No they’ll just drop() you

Try using allman braces and see how far you get on a basic issue like that

> Like seriously, what's the point of explicitly allowing this? Imagine the opposite were true, you weren't allowed to do this - what would they do?

Imagine if they just say "LLMs are banned" then there's a lot of ambiguity. So they specifically outlined that generative uses of LLMs are banned, and that non-generative ones are not banned (i.e. "allowed").

I think it's a poor choice of words on their part, but it makes sense (considering what their policy is). It's more of a "we're not disallowing use in these particular scenarios, so you can still use LLMs for these if you want". Remember: it's a big project, and if they don't explicitly state something then people will ask and waste everyone's time.

If anything, it reads to me as a proactive rebuttal of complaints that they don't allow LLMs; they're definitively stating that they do allow using them for very specific purposes.

Needs to be "solicited" from a senior dev. How many requests for ai code do you think they will be making?

I can't find any reference to using LLMs to ask questions in the ways that are cited from the parent comment needing to be solicited.

Y tho? It's already bad enough a programming language wants to play politics (doesn't matter what my politics are if I want to code in the c "community"), now they're taking purely emotional stances like "AI evil"

> now they're taking purely emotional stances like "AI evil"

But they aren't? Nowhere in the document it says this; in fact, it says the opposite - that they don't want to make a moral judgement.

> It's already bad enough a programming language wants to play politics (doesn't matter what my politics are if I want to code in the c "community")

It also doesn't matter what your politics are in the Rust community. My personal politics don't agree with the majority of prominent Rust contributors either, and that's fine. It doesn't (and hasn't) stopped me from being able to use Rust for over a decade now. Ignore politics and just engage on a purely technical level, and you'll be fine.

> It also doesn't matter what your politics are in the Rust community

Largely true, apart from the trans issue. Refuse to agree a man is a woman because he says it's true, and you're a bigot

You don't have to agree to treat people with respect. Using someone's preferred pronouns doesn't hurt you.

https://fairplayforwomen.com/pronouns

A dissenting view.

They're just giving examples of what you can do and explicitly saying so. Saying "you couldn't stop me" is completely missing the point.

This is not very different from the Linux kernel's policy so it's an odd comparison. It's actually almost identical in practical terms.

edit: lol proof that this doc needs to be stupidly explicit is in the pudding with the HN comments going out of their way to radically misread it

It feels telling that it reads like university course guidelines.

What do you mean?

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