Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

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I think what it means is "we will judge you based on the code you submit, we don't care if it comes from an AI". Also probably "we will judge you if you obviously don't understand the code you submit".

At least that's how I do it. When someone offers a patch to an open source project, I don't really care if that person has a PhD, or if that person does this in their free time, or if that patch is actually the result of a whole team working together. I judge the patch based on the value it brings to me as a maintainer.

Obviously the code has to be good, but also the interaction with whoever offers the patch has to be smooth: if I have a question, if I need them to confirm/change/test/elaborate on something, I need that to work.

If I feel like I would be faster doing the work myself AND this author is not putting effort into it (e.g. they just copy-paste an AI), I will not review that work. Possibly I will distrust that author. If too many contributions end up wasting my time, I will start limiting the contributions to people I know/trust, etc.

In terms of maintenance, I don't see a difference between getting a contribution from a stranger or from a stranger using an AI.

In terms of philosophy, that's obviously different: One may not want to accept contributions from people using AI because they think that AI is bad for society, for instance. And I would totally understand that. But if the stance (and it seems to be Linus' stance) is that a patch is only judged based on its technical merit, then I don't see why AI-in-the-loop would be an issue.

This was my take on it as well. Which in many ways makes a lot of sense and is pragmatic.

The thing which I think is going to be a very sore lesson for everyone at some point is that if anyone uses AI it becomes a burden for everyone. Even in projects that reject all AI usage.

What I can do is create 50 personas that all contribute patches. 40 of them get called out and are distrusted, but 10 make it through. I can give more focus on those 10 to ensure their trust level increases. Then slowly have them all come together to shepard some subsystem where I'm going to be the only real person involved and can sign off on my own work in a that looks like I have oversight from the outside.

In the past this was possible but took a very high cost. You need a bunch of competent software engineers who you can trust not to blab their secret mission. Today anyone can give it a try.

I don't disagree, and AI helps scaling many things: good work, bad work, malware.

However, I remember that a couple of university researchers (PhD candidates maybe?) thought it would be a good idea to introduce security issues in Linux, and managed to do it. Without AI and without a lot of resources.

A consequence of that was that Linux immediately reverted all the patches coming from that university, saying "we don't know if we can trust you guys" (but really I guess as a way to tell universities "if you fuck with us we ban you, now keep your people in line").

And that's what I was thinking about when I said that if too many contributors misbehave, as a maintainer I will just stop accepting contributions from people I don't know. And maybe that will happen. Maybe it will be harder and harder to just be accepted into the club of the people who can send a contribution and have it reviewed at all.

> In terms of maintenance, I don't see a difference between getting a contribution from a stranger or from a stranger using an AI.

Perhaps not in terms of maintenance. In terms of provenance there is a significant difference between "I wrote this." and "I found this."

I meant as a maintainer. As a maintainer, I receive patches from contributors, I decide if I merge them or not (and under which conditions), and then I take ownership of the merged patch (as in, if it breaks I am responsible for getting it fixed).

Which means that "as a maintainer", I don't write anything. I merge code that falls from the sky. Whether it was an AI cloud or a manual-coding cloud, I don't know: from where I stand, it falls from the sky.

> there is a significant difference between "I wrote this." and "I found this."

Of course. When I write code ("I wrote this"), then it does not fall from the sky: I wrote it. I know, it's me :-). But in the open source world, being a maintainer means that you deal with code that falls from the sky. Unless you decide to close your project to contributions and only accept people you trust.

> In terms of provenance there is a significant difference between "I wrote this." and "I found this."

That's very well put. I'm stealing your wording.

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