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Comment by flufluflufluffy | Hacker News Reader

I’d be very surprised if any long time contributor to gcc would want to start pushing AI generated code. But even if that is the case, this is one of the largest and most complex pieces of software on the planet, and is used to produce the binaries of countless other pieces of software. I think this policy makes sense because of that. We want to make sure no inadvertent behavior is introduced (whatever that might be, from bugs to ~puts conspiracy theory hat on~ some kind of backdoor undetectable by humans inserted into every compiled binary allowing the authoring AI system (or the government behind it) remote access to every machine it runs on). Okay maybe that’s a little crazy

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As a non-GCC compiler developer myself, there's a spectrum of AI use and the words "AI generated code" can mean different things to different people. At the extreme ends, nobody I know well objects to AI auto-completion in your editor, but neither does anybody want to let AI open pull requests autonomously.

Having a coding agent iterate on a well-defined narrow task in the background while I'm in a meeting or working on something else, and then doing a thorough, thoughtful, and active local code review (meaning, having an editor and the diff open side-by-side and liberally making edits to clean up the code) before pushing anything out for others to see feels like a reasonable point in the space right now. Nothing is perfect, but this style of active code review removes basically all AI smells in practice. The edit-build-test loop is fairly long (i.e., longer than a few seconds), so having AI babysit this loop for the initial development of a task is helpful.

> I know well objects to AI auto-completion in your editor, but neither does anybody want to let AI open pull requests autonomously.

I think it’s more about turning language models into your smart intern, rather than letting them do all your work or become your moronic boss.

In any case, I do think there could be room for AI in the future—for instance, in academic research. I recently saw a news story about an AI that managed to detect certain types of cancer based on a specific blood test; I consider that a justifiable use of AI. However, using it to autonomously send PRs? That strikes me as going too far.

> But even if that is the case, this is one of the largest and most complex pieces of software on the planet, and is used to produce the binaries of countless other pieces of software. I think this policy makes sense because of that. We want to make sure no inadvertent behavior is introduced

That would be an excellent reason to limit AI contributions if true. I am not in a position to judge the requirements of a compiler project so I do not have an opinion on whether that is a sound reason or not.

However, the reasons being given for the change (and the wording around "legally significant") seem to be about copyright law which I do not think is sound reasoning (see my other comments on this).

> ~puts conspiracy theory hat on~ some kind of backdoor undetectable by humans inserted into every compiled binary allowing the authoring AI system (or the government behind it) remote access to every machine it runs on). Okay maybe that’s a little crazy

Someone using AI code to introduce a back door will surely be willing to lie and say its human written so this policy will not help.

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