Ripgrep AI Policy | Hacker News Reader

Ripgrep AI Policy

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106 pointssingiamtel23 comments

Looking at all the unmerged pull requests in ripgrep, you can see what's going on. I will not link him here, but for instance, there's a "Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft", whose agent created 260 PRs in 211 repos with trivial typo fixes in code comments(!). Almost all of them are rejected (including those in ripgrep), but of course, a few get merged and he now boasts he "contributed" to sqlalchemy, Nim and others... What a time to be alive.

Drive-by PRs have been an issue before, but with AI it's just getting disrespectful

I used my human eyes to submit updates to Redis and Git, fixing typos in comments.

Sure it's low-hanging fruit, but if you're looking at the code it's good to have the comments be readable and not full of typos.

(That said this was a few years ago, and there were no LLMs at that point. I didn't go out of my way to make trivial contributions, but I figured since I saw the "problems" I should submit a patch to fix them.)

This is such a refreshing policy. AI code is welcome as long as it's good, but comments have to be human.

If someone can't take the time to write their own replies (in their own words), then it feels fair to assume that they didn't take the time to test, review, and clean whatever code they submitted.

> This policy was adapted from uv's AI policy.

Wasn't uv bought by an AI company?

Was curious and astral put up their AI policy a couple weeks before the acquisition. Of course, it's quite possible they already knew it was happening: https://github.com/astral-sh/.github/pull/1

That said, I'm kind of surprised ripgrep hasn't been acquired by anyone, considering all the major AI agents use it pretty heavily.

well, ripgrep is not a company.. what means to "buy" an open source project?

companies either "fund" open source developers (usually a pittance), "contribute" code, or if all fails "fork" them, but straight buying, that's something I never see

This is when a company buys the sole developer.

You don't generally buy people. You can employ them, though.

In slave states without proper civil rights, like the US, you can buy them. Your contract forbids everything. Eg every SW you produce in private belongs to the company, not to you. Or everything you say in private will affect your contract.

Well, the background checks in the US at least have to follow laws.

Then theres reference checks, less formal but generally still follow some kind of rigor or process and you generally know who they’re going to talk to.

Then there’s the third type of investigation, where they actually don’t tell you they’re doing it, may or may not admit to doing it, and you have no way of knowing whether you were singled out for some reason, assuming you are able to find out it happened in the first place.

And good luck searching for any recourse if ethics or even laws (such as HIPAA) are ignored in that situation, even if it’s for example a b2c healthcare company that is expected to set an example for health privacy standards, rather than calling everyone you knew to probe their memories of how healthy you appeared to be at the time, then using that information to evaluate your performance with different criteria than other employees.

Sure, it’s not a typical scenario, but if it happens to you, you’ll probably never be able to scoff at a comment like this again. You might never get over it.

burntsushi also works in this company (or worked?). he is actually a developer of uv (or was a couple years ago?)

https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/graphs/contributors?from=9%2...

Sounds about as sane as you could possibly be given the climate.

This is really good. I'm going to adopt this I think. Yoink! ;)

I think of burntsushi as the king of MIT. Come ye all corporations.

This is a very elegant way of dealing with slop, whilst still reaping the benefits of smart people using AI to do useful things.

Finally, a sane policy.

No AI comments is silly. Of course you need to be able to explain and summarize it yourself, but the AI does it so much better.

Of course, they can't realistically police every use of AI any more than they can police someone using Grammarly or similar tools. I think the core of the argument is really about drawing a hard line against low-quality "write a response for me" type usage.

In reality, people are going to keep doing that no matter what. But at the same time, it's still probably a worthwhile line to draw when it comes to discouraging more irresponsible or disengaged uses of AI.

> Of course you need to be able to explain and summarize it yourself

How can I hold you to that unless I make you do that in your own words?

In my own words it would be 10 times shorter, with much less educational value.

Ten times shorter just means "readable without losing an excess of time on ramble" and I feel like someone's comeback to this will be "you should ask an AI to summarise".

It means, familiar to anyone close to the code, but not to any exec.

The AI makes it clear even for execs, juniors or flybyes. Which you usually don't want to have around near that code.

But in the end Stallman was right. it pays off to follow GNU changelog conventions, and be very verbose for outstanders. The AI can do that for you.

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