Doesn’t it? Trying to ban sunlight in the desert means you will waste a ton of resources, fail, and look foolish in the process. Maybe you shouldn’t do that.
It was a poor metaphor. You absolutely can ban AI software in software you control. If someone then managed to lie and sneak some in and gets found out, ban them and purge their contributions.
Open source maintainers have enough trouble without trying to ban all AI generated code just to comply with a distributor.
AI code is inevitable. Even if you outright ban it, people will try to sneak it in. Lets say the change is literally just changing the order of calls to fix a bug - but the person who found and fixed the bug used AI to do so. Do you ban that? If it’s not disclosed, how would you know? After all the commit is literally just a line order swap. What if the committer actually hand wrote that fix but used AI for the PR body because they don’t speak English well and don’t want to appear dumb?
The best practice is to allow AI-generated code as long as the person providing the commit can properly reason about its function - meaning they understand what the code does and have done their due diligence. Good quality AI generated code isn’t the issue, it’s the skiddies who think prompting Claude with the most basic queries and blindly accepting the output until the one thing they wanted to achieve works, results in usable code. It results in unmaintainable slop. You need an actual engineer with experience to review it, but maintainers don’t have that capacity, so banning slop and requiring contributors to understand what they’re trying to get merged is the best way forward.
There are serious legal concerns about what integration of AI code could mean for open source licenses as it’s already been decided that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted.
Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
Doesn’t it? Trying to ban sunlight in the desert means you will waste a ton of resources, fail, and look foolish in the process. Maybe you shouldn’t do that.
Obviously I’m not talking about the metaphor.
It applies to the root too. It’s a good metaphor.
It was a poor metaphor. You absolutely can ban AI software in software you control. If someone then managed to lie and sneak some in and gets found out, ban them and purge their contributions.
Maintainers are busy enough as is without having to take on the additional role of AI police
Open source maintainers have enough trouble without trying to ban all AI generated code just to comply with a distributor.
AI code is inevitable. Even if you outright ban it, people will try to sneak it in. Lets say the change is literally just changing the order of calls to fix a bug - but the person who found and fixed the bug used AI to do so. Do you ban that? If it’s not disclosed, how would you know? After all the commit is literally just a line order swap. What if the committer actually hand wrote that fix but used AI for the PR body because they don’t speak English well and don’t want to appear dumb?
The best practice is to allow AI-generated code as long as the person providing the commit can properly reason about its function - meaning they understand what the code does and have done their due diligence. Good quality AI generated code isn’t the issue, it’s the skiddies who think prompting Claude with the most basic queries and blindly accepting the output until the one thing they wanted to achieve works, results in usable code. It results in unmaintainable slop. You need an actual engineer with experience to review it, but maintainers don’t have that capacity, so banning slop and requiring contributors to understand what they’re trying to get merged is the best way forward.
There are serious legal concerns about what integration of AI code could mean for open source licenses as it’s already been decided that AI generated content cannot be copyrighted.
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