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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

https://lwn.net/Articles/1091231/
194•pluc•1h ago•132 comments

Indirect Calling of Nested Functions on GCC Without Executable Stack

https://uecker.codeberg.page/2026-08-29.html
18•uecker•1h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Typebase – A single-folder back end you write in TypeScript

https://typebase.io
30•andrewww-dev•3d ago•2 comments

SQLite as a Document Database (2020)

https://dgl.cx/2020/06/sqlite-json-support
14•lioeters•4d ago•0 comments

Creating the Aetheryte Radio

https://haz.ee/posts/aetheryte-radio.html
29•wonger_•1d ago•4 comments

Samsung's Processing-in-Memory (PIM)

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/hot-chips-2026-samsungs-processing
181•ingve•9h ago•62 comments

Glacier Mice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glacier_mice
120•ostacke•4d ago•24 comments

GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

https://ckardaris.com/blog/2026/08/28/keyboard-driven-guis.html
939•ckardaris•1d ago•460 comments

Boot a Virtual iPhone via Apple's Virtualization.framework

https://github.com/Lakr233/vphone-cli
341•hentrep•16h ago•88 comments

Show HN: Galaxium, an experimental WebGPU space explorer

https://galaxium.app
52•guillaumec•5d ago•18 comments

EVE Online moves to Python 3

https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/the-move-to-python-3-begins
124•TylerJaacks•4d ago•64 comments

Htmx 4.0

https://four.htmx.org/announcements/2026-08-28-htmx-4.0.0-is-released
742•rmsaksida•1d ago•183 comments

Hunting Down a Go Runtime Bug on 32-Bit Embedded Systems

https://sigma-star.at/blog/2026/08/go-runtime-netpoll-bug/
71•birdculture•3d ago•7 comments

U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

https://www.inventati.org/
662•exiguus•1d ago•663 comments

Europe's last regular standard-gauge steam passenger service

https://parowozowniawolsztyn.pl/?page_id=2141
80•GungulSurm•2d ago•20 comments

StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator

https://github.com/stemdeckapp/stemdeck
163•thclpr•14h ago•45 comments

I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis

https://pwning.systems/posts/llm-memory-program-analysis/
216•matt_d•16h ago•64 comments

Time complexity of operations on Python's built-in types

https://docs.python.org/3.16/library/time-complexity.html
45•theanonymousone•4d ago•8 comments

Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions

https://www.orbify.eu/demo/
564•smoser•1d ago•184 comments

TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store

https://github.com/kingroryg/turbokv
147•rgbimbochamp•13h ago•70 comments

Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

https://anil.recoil.org/notes/rumour-is-the-exploit
358•avsm•23h ago•115 comments

Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn45vdxyvvlo
253•tosh•4h ago•299 comments

Queen Caroline turned King Arthur into an 18C royal PR strategy

https://theconversation.com/how-queen-caroline-turned-king-arthur-into-an-18th-century-royal-pr-s...
34•samizdis•4d ago•9 comments

Monzo Stand-In

https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-monzo-stand-in
106•coffeefuel•5d ago•46 comments

Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

https://openai.com/index/our-decision-on-cursor-following-its-acquisition-by-spacex/
681•meetpateltech•13h ago•405 comments

Experiments with Plotter Art

https://sometimes.digital/posts/experiments-with-plotter-art/
81•surprisetalk•5d ago•7 comments

Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

https://www.vectorian.be/articles/2026-06-07/sumerian-king-list-paleoclimate-alignment-explorer/
120•dev_l1x_be•16h ago•70 comments

The Twelve-Factor App (2025)

https://12factor.net/
293•jxmorris12•1d ago•163 comments

Curvature Beziers: Improving on a timeless recipe

https://acko.net/blog/curvature-beziers/
140•leephillips•4d ago•23 comments

Attimet (YC F24) Is Hiring Members of Technical Staff – Engineering and Research

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/attimet/jobs/6btZFDg-member-of-technical-staff-engineering
1•kbanothu•22h ago
Open in hackernews

Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

https://lwn.net/Articles/1091231/
186•pluc•1h ago

Comments

BlueRoguesDevel•1h ago
I hope it works out better than Microsoft and using it on Windows 11...
LeoPanthera•1h ago
Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?
loloquwowndueo•1h ago
lol windows doesn’t need AI to be the dumpster fire it’s always been
LoganDark•1h ago
Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does
chuckadams•1h ago
Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.
LoganDark•1h ago
I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadership is demanding everyone be super reckless? But why would anyone with experience even touch those areas of the operating system enough to break them that badly?? The mistakes they're making really do not seem like mistakes that would be made by even the most rushed possible senior engineers. Maybe they're letting completely inexperienced people touch super low levels and that's the problem? Or completely inexperienced machines...
ang_cire•37m ago
I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we have to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.
static_motion•36m ago
I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.
tehbeard•1h ago
It's based off that 30% of code written by AI quote from the MS CEO last year.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...

Note that he said written by, not assisted; and also that there's been some major QA issues with win11 the last year, enough for Microsoft to have made a public apology/commitment to improve...

So, no definitive evidence, but the rest of the breadcrumbs provide enough to say that yes it does appear to have suffered from it.

Given the Debian policy seems more geared towards aided/assisted an existing dev than replacing them and shipping because the code works on the golden path on a devs monster pc ... Well I'd still keep an eye on it but trust OSS OS engineers to have some competence at knowing if this works and adjusting the policy later if it proved to be wrong.

outside1234•1h ago
Source?

The rumor is the opposite, that Microsoft has actually used AI to discover and fix common security issues at scale.

mistrial9•1h ago
> common security issues

the entire industry is experiencing this as model capacity increases. How does "all projects get critical security fixes now" relate to "crap apps and loopy services by literally millions of lines of slop code" ?

ang_cire•31m ago
Those are 2 different questions. They wouldn't even be the same people involved.

Your appsec engineers will be the ones bug hunting with Mythos or whatever. Your regular engineers will be the ones implementing features. If the feature is a bad design and functions badly as a result, that is entirely orthogonal to whether it contains coding errors or bugs.

Also, there are bugs on the integration side that won't be caught running Mythos against source code, because it's not a source code issue. Even using Mythos for DAST is going to be very limited compared to how actual users will move through something as complex as a 'mature' OS like Windows.

baggy_trough•1h ago
I followed the discussion on debian-vote with interest. I'm glad that the hysterical objections lost, as they seemed quasi-religiously motivated.
packetlost•1h ago
But it's an """ethical""" argument against it.
baggy_trough•1h ago
How can we use this coding tool amidst the general rising tide of fascism?? /s
olalonde•37m ago
I've seen people claim that using Claude Code makes you racist.

https://bsky.app/profile/boxobark.ing/post/3mtr7j3tpok26

mc32•28m ago
I don't know if they truly believe that persons using CC are racist (like they examined the thing logically from bottom to top and came back with that conclusion) or if it's the new Goodwin --pulling the emergency brakes and damn the consequences.

It's as though people want to find the most dubious of non-existent connections and use that as leverage to besmirch something they don't like.

clcaev•6m ago
Some may express societal challenges in ways that inappropriately and wrongly infer intentionality. We can acknowledge their point while strongly disagreeing with their characterization.

There are significant societal impacts of this AI buildout. Some are concerned externalities weigh more heavily on the poor and marginalized. I think the data center holds are part of this civil discourse.

I'd prefer we have more conservative pollution standards along with a reasonable tax on AI use that helps mitigate externalities. That's hard. Reasonable people can have fierce disagreements on what market interventions are indicated, and how extensive they should be.

chuckadams•1h ago
New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
onesandofgrain•1h ago
Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it", oh poor me, someone got a bug. If it's paid for through a job your argument is sound.
LoganDark•1h ago
"Responsible for it" just means nobody has to tolerate shitty patches even if the reason they're shitty is because you neglected to pay attention to them. And if you blatantly fail to understand your own code or refuse to engage with reviewers, nobody has to trust that your LLM knew any better.
daveguy•54m ago
Well said. No one should trust an llm without verification/validation. They're just not good enough to do that and they have no sense of responsibility or ability to take it themselves. LLMs are empty.
swiftcoder•1h ago
> Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it"

Sure there is. Contributing to open source is a privilege, not a right. Abuse it, and find yourself unwelcome as a future contributor

thi2•1h ago
onesandofgrain•1h ago
What does "Responsible" even mean...

This will turn to shit because laziness will take over and comprehension will fall as a consequence of that. Junior will "contribute" and the seniors will eventually become too lazy to care. What's next... vibecoding airline ADA code. Save me lord jesus christ.

hypfer•39m ago
As an example for "responsible LLM use" (albeit not necessarily debian-related).

While doomscrolling HN right now, I have an agent crunching away at figuring out how to build a flashable TWRP ZIP file, because I could not care less about such android specifics.

Such use-cases would be blanket banned by some of the harsher options, forcing people to do stuff they have no interest in doing, for reasons that are at best well-meaning.

Which, in something volunteer-driven, is not necessarily a good idea, because if you're not allowed to do the work in the way you'd like to, you might just stop doing it altogether.

That said, if your work ends up shit, you still shall get shat on. Simple as that.

chrisjj•21m ago
> What does "Responsible" even mean...

Quite. Of the two different common meanings, I reckon:

"The use of a generative AI tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the work they submit."

will be true in the sense of "Who the hell is responsible for this mess?"

jhack•1h ago
Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
tom_•51m ago
If there weren't a wide range of options offered, there'd be a risk of it not actually reflecting what people want - which is, presumably, the whole point of putting it to the vote in the first place.
kccqzy•41m ago
This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.
themgt•1h ago
August 29th, 2026. Debian votes to allow responsible use of generative AI. Human decisions are removed from strategic apt packaging. Debian Sid is ported to GNU Hurd by a "free as in speech" swarm. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
raverbashing•27m ago
It's ok, the most dangerous thing a Debian AI would do is want to rewrite itself in M4 and enter an infinite recursion on non-binding votes on allowing votes of whether to use long flags on aptitude
rvz•59m ago
Now you have seen both cases where a majority vote was involved to allow AI or not, vs a single core beloved dictator for life (BDFL) forces a ban without a vote to allow / disallow AI.

This is democracy in action. A fair and square vote and look at how well it works with no core BDFL to force in their opinions.

ghostDancer•50m ago
There are several occurrences in history that the democratic majority has chosen the "wrong" person/way/thing. Democracy is considered the best system but it's not perfect.
kfksjcjsidjd•23m ago
Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority. And if you naively assume that the majority always knows best, then I suggest you pick up a few history books.
throwawayffffas•59m ago
And so it begins.

I don't believe they had a choice though, sticking to hand written code would be backwards and eventually meaningless as people would just submit generated code as "handwritten", the coding models are quickly becoming capable enough for this.

I wonder what it means copyright wise though. To what degree is the code even copyrightable if it's entirely generated, even if you review and provide feedback.

ButlerianJihad•47m ago
My predictions for genAI code in F/OSS projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613

1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.

2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.

mariusor•47m ago
I think most communities tackling this issue, or at least the open source ones, work on a honour basis for determining if a project is LLM based or not.
edward•57m ago
Joey Hess is unimpressed. See https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Debian_and_the_sirens/
hypfer•27m ago
Googling the name shows a 2021 podcast thing stating something about leaving the project.

I did not bother checking anything about this person or that timeline, but if true, then them continuing to be unhappy with the steering of the project doesn't exactly come as a surprise.

softwaredoug•20m ago
His point is using LLMs to build software will lead to code so complex that it requires an Agent. Or that it will cause avoiding cleaning up the boilerplate because we can tolerate it now because of agents.

And thus this will all bias towards complexity and fragility..

Aside from Bun, which is owned by Anthropic, do we know of open source projects that allow AI where this has happened?

frabcus•19m ago
His reasoning is quite fresh and interesting:

> What LLMs in Debian development will do, I fear, is eliminate any incentive to scrap boilerplate or reform policies that require a lot of other senseless human effort. If I had had access to LLMs 30 years ago, I might have just had them generate the rules files, replate with complexity. So they will make Debian even more firmly what it is, and ever less likely to explore what it could become.

I use and like LLMs, but it does feel like structural social changes are harder to do. For example, creation of new protocols. I hope I'm wrong, and LLMs are used to build collaborative, community projects - not just everyone vibe coding their own incompatible software.

jordemort•52m ago
gross
chrisjj•51m ago
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.

How absurdly naive.

guenthert•49m ago
If they can't be bothered to write the code, can they be bothered to maintain it?
sprybear•39m ago
progress of a kind
poisonborz•34m ago
What other sensible option was there? This would be the reality either way.
gib444•26m ago
How so?
NietTim•26m ago
This seems like a very sane take. At no point during my career up until now would submitting code to production that you didn't understand be acceptable. Over the past months/year, a lot of the discourse around AI-written code I've read comes down to responsibility, and IMO for that we've had a solution since way before this AI boom: as a developer, you are responsible for the code you put into production. This really isn't/shouldn't a wild concept.
GZGavinZhao•19m ago
Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code.

[1]: https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...

swingandamiss•7m ago
Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't like AI, but ultimately, AI will win out, it's just too good.
sph•6m ago
On a similar note, is there any distro that explicitly has banned usage of generative AI for their project? Asking for a friend.
voakbasda•58m ago
I suspect their experienced senior engineers that actually knew the products have left, and they cannot attract talent like they once did.
marcosdumay•29m ago
Keep in mind that Microsoft laid-off a large share of their developers shortly before and during the interval the GP talks about.

Repeatedly.

You are right that's one or the other. Probably both are contributing.

qarl2•1h ago
> ... hysterical ... quasi-religiously ...

I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case that when my fellow citizens begin to act insane - might it be the result of foreign propaganda.

edoceo•7m ago
Home grown propaganda, pretending it's from "the others"
How is it different to hand written code if the author doesnt care?
victorbjorklund•1h ago
You can make the exact same argument with code written by humans. And if you were right we should see shitty bad code in open source projects like Linux, Postgres, etc. We don’t.
Grombobulous•54m ago
Basically what you’re saying is that anything that exists outside of capitalist incentive structures isn’t allowed to have standards.

When I am at home practicing my musical instrument or learning to paint, those aren’t paid activities, so I can’t demand high standards for myself.

When Habitat for Humanity is looking for volunteers to do electrical and plumbing on homes, they have to allow unlicensed random folks do it.

This is not how life works at all.

oooyay•1h ago
This is the way it should've always been. I don't care what tool you use, but you'd better be ready to stand by and explain the results if necessary.
dguest•44m ago
Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?

We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion.

internet2000•35m ago
> Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?

Yes. Very notably: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

sodapopcan•15m ago
On the opposite side or the noteable spectrum, look up "Steve Yegge wants you to stop looking at your code." He said it in a video interview, though plenty of summaries online of exact wording and ideas. Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?
nicoburns•16m ago
Yep, in both directions. Some projects ban use of AI entirely. Others are happy to live with slop.
sergiotapia•38m ago
These are unprecedented times, I think every single company on the planet is figuring our what AI means to them.

I think the dust has kind of settled though for engineering teams on: You must use AI for your work, and you must stand by your work.

The meat between these two mandates are still being fleshed out.

trollbridge•59m ago
86Box is like that and I like it.

You’re also responsibility not to write crap PRs.

throwaway2037•55m ago
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
bigstrat2003•46m ago
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
winrid•44m ago
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.
bigstrat2003•40m ago
They cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.
fidotron•33m ago
There was an increasingly scary mass of people in the industry that viewed the coding as a sort of therapeutic exercise, and would become quite obsessive about it. For those people LLMs are anathema because they take away what was the rewarding part of the job.

If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.

Sharlin•27m ago
You find it scary that people enjoy what they do? Simply caring about the end result is often not wise, ethical, or sustainable, and the quality thereof is dubious in any case, especially when you consider that the end result of developing software is never just the artifact.
fidotron•21m ago
Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.

And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.

This is quite distinct from enjoyment.

sisyphus15•31m ago
Completely wrong generalization.

I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition.

I used to care, a lot. And I still do.

yoyohello13•9m ago
If you actually cared. You’d do something about it.
aceazzameen•41m ago
It doesn't apply to everyone, but yes I know people who are over-reliant on LLMs and definitely getting dumber. With devs and non-devs too. I hate seeing this happen.
fidotron•36m ago
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.

Make that some/a lot, but not all.

There is a clear bifurcation. A lot of those that never cared really don't care now, but then you get others that can use it to crank that much harder than ever before.

If you put the same brain effort in but leverage LLMs you really can be dramatically more productive.

vlyan•35m ago
IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some of the very limited space in our memory for more important things.

sure, students and juniors shoot themselves in the dick if they let LLMs do everything, but they're fucked anyway so it doesn't matter,

zaneyard•30m ago
With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.
cassianoleal•23m ago
It's really not.

Number and order of arguments, long names, etc. are just bureaucracy. Knowing them doesn't mean you understand the codebase any better than if you rely on the IDE for it.

It's a bit like remembering the exact date an historical event happened vs. knowing at which point in history it did, what other events relate to it, etc. Neither makes you better or worse at knowing and understanding the history of the event.

hn_submit•15m ago
Tools like Resharper and IntelliSense make me more productive but don't inhibit my thinking, which is what LLMs seem to do.
rel2thr•20m ago
You can just ask Claude why it did something in the code and it will tell you

Programmers just moved up a level , not dumber, we are now managers of a team of 'agent' programmers. The deliverable is now a functionality instead of a specific block of code

hn_submit•17m ago
I just means I'm gonna be filthy rich in a couple of years when most programmers have lost their proficiency and me never having used Claude or any other A.I. slop tool.
newsomix9xl•8m ago
The LLM did not require them to ignore their code. That's a choice they made.

They made choices that made them dumber is what I'm saying.

createful•7m ago
You could also say the same with desktops. Desktops abstracted CLI commands like mv or ls. People who are taught on desktops will get scared when they see a terminal.

Yet programmers will still know commands. Abstractions can make things easier but it doesn't require losing skills.

brookst•6m ago
There’s certainly an analogue to package managers, which made it easy to pick a random package rather than writing the code.

We survived. Some upsides, some downsides, life continues.

rvz•54m ago
This is the sensible option and well reasoned position, rather than a zero vote, total and complete ban by a single core maintainer, which is rather destructive for a project to do.

When you ask others that use AI frequently, the responsibility and understanding on what the agent wrote does not go away. You need to know what you are doing.

As soon as attackers are also using AI against your project, you have no choice but to use AI to protect yourself.

goda90•54m ago
My employer has this policy. We also have a strong code review process. But it all crumbles in the face of developers burning out as management thinks we can move way faster and being overloaded with code that had little thought put into it.
marcosdumay•53m ago
Well, Debian has the benefit that the project has no trouble at all saying "no". Most open source communities have a difficult time with that.
hliyan•51m ago
A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.
qsera•31m ago
What stops them from submitting PRs from another account?
cdata•23m ago
I can't speak for all, but many mature open source communities have explicit or ad-hoc reputation schemes that are used to triage contributions. A fresh account means starting over with zero reputation, which in turn means your contributions wait at the back of the line.
qsera•8m ago
ability to create low effort PR means that they can reset the reputation as much as they can..
kaffekaka•22m ago
What stopped them before?
qsera•9m ago
Before they were not able to spam large PRs
MithrilTuxedo•19m ago
Reputation, or lack thereof.

Proof of authority, essentially.

jayofdoom•6m ago
Nothing. And that's the problem -- the issue isn't "should a contributor be able to use AI" it's quickly becoming "is this entire contributor an AI agent". Every actual-human who gets a bad first experience hurts the project. The contributors having to be suspicious of new people hurts the project. The whole thing just sucks, and I don't know how to fix it.

I use claude-code, but the AI ecosystem and some of the autonomous tooling coming out of it -- which some people "helpfully" use irresponsibly and point at OSS projects they aren't personally invested in -- enables a LARGE amount of abusive behavior towards open source projects. This is even before we get into how many infrastructural resources crawlers eat up.

Me, and most other OSS contributors, signed up to be a mentor, to create software, to work together ... not to be the equivalent of a reddit moderator banning AI agents left and right.

dudul•51m ago
That's the policy we have at my work. Use AI if you want, as long as people can review it and if it breaks, don't go blaming Claude, it's your fault.
hypfer•51m ago
This outcome was to be expected.

The whole voting mechanism just exists as an elaborate dance that makes everyone keep their face, while the only sensible option wins.

A bureaucratic tarpit for bad ideas and emotions.

In a better world, none of this would be necessary, but we live in this world, and for that one, it's nice that someone engineered the system that way. Good job.

ad_fontes•47m ago
> it's still your code

I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation.

So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.

tonyarkles•34m ago
Not a lawyer, but to some degree I think policies like the one Debian came up with can help the argument. You’re not submitting a stream of commits that all have an Authored-By: Claude Code footer and massive yappy commits and comments. The policy essentially forces there to be a degree of human authorship to each commit even if some of the bits came from LLM assistance.
jfoster•30m ago
At this point, who could bring a copyright claim? Well, considering the massive AI training effort hoovering everything up, seems it might be approximately everyone.

Who would they be making the claim against? Well, considering the massive uptake of AI across the tech industry & beyond... approximately everyone.

Yes, the model companies are in the middle, but it's getting to the point where it seems a bit doubtful that claims will have any significant outcomes.

NYT might be able to get OpenAI to pay them for their content, but that's more of a financial tweak than a up-ending of industry.

dfxm12•17m ago
Different models have different licensing. Maybe open ai or anthropic doesn't claim ownership of output today, but some companies do. https://www.recraft.ai/docs/trust-and-security/ownership

I imagine few can afford a legal battle...

Free plan

Images generated on the Free plan are public and owned by Recraft

rfgplk•16m ago
> Copyright

Literally irrelevant and I have no idea why people even bring this up constantly. Copyright is practically unenforceable in the software world, when was the last time you saw someone (a company or an individual) actually sue _and win_? Apple wasn't capable of stopping all the other phone manufacturers from directly cloning their product (despite having patents & copyright) so how can an individual? The only thing that matters is execution.

For instance, my repos are cloned like ~100/week by what I presume are bots and AI lab scrapers using them for training material. How am I supposed to even find out who's doing it, and if they're abiding by the licenses I provided? It's impossible.

Lastly, having copyright isn't the same thing as being allowed to commercialize the software (and I believe loads of people confuse the two). You can still sell public domain code, even if you don't have copyright over it.

ravenstine•11m ago
Software is one of the most derivative types of works ever invented. It's arguably based on copying what other people have already created. The modern world would look a lot more primitive if this wasn't the case.

Corporations like Coca-Cola long ago figured out that begging people not to steal your ideas is a waste of time. If you don't want people using your ideas, then don't share them.

Dunno why so many programmers don't get this and seem perpetually butthurt that other programmers figured out the ultimate way for programmers to rip off each other's code.

throwatdem12311•38m ago
This is why AI agent attributions in commits is silly (it’s really just a stealth ad for the tool)

Had someone at $DAYJOB just shrug and say Claude messed up when I pointed out a sql injection in the code in their PR.

It became explicit policy at the company after that moment that blaming the AI is not an excuse for shoddy work.

qsera•33m ago
> blaming the AI is not an excuse..

It kind of is if the company mandates LLM use.

It is sort of sad that now programmers are suddenly expected to be perfect reviewers of code they didn't write.

hn_submit•19m ago
Yeah but how will this work in practice? IMHO people will just submit code they didn't write or understand.

Maintainers should quiz the submitters on the code and if they fail to answer reasonably the PR is dropped with the comment: "A.I. slop" and de submitter banned.

MithrilTuxedo•17m ago
That is the purpose of submitting them for review. Maintainers should be doing that anyway. Whether AI was used to produce the change should be invisible or not apparent to the reviewer.
bjackman•16m ago
Before I left Google recently there was a document going around called go/stake-your-reputation, basically saying "I'm happy to receive your AI generated code but the condition is that I will judge your capabilities by it, exactly as if you handwrote it, and I'll lower my opinion of you if it's slop (with the implication that if you don't improve I'll stop accepting your contributions)"

I think the term "stake your reputation" is quite good for this situation. I.e. "hi new contributor, please acknowledge that you Stake Your Reputation before we move ahead with this code review".

(Doesn't help with legal aspects of course)

a2ff6eeb0•11m ago
Yes, because LLMs have no online learning, it's a mistake to innovative in programming languages and tooling. Use what exists instead, the power of having training data is often underestimated.
jimmaswell•9m ago
I use LLM's to make massive structural changes I never would have done by hand all the time. It's intractably tedious for me but easy for an LLM.
glhaynes•5m ago
Yes, I experiment much more. It's easier to justify, and, perhaps more importantly, just WAY psychologically easier to throw away a 20 minute experiment that your robot wrote for you than the same when it took you a week of tedious manual coding.
Cantinflas•9m ago
That's a very narrow view. If anyone could vibe code their printer drivers, maybe free software wouldn't have existed, because it would not have been needed in the first place.