Related:
This is in a PR where Shougo, another long-time contributor, communicates entirely in walls of unparseable AI slop text: https://github.com/vim/vim/pull/19413
Thank you for the detailed feedback! I’ve addressed all the issues:
Thank you for the feedback! I agree that following the Vim 8+ naming convention makes sense.
Thank you for the feedback on naming!
Thanks for the suggestion! After thinking about this more, I believe repeat_set() / repeat_get() is the right choice:
Thank you for the feedback. A brief clarification.
I spent literally all day yesterday working on this:
https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/
I’ve started to add it to my projects. Eventually, it will be on all of my projects. I made it so that any project could adopt it, or modify it to their needs. It’s got a thorough and clear definition of what is banned, too, so it should help any argument over pull requests.
Hopefully more projects will outright ban AI generated code (and other AI generated material).
I like this approach, but how can it be enforced? Would you have to read every line and listen to a gut feeling?
Basically the best you can do is continue as normal, and if someone submits something that says it is or obviously is AI, point to this policy and reject it. Just having the policy should be a decent deterrent.
It’s okay, we’re just not going to tell you 👍
People submitting malicious or deceptive code to open source repositories isn’t a new phenomenon. Just know that if you do it with any name in any way attached to your real name, and anyone finds out, you can kiss your reputation in the software dev community goodbye.
Also, if you don’t admit that it’s AI generated, and it turns out to be copyrighted code, you’ll have a fun time in court trying to defend yourself for copyright infringement by admitting to fraud.
Good luck proving it
You’re a special type of uninformed, aren’t you
Same mindset as “You don’t need a perfect lock to protect your house from thieves, you just need one better than what your neighbors have.”
If a vibecoder sees this they will not bother with obfuscation and simply move onto the next project.
Obviously you ask an LLM if any of it was generated!
No, it’s a prejudiced hot take that’s completely and utterly unenforceable which will be seen as some Luddite behavior in 10 years when everyone is using the tooling.
Tell us how you really feel.
I did. And you’re worried about clankers being able to comprehend as well as a human 🤣, good Lord the bar is low.
Ok that’s really funny and I do agree with you, but I think you might be coming at this a little… unhinged. The issue with this is that it is unenforceable and honestly somewhat pointless. If AI tools are not up to scratch, then that will always be reflected in the quality of the code. Bad code is bad code, it doesn’t matter what made it. A lot of people seem to think AI is synonomous with bad code, and if that is the case, simply ban bad code.
The issue they are going to run into is twofold:
Firstly, what qualifies as “using AI”? Admittedly I haven’t actually read their licensing, but I’m just going to take a guess and say that it bans all forms of AI used anywhere in production. Almost every compiler I use these days has auto predict. It’s rarely useful, but if it does happen to guess the rest of the code I was already going to type, and I accept that, did I use AI to assist my coding? Back in the day before it was an llm the auto predict was actually decent, so not all of them use AI. How would you even know whether your is AI or not?
The second issue is an issue of foresight. When the AI tools do become up to scratch, that will be reflected in the quality of their code. Suddenly AI generated code is faster, more efficient, and easier to understand all simultaneously. Anyone using this license is effectively admitting that theirs is the inferior option.
It’s always hilarious to me when people ask whether something is AI slop. I dunno man, has your ability to detect whether something is good been reduced to AI slop? If it’s good, it’s good. If it’s not, it’s not. Either you like it or you don’t. Feels very similar to transphobes saying they can always tell. If that’s true, and AI really is always going to worse, you should never have to ask whether something is AI slop, you should just be able to tell. Otherwise it’s just slop, no ai necessary.
Firstly, what qualifies as “using AI”? Admittedly I haven’t actually read their licensing, but I’m just going to take a guess and say that it bans all forms of AI used anywhere in production. Almost every compiler I use these days has auto predict. It’s rarely useful, but if it does happen to guess the rest of the code I was already going to type, and I accept that, did I use AI to assist my coding? Back in the day before it was an llm the auto predict was actually decent, so not all of them use AI. How would you even know whether your is AI or not?
So two things. First, it’s a policy, not a license. Second, the definition of AI generated is very clear in the policy.
I don’t know why you would criticize it without reading it, but the main problems with AI generated code are legal, not quality related, and they are also clearly laid out in the policy.
That kind of troll language doesn’t work in this forum. Cya 👋
Yes it does. Folks who just want to screech went crazy. Like, two of you actually engaged and brought valid concerns. Y’all are a CRAZY prejudiced bunch and hate being called out just as much as the next shit flinging monkey tribe.
You actually think Lemmy is better behaved 🤣🤣🤣🤣
this is cool
you should make a post about this somewhere here on Lemmy
people should know about it
Ok, yeah, I’ll make a post for it.
Feel free to share it anywhere. :)
hi, i have strong feelings about the use of genai but i come at it from a very different direction (story writing). it’s possible for someone to throw together a 300 page story book in an afternoon - in the style of lovecraft if they want, or brandon sanderson, or dan brown (dan brown always sounds the same and so we might not even notice). now, the assumption that i have about said 300 pager is that it will be dogshit, but art is subjective and someone out there has been beside themselves pining for it.
but this has always been true. there have always been people churning out trash hoping to turn a buck. the fact that they can do it faster now doesn’t change that they’re still in the trash market.
so: i keep writing. i know that my projects will be plagiarized by tech companies. i tell myself that my work is “better” than ai slop.
for you, things are different. writing code is a goal-oriented creative endeavor, but the bar for literature is enjoyment, and the bar for code is functionality. with that in mind, i have some questions:
if someone used genai to generate code snippets and they were able to verify the output, what’s the problem? they used an ersatz gnome to save them some typing. if generated code is indistinguishable from human code, how does this policy work?
for code that’s been flagged as ai generated- and let’s assume it’s obvious, they left a bunch of GPT comments all over the place- is the code bad because it’s genai or is it bad because it doesn’t work?
i’m interested to hear your thoughts
That’s a very good question, and I appreciate it.
I put a lot of this in the reasoning section of the policy, but basically there are legal, quality, security, and community reasons. Even if the quality and security reasons are solved (as you’re proposing with the “indistinguishable from human code” aspect), there are still legal and community reasons.
Legal
AI generated material is not copyrightable, and therefore licensing restrictions on it cannot be enforced. It’s considered public domain, so putting that code into your code base makes your license much less enforceable.
AI generated material might be too similar to its copyrighted training data, making it actually copyrighted by the original author. We’ve seen OpenAI and Midjourney get sued for regurgitating their training data. It’s not farfetched to think a copyright owner could go after a project for distributing their copyrighted material after an AI regurgitated it.
Community
People have an implicit trust that the maintainers of a project understand the code. When AI generated code is included, that may not be the case, and that implicit trust is broken.
Admittedly, I’ve never seen AI generated code that I couldn’t understand, but it’s reasonable to think that as AI models get bigger and more capable of producing abstract code, their code could become too obscure or abstracted to be sufficiently understood by a project maintainer.
Thank you
That’s great, thank you!
Added to my project’s repo.“AI generated” means that the subject material is in whole, or in meaningful part, the output of a generative AI model or models, such as a Large Language Model. This does not include code that is the result of non-generative tools, such as standard compilers, linters, or basic IDE auto-completions. This does, however, include code that is the result of code block generators and automatic refactoring tools that make use of generative AI models.
As “artificial intelligence” is not that well defined, you could clarify what the policy defines “AI” as by specifying that “AI” involves machine learning.
“Generative AI model” is a pretty well defined term, so this prohibits all of those things like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude Code, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, etc.
Machine learning is a much more broad category, so banning all outputs of machine learning may have unintended consequences.
This is super cool!
Did want to offer one language critique, it’s easy to jump to the word human as the opposite of AI-made, but there are a lot of therians and adjacent entities in the software engineering space. It would be wonderful to find language that is a pro-“human” policy that avoids that word and instead focuses on people of all sorts of identities so as not to be othering.
Sounds strange to some I’m sure, but this has been coming up more and more with coworkers I’ve had across several companies. It’s kind of like moving from “he or she” to “they”, a great example is the writings of beeps a prominent software engineer on the GOV.UK site and its accessibility https://beeps.website/about/nonhuman/
Regardless if any changes are made thanks for reading and your policy writeup, again very cool :D
I would be fine to include more inclusive language, except that I want to be in line with the wording the US Copyright Office uses, as a major goal of this policy is to ensure that every contribution is copyrightable. They specifically use the word human, and go so far as to say that it is only human authorship that can make something copyrightable.
There was a landmark case where a monkey took a selfie, and the courts decided that the picture could not be copyrighted. In the court’s decision, again, it’s specifically “human” authorship that was the requirement for copyright.
The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.
…
Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.
- https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
In my opinion, “person” would be a better term to use, since the personhood of the author is really what matters, but since this is meant to provide legal protection, I’m pushed toward the term “human”. Also, “person” could be confused with the concept of a “legal person”, which includes corporations. A corporation itself cannot be an author, but it can own copyrights.
Maybe I should add this to a portion near the bottom of the page to provide the reasoning behind sticking to the term, despite the desire to be inclusive.
honestly, an amazing and respectable answer with solid reasoning
up to you if you’d like to add a footnote, either way I’m rooting for you this is good stuff
I added several quotes from the copyright office’s guidance that show their specific usage of the term “human authorship” to the More Information section. :)
One interesting thing is that they explicitly say that a work that is “authored by non-human spiritual beings” can only qualify for copyright protection if there is “human selection and arrangement of the revelations”, and even then, only the compilation is copyrighted, not the “divine messages”.
The devs do have my sympathy, they dedicate their time and energy for these projects and start burning out.
The solution obviously shouldn’t be drowning it on slop. They should be just slowing down. Vim has been an excellent and functional tool for many years now, it doesn’t need more speed.
There are better ways to use LLMs as a productivity tool.I see this excuse of burn out every time it comes to LLM use, but i honestly do not buy it. You cant tell me every other dev out there just burnt out at the same time in sync with the release of LLM coding assistants. If you use LLMs like this you simply dont care about the project anymore and should move on with your life. Its better for everyone if it gets abandoned by the original dev and forked by ones that care. Sometimes you just gotta let go.
Agreed. They need to take a break at least.
There aren’t better ways, not in their current forms.
Emacs. C?min ;)
Doom with evil.
What I’m wondering is, why does Vim need new features in the core repo at all?
It’s finished software at this point.
The dev should just do security upgrades and let extensions developed by other people handle additional functionality.
It’s such a monumental waste of LLMs to include these slop phrases.
Employee 1 enters a prompt to send a slop mail that is so garbage it is unbearable to read using a brain.
So employee 2 either summarizes the slop mail using an LLM too or skips obtaining the information entirely and just goes straight to answering by prompting the next slop mail.
I wonder if that’s by design - to make interacting with slop so painful that human-to-human communication will not happen without a LLM in between anymore.
I originally meant to leave a much shorter comment; apologies.
I can’t code to save my life. However I find your observation interesting. The way I see it, AI, no matter where, is eroding human to human interactions. It becomes the middleman for everything.
It’s really obvious with personal research. A couple years ago if you wanted to start say, growing tomatoes in your backyard, you would have searched people’s comments on a variety of media platforms, would have read a few books or blogs. You would have asked questions to a bunch of people with some experience, left a like or upvote on people posting photos of their tomatoes, you would have used your own judgement to discern what consisted good quality advice and what not.
It would have taken you days. But all that interaction is very rewarding especially for those authoring comments, blogs, books, and photos of their experiences. Because nobody makes something just to be ignored.
Now LLM does all that process for you. In a matter of seconds. And giving no feedback or interaction to anyone whose information was used. It’s depressing, but I’m intrigued to see how it plays out.
I agree. Specifically for your example I think the transformation has been going on for a while with the aggressive monitization of internet content / the ad industry and the general downfall of google search. LLMs could to be the final nail in the coffin for nieche expertise on the broader internet.
I too am curious to see how AI companies will try to overcome the lack of human generated content to train their models on.
I had this reflection 3 years ago, and I think that’s where we’re headed.
The internet is already un-useable for search without prompting an LLM to gather the info you need for you, and it’s getting worse every month.
Reverse compression: making transmission larger (while still being lossy).
AI psychosis
Shougo is Japanese. I’m guessing he communicates like that because he uses translation rather than trying to communicate in broken English.
TBF if the reviewer just quoted Claude at me, I would reply with Claude or ChatGPT.
That’s cool and all, but also they obviously are not just using it to translate. Those are an LLM’s words, not a human’s, and it is painfully clear. It doesn’t even seem like a person is “behind the wheel” at all. As soon as someone disagrees with them, they basically just apologize for “getting it wrong” and do whatever that person told them. They actually go back and forth on the naming convention based solely on the most recent comment. It’s typical LLM “agree with the person no matter what” behavior.
Okay that’s really strange. I can only speculate on why they’re doing that. I do know that Shougo is a very long-term contributor to vim’s plugin ecosystem. I can’t imagine why he would be doing this if it weren’t just a language barrier issue.
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wtf. i really like vim. is everyone really using neovim instead and there’s no good dev maintaining vim now?
looks sane
i ❤️vim. used it for some 15 years.
switched to neovim cause of firenvim which allowed me to use neovim in text areas in firefox
Just use VScode, definitely no slop in there. Microslop would never
I never liked vim. This got me to try Micro and now the only time I’m going to use Vim is if I’m forced by a remote system I can’t install it or nano on. I may strip it out of my systems entirely. I really don’t need something so complicated to edit the sudoers file.
i use vim keybinds on my web browser too, it’s very convenient once i got used to it. but yeah i understand it’s not really for everyone.
I understand it and DEs like sway but keybind life is not for me. If I need more than micro I’ll just use a full blow IDE.
I wonder what Bram’s stance would have been on AI.
Anyway, looks like it’s time to learn emacs.
Use Doom Emacs, then it’s usual Vim bindings + the space bar for fancy commands. The difficult part would be Emacs Lisp for customization, but then again it’s way better than Vimscript.
Or just switch to Neovim?
If you have a few days and feel like staying inside for a bit, check out the system crafters Emacs from scratch videos on yt (perhaps also elsewhere). They are awesome and get you started better than just downloading spacemacs or so, but take some time.
Thanks for the replies - going to check that out when I have time.
I would like to mirror another commentor and mention that Shougo is Japanese and probably issuing Claude to communicate.
Truly nothing is sacred lmaoooooo
I’m probably more surprised than I should be that so many programmers are so pathetically lonely and delusional.
Having an AI understand your codebase, and potentially answering an issue, which might not be an issue is great I think.
The problem I see here is that you have no idea that a bot is answering. Why isnt there a ‘shougo-bot’ / ‘vim-helper-bot’ / whatever named bot user for it?
“Talking” to an AI should always be disclosed, everyone feels betrayed whenever they find out that a clanker is on the other side of the channel.
TBH I don’t really mind when LLMs are used for code reviews. My main issue[1] with coding assistants is that the people using them don’t verify the code they emit thoroughly (that would be too much work. Remember - reading code is harder then writing it) and thus they often push junk into the codebase and blame the AI for the bad quality when it crashes. But with code reviews there is no such risk, because you still have to read and understand the comments and decide on your own how to resolve them.
Some caveats;
- It must be disclosed that the comment was generated by AI. Disagreeing with a human reviewer (who’s usually maintainer) and disagreeing with an LLM are very different beasts.
- If the submitter disagrees with an AI comment, and the reviewer agrees with the model’s initial criticism - the reviewer[2] need to defend it themselves, not delegate the argument back to the LLM.
Well that’s a first. First time I’ve ever recognized a github name I’ve pulled from before in a drama article. Used Dein in my vim config a while back. RIP
Edit: rearranged added rip
IMHO, the logo shouldn’t have the anti-AI symbol. I like the quill. Maybe a more positive DNA symbol.
least they’re using claude and not chatpgpt
