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Comment by rhizome31 | Hacker News Reader

As a developer who doesn't use AI for coding, except for the occasional non-project specific question to a chat bot, I am wondering if you use it for client projects or only for your own projects. If you do use it for client projects, do you have some kind of agreement that you're going to share their code with a third-party? I'm asking because most clients will make you sign a contract saying that you shouldn't disclose any information about the project to a third-party. I even once had a client who explicitly stated that AI should not be used. Do you find clients willing to make an exception for AI coding agents?

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I basically only use it in the workplace, and largely because of one of those AI mandates.

I don't think it actually saves me enough time (or for many tasks, any time) so I wouldn't pay for it for my own projects, and also for my own projects, the enjoyability is a big factor, and I enjoy doing more than prompting.

Thank you for the reply. What do you mean by "AI mandates"? Does it mean your company has an explicit policy allowing sharing code with AI services?

Sadly, I mean my current employer is doing the whole "tracking to see AI usage rates" and basically checking in performance reviews if people are using as much AI as the AI sales people told the CEO people need to use.

We're a SaaS company so we own all our code.

I just puked in my mouth a little. Sorry to hear you're being subjected to that.

That's hideous.

Wow, really?! I had no idea that such policies existed. Quite astonishing I have to say.

Klarna, Shopify and either Google or Meta made a lot of press promoting policies like that and also the AI companies themselves are selling this kind of approach in the "how to make the best use of our tools" advice they give to execs.

No, I don't. This goes for internal projects as well, we're not going to share code unless payed to do so.

We commonly work with personal information so it would also introduce rather harsh legal risks if usian corporations could reach it.

I have a client that actively asks me to use AI more and more. They expect to get better quality code faster, ie. to reduce costs. (That's not my experience but that's beside the point).

I don't share anything with openai/anthropic that I wouldn't feel comfortable pasting into a web search prompt.

So no AI autocomplete I suppose?

I assume AI autocomplete may send any part of your code base or even all of it to a third-party.

Precisely. For work projects, I only send contexts I've specified myself (so I might copy-paste a chunk, clean it, then send), I don't let AI tools pick and choose what they need.

If I were using it for some hobby project or open source thing I would probably be more open to experimenting with sending random parts of the codebase.

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