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Comment by cheriot | Hacker News Reader

> promises that the contributed code is not the product of an LLM but rather original and understood completely.

> require them to be majority hand written.

We should specify the outcome not the process. Expecting the contributor to understand the patch is a good idea.

> Juniors may be encouraged/required to elide LLM-assisted tooling for a period of time during their onboarding.

This is a terrible idea. Onboarding is a lot of random environment setup hitches that LLMs are often really good at. It's also getting up to speed on code and docs and I've got some great text search/summarizing tools to share.

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> Onboarding is a lot of random environment setup hitches

Learning how to navigate these hitches is a really important process

If we streamline every bit of difficulty or complexity out of our lives, it seems trivially obvious that we will soon have no idea what to do when we encounter difficulty or complexity. Is that just me thinking that?

There will always be people who know how to handle the complexity we're trying to automate away. If I can't figure out some arcane tax law when filling out my taxes, I ask my accountant, as it's literally their job to know these things.

> There will always be people who know how to handle the complexity we're trying to automate away

This is not a given!

If we automated all accounting, why would anyone still take the time to learn to become an accountant?

Yes, there are sometimes people who are just invested in learning traditional stuff for the sake of it, but is that really what we want to rely on as the fallback when AI fails?

It's highly unlikely that everybody will flock to LLMs, leaving absolutely nobody capable of stringing together a few lines of code on their own. Some devs may enjoy vibe coding, and may even be more productive that way, but there will always be use cases where it is preferable to produced deterministic code via a human dev.

> > Onboarding is a lot of random environment setup hitches > > Learning how to navigate these hitches is a really important process

To add to this, a barrier to contribution can reduce low quality/spam contributions. The downside is that a barrier to contribution that's too high reduces all contributions.

Some people find a solution, think about it, and incorporate that into their understanding of the world.

Some people ask for a coworker to do it for them, c/p stackoverflw, etc and never learn.

AI makes the first group that much more effective. Setup should be a learning process not a hazing ritual.

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