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Comment by vikramkr | Hacker News Reader

The wording of "written with ai tools" implies generation, as do all the concerns about copyright etc. it would be beyond insane to attempt to ban asking a chat bot or an agent questions to navigate or understand a codebase, not in the least because that is completely unenforceable

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> not in the least because that is completely unenforceable

You've completely missed my point. It's ALL completely unenforceable. That doesn't mean the directive is useless - it's a guideline for contributors towards a general project direction that will materially limit & reduce overt LLM usage by anyone acting in good faith (the vast majority). The enforcement doesn't need to be strict, but anything less than strict wording won't be effective in influencing people's behaviour.

IMO firm wording against non generative uses of AI or lightweight uses like tab complete will go beyond just influencing good faith actors to reduce llm usage - it'll just influence them to not contribute instead. If you make it clear you don't even want llms used for debugging, if you're a good faith actor that makes use of even the most minimal extent of these very common and basic tools, you'd rather just not deal with the hassle. Either you don't deal with debian at all or you don't try and upstream your changes. The latter is probably the desired outcome to limit slop contributions, but when you have the Linus Torvalds making clear that llms are a tool and that he thinks banning their use is absurd when it comes to the kernel itself, youre gonna cut down on a lot more than slop.

> when you have the Linus Torvalds making clear that llms are a tool and that he thinks banning their use is absurd when it comes to the kernel itself, youre gonna cut down on a lot more than slop

What you're saying here is that you think one person should dictate the philosophical position of every downstream project.

No what I'm saying is that this is a case where one person already does have a hell of a lot of influence over every downstream project already and that has consequences

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