9 ms·

Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD

77 points by corbet 6mo ago

bitwizeshift 6mo ago
Paywalled article on something vibe-coded? That seems like a bold strategy.
- dana321 6mo ago
  click to continue
LeFantome 6mo ago
Vibe coding and OpenBSD. The perfect combination.
- croes 6mo ago
  Vibe coding and file systems are even better
  - himata4113 6mo ago
    trying to load with linux ext4 hmm doesn't load, but it works with my version! Must be a bug in the linux kernel, let me git clone and build an out-of-tree module...
  - LeFantome 6mo ago
    Kent Overstreet has already blazed that trail.
  - api 6mo ago
    It's clearly an experiment.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- whalesalad 6mo ago
  I vibe-configured an Edgerouter 4 as a hot-drop box that would establish a secure tunnel and create a fake WAN for some servers that had to be temporarily pulled from service but remain operational in someones home garage. I overnight shipped it to them with two of the ports labeled, they plugged in home internet on one port, the rack on the other port, and it secure tunneled to a Linode VPS to get a public IP, circumventing all the Verizon home internet crap. I used OpenBSD. Claude did most of the work.
nurettin 6mo ago
It is amusing to see that the only concern seems to be about a confusion around licensing, not the validity or maintainability of the code itself.
- g0xA52A2A 6mo ago
  Is it worth the effort to review until such implications are understood?
  - nurettin 6mo ago
    No of course not, bike shedding licenses is where it is at.
- kvuj 6mo ago
  How is that different than a human writing the code? Whether an AI or a human wrote it, I would expect the same bar of validity/maintainability.
  - nurettin 6mo ago
    To me, SOTA is just bad at DRY, KISS, succint, well architected, top down, easy to test code and has to be constantly steered to come close. Even the article suggests that. YMMV.
    - serf 6mo ago
      TDD and strong goals help.. ..much like with human development.
      - nurettin 6mo ago
        TDD makes the code test-passable, but it is still rng. As for goals, you can't foresee every stupid thing it will generate. It will look at a state machine, and rather than using the existing event structure, write its own loops and conditions. This is very different compared to human devs. No goal will help. You just keep yanking its chain until it generates as described. It can't even put imports at the top as you described. It can't help making circular refs in c++ despite being specifically told to use a hierarchical structure. Left alone you will get truly unstructured random mess. People keep making trivial apps with open source examples thinking they found god. Another dismissive comment and I swear.
throwatdem12311 6mo ago
Can someone just copyright wash Windows already.
- greyface- 6mo ago
  ReactOS did this without any need for an LLM.
  - ziml77 6mo ago
    No they didn't. It would be copyright washing if someone contributed to ReactOS who remembered large portions of the Windows code and wrote the ReactOS implementations based on that.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  The Windows 2000 and Windows XP sources are readily available and must have made it into the training data. But most software has dropped XP support. You really need at least some of the Win 8 and Win 10 APIs to claim compatibility with modern software, and I doubt claude has seen those from the inside
FeepingCreature 6mo ago
> So as of today, the Copyright system does not have a way for the output of a non-human produced set of files to contain the grant of permissions which the OpenBSD project needs to perform combination and redistribution. This seems extremely confused. The copyright system does not have a way to grant these permissions because the material is not covered under copyright! You can distribute it at will, not due to any sort of legal grant but simply because you have the ability and the law says nothing to stop you.
- jagged-chisel 6mo ago
  Eh … the argument will likely be things created by Thing at the behest of Author is owned by the Author. It’ll take a few cases going through the courts, or an Act of Congress to solidify this stuff.
  - HappySweeney 6mo ago
    Haven't there already been a few cases, each of which found that mechanically-produced works are not copywritable?
    - senko 6mo ago
      no
    - majorchord 6mo ago
      yes https://copyrightalliance.org/current-ai-copyright-cases-part-1/ https://copyrightalliance.org/current-ai-copyright-cases-par...
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.
g0xA52A2A 6mo ago
Wow that thread just kept going. Whilst the LWN article covered most of the "highlights" I think this reply from Theo is pretty suscient on the topic at large [1]. [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2
- bt1a 6mo ago
  > Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now. Thats awesome lmao
  - raggi 6mo ago
    that's not a statement from a lawyer, and it's confused. there is one true thing in there which is that at least under US considerations the LLM output may not be copyrightable due to insufficient human involvement, but the rest of the implications are poorly extrapolated. there are lots of portions of code today, prior to AI authorship, that are already not copyrightable due to the way they are produced. the existence of such code does not decimate the copyright of an overall collective work.
LeFantome 6mo ago
The article is largely about the copyright concerns of LLM generated code that was almost certainly trained on the GPL original. Also, it is essentially an ext2 filesystem as it does not support journaling.
- phendrenad2 6mo ago
  By that logic, everything is a GPL violation, because someone has written a GPL version of everything you could conceivably think of so anything you try to use AI to write, oops, tainted. Also should apply to people's brains, too. If you looked at GPL code in your life, you're tainted. I know, the courts have ruled against this, but like, it's AI man!
charcircuit 6mo ago
>incorporate knowledge carrying an illiberal license. Copyright prevents copying. It doesn't prevent using knowledge.
- bigfishrunning 6mo ago
  Good luck proving an LLM has "Knowledge", and isn't just a statistical model that tries to form outputs as a copy of it's training data...
CodeWriter23 6mo ago
Well this is ironic, GPL advocate(s) declaring a clean implementation based on specifications infringing due to someone/something reading specs provided under license. Didn't Oracle lose that argument in court as pertains to Android implementation of Java libraries?
- corbet 6mo ago
  I'm not sure what you're reading; there is a distinct lack of GPL advocates in that conversation.
longislandguido 6mo ago
~20 years ago, the Linux camp accused OpenBSD of importing GPL'd code (a wireless driver IIRC) and cried foul. The code was removed. Fast forward to 2026, Theo says no to vibe-coded slop, prove to me your magic oracle LLM didn't ingest gobs of GPL code before spitting out an answer. People are big mad of course, but you want me to believe Theo is the bad guy here for playing it conservatively?
- ksherlock 6mo ago
  The history is a bit backwards but the point is good. OpenBSD atheros wireless code was imported into linux, the BSD attributions were removed, and it was re-declared as GPL. That was later changed back.
  - longislandguido 6mo ago
    https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=117579116031296&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=117579116031296&w=2
hypeatei 6mo ago
> This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge? This comment on the article is spot on. I don't vibe code or care about AI really, but it's so exhausting to see people playing lawyer in threads about LLM-generated code. No one knows, a ton of people are using LLMs, the companies behind these models torrented content themselves, and why would you spend your time defending copyright / use it as a tool to spread FUD? Copyright is a made up concept that exists to kill competition and protect those who suck at executing on ideas.
ethin 6mo ago
> Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now. Can someone explain this to me? I was under the impression that if a work of authorship was not copyrightable because it was AI generated and not authored by a human, it was in the public domain and therefore you could do whatever you wanted with it. Normal copyright restrictions would not apply here.
- Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
  Data theft of service or piracy from the web and "AI" users content are used in the model training sets, and when codified the statistical saliency is significant if popular content is present. For example, when an LLM does a vector search, there is a high probability of pirated content bleed-though and isomorphic plagiarism in the high dimensional vector space results. Thus, often when you coincidentally type in "name a cartoon mouse", there is a higher probability Disney "Micky Mouse" will pop out in the output rather than "Mighty Mouse". Note Trademarks never expire if the fees are paid, and Disney can still technically sue anyone that messes with their mouse. Much like em dashes "--", telling the current set of models to stop using them inappropriately often fails. Also, activation capping is used to improve the models behavioral vector, and have nothing to do with the Anthropic CEO developing political ethics. LLM are useful for context search, but can't function properly without constantly stealing from actual humans. Thus, will often violate copyright, trademark, and patents. In a commercial context it is legally irrelevant how the output has misappropriated IP, and one can bet your wallet the lawyers won't care either. No, IP is not public domain for a long time (17 to 78 years) regardless of peoples delusions, even if some kid in a place like India (no software patents) thinks it is.. This channel offers several simplified explanations of the work being done with models, and Anthropic posts detailed research papers on its website. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdKiQNw80c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdKiQNw80c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4 Many YC bots are poisoning discourse -- so this thread will likely get negative karma. Some LLM users seem to develop emotional or delusional relationships with the algorithms. The internet is already >52% generated nonsense and growing. =3
cachius 6mo ago
I'd like to see it AFL fuzzed and compared to the original. Took 2 hours to first bug ten years ago in 2016. Discussion then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469535 Mirror of the slides https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/AFL%20filesystem%20fuzzing,%20Vault%202016_0.pdf#page=3 https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
joshstrange 6mo ago
> Who is the copyright holder in this case? It clearly draws heavily from an existing work, and it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it. It's not the AI, because only persons can own copyright. Is it the set of people whose work was represented in the training corpus? Was the it the set of people who wrote ext4 and whose work was in the training corpus? The company who own the AI who wrote the code? Someone else? I don't love this take. Specifically: > it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a good bit of "blood, sweat, and tears" invested by a human directing the LLM to make this happen. Yes, LLMs can spit out full projects in 1 prompt but that's not what happened here. From his blog the work on this spanned 5 months at least. And while he probably wasn't working on it exclusively during that time, I find it hard to believe it was him sending "continue" periodically to an LLM. Anyone who has built something large or complicated with LLM assistance knows that it takes more than just asking the LLM to accomplish your end goal, saying "it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it" is insulting. I've done a number of things with the help of LLMs, in all but the most contrived of cases it required knowledge, input from me, and careful guidance to accomplish. Multiple plans, multiple rollbacks, the knowledge of when we needed to step back and when to push forward. The LLM didn't bring that to the table. It brought the ability to crank out code to test a theory, to implement a plan only after we had gone 10+ rounds, or to function as grep++ or google++. LLMs are tools, they aren't a magic "Make me ext4 for OpenBSD"-button (or at least they sure as hell aren't that today, or 5 months ago when this was started).
kgeist 6mo ago
Binaries are copyrightable in both the US and the EU, and they are not technically produced by a human either, they're produced by a computer program. I honestly don't understand why this isn't extended to AI-generated code. Isn't it the same thing? One could argue that compilers merely transform source code into binaries "as is," while AI models have some "knowledge" baked in that they extract and paste as code. But there are compilers that also generate binaries by selecting ready-to-use binary patches authored by compiler developers and combining them into a program. One could also argue that, in the case of compilers, at least the input source code is authored by a human. But why can't we treat prompts as "source code in natural language" too? Where is the line between authorship and non-authorship, and how is the line defined? "Your prompt was too basic to constitute authorship" doesn't sound like an objectibe criterion. Maybe for lawyers, AI is some kind of magical thing on its own. But having successfully created a working inference engine for Qwen3, and seeing how the core loop is just ~50 lines of very simple matrix multiplication code, I can't see LLMs as anything more than pretty simple interpreters that process "neural network bytecode," which can output code from pre-existing templates just like some compilers. And I'm not sure how this is different from transpilers or autogenerated code (like server generators based on an OpenAPI schema) Sure, if an LLM was trained on GPL code, it's possible it may output GPL-licensed code verbatim, but that's a different matter from the question of whether AI-generated code is copyrightable in principle. Interestingly, I found an opinion here [0] that binaries technically shouldn't be copyrightable, and currently they are because: the copyright office listened to software publishers, and they wanted binaries protected by copyright so they could sell them that way [0] https://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/what_if_copyright_didnt_apply_binary_executables/ https://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/what_if_copyright_...
- wahern 6mo ago
  That linked opinion overstates the case. In the real-world, two different programs performing any non-trivial but functionally identical task will look substantially dissimilar in their source code, and that dissimilarity will carry over to the compiled binary, meaning what was expressive (if anything) is largely preserved. To the extent two different programs do end up with identical code, then that aspect was likely primarily functional and non-copyrightable, or at least the expressive character didn't carry over to the binary. Ordering and naming of APIs in source code can be expressive, and that indeed is often lost (literally or at least the expressive character) during the compilation process, but there are other expressive aspects to software programing that will be preserved and protected in the binary form. IMO, your intuition regarding AI is right--it's not a magic copyright laundering machine, and AFAIU courts have very quickly agreed that infringement is occurring. But in copyright law establishing infringement (or the possibility of infringement) is the easy, straight-forward part. Copyright infringement liability is a much more complex question. Transformative uses in particular are a Fair Use, and Fair Use is technically treated as an affirmative defense to infringement.[1] If something is Fair Use, infringement is effectively presumed. But Fair Uses are typically very fact-intensive questions, and unlike the case with search engines I'm not sure we'll get to the point where there's a well-defined fence protecting "AI". [1] There's a scholarly pedantic debate about whether Fair Use is properly a "defense", rather than "exception" to infringement, but it walks and talks like a defense in the sense that the defendant has the burden of proving Fair Use after the plaintiff has established infringement. There's a similarly pedantic (though slightly more substantive) debate in criminal law regarding affirmative defenses. But the very term "affirmative defense" was coined to recognize and avoid these pedantic debates.
ptidhomme 6mo ago
I liked this reply in the thread : There's another issue surrounding developer skill atrophy or stunting that I find \ particularly concerning on an existential level. If we allow people to use LLMs to write code for a given project/platform, experience \ in that platform will potentially atrophy or under develop as contributors \ increasingly rely on out sourcing their applicable skills and decisions to "AI". Even if you believe out sourcing the minutia of coding is a net positive, the \ "enshitification" principal in general should give you pause; as soon as the net \ developer skill for a project has degraded to a point of reliance, even somewhat, I \ think we can be confident those AI tools will NOT get less expensive. I'd rather be independently less productive, than dependent on some MegaCorp(TM)'s \ good will to rent us back access to our brains at a fair price. - achaean https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177430829313972&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177430829313972&w=2
hulitu 6mo ago
> Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD Who wants to test it ? Preferably on real hardware. /s
throwaway270925 6mo ago
As someone handling dozens of OpenBSD servers and VMs at work, I dont care about copyright and licenses anymore. Its 2026, just shut up and give us at least one modern filesystem already!
sombragris 6mo ago
Regardless of license status, I'd be very hesitant to trust a vibe-coded filesystem implementation with my data.
majorchord 6mo ago
Why did they even mention it was vibe-coded? Would it not be a lot harder for someone to prove that fact if you just didn't tell them?

77 points by corbet 6mo ago

bitwizeshift 6mo ago

Paywalled article on something vibe-coded? That seems like a bold strategy.

dana321 6mo ago
click to continue

LeFantome 6mo ago

Vibe coding and OpenBSD. The perfect combination.

croes 6mo ago
Vibe coding and file systems are even better
- himata4113 6mo ago
  trying to load with linux ext4 hmm doesn't load, but it works with my version! Must be a bug in the linux kernel, let me git clone and build an out-of-tree module...
- LeFantome 6mo ago
  Kent Overstreet has already blazed that trail.
- api 6mo ago
  It's clearly an experiment.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 6mo ago
I vibe-configured an Edgerouter 4 as a hot-drop box that would establish a secure tunnel and create a fake WAN for some servers that had to be temporarily pulled from service but remain operational in someones home garage. I overnight shipped it to them with two of the ports labeled, they plugged in home internet on one port, the rack on the other port, and it secure tunneled to a Linode VPS to get a public IP, circumventing all the Verizon home internet crap. I used OpenBSD. Claude did most of the work.

nurettin 6mo ago

It is amusing to see that the only concern seems to be about a confusion around licensing, not the validity or maintainability of the code itself.

g0xA52A2A 6mo ago
Is it worth the effort to review until such implications are understood?
- nurettin 6mo ago
  No of course not, bike shedding licenses is where it is at.
kvuj 6mo ago
How is that different than a human writing the code? Whether an AI or a human wrote it, I would expect the same bar of validity/maintainability.
- nurettin 6mo ago
  To me, SOTA is just bad at DRY, KISS, succint, well architected, top down, easy to test code and has to be constantly steered to come close. Even the article suggests that. YMMV.
  - serf 6mo ago
    TDD and strong goals help.. ..much like with human development.
    - nurettin 6mo ago
      TDD makes the code test-passable, but it is still rng. As for goals, you can't foresee every stupid thing it will generate. It will look at a state machine, and rather than using the existing event structure, write its own loops and conditions. This is very different compared to human devs. No goal will help. You just keep yanking its chain until it generates as described. It can't even put imports at the top as you described. It can't help making circular refs in c++ despite being specifically told to use a hierarchical structure. Left alone you will get truly unstructured random mess. People keep making trivial apps with open source examples thinking they found god. Another dismissive comment and I swear.

throwatdem12311 6mo ago

Can someone just copyright wash Windows already.

greyface- 6mo ago
ReactOS did this without any need for an LLM.
- ziml77 6mo ago
  No they didn't. It would be copyright washing if someone contributed to ReactOS who remembered large portions of the Windows code and wrote the ReactOS implementations based on that.
wongarsu 6mo ago
The Windows 2000 and Windows XP sources are readily available and must have made it into the training data. But most software has dropped XP support. You really need at least some of the Win 8 and Win 10 APIs to claim compatibility with modern software, and I doubt claude has seen those from the inside

FeepingCreature 6mo ago

> So as of today, the Copyright system does not have a way for the output of a non-human produced set of files to contain the grant of permissions which the OpenBSD project needs to perform combination and redistribution. This seems extremely confused. The copyright system does not have a way to grant these permissions because the material is not covered under copyright! You can distribute it at will, not due to any sort of legal grant but simply because you have the ability and the law says nothing to stop you.

jagged-chisel 6mo ago
Eh … the argument will likely be things created by Thing at the behest of Author is owned by the Author. It’ll take a few cases going through the courts, or an Act of Congress to solidify this stuff.
- HappySweeney 6mo ago
  Haven't there already been a few cases, each of which found that mechanically-produced works are not copywritable?
  - senko 6mo ago
    no
  - majorchord 6mo ago
    yes https://copyrightalliance.org/current-ai-copyright-cases-part-1/ https://copyrightalliance.org/current-ai-copyright-cases-par...
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  Just like we settled on photographers havin copyright on the works created by their camera. The same arguments seem to apply The US Copyright Office has published a piece that argues otherwise, but a) unless they pass regulation their opinion doesn't really matter, and b) there is way too much money resting on the assumption code can be copyrighted despite AI involvement.

g0xA52A2A 6mo ago

Wow that thread just kept going. Whilst the LWN article covered most of the "highlights" I think this reply from Theo is pretty suscient on the topic at large [1]. [1] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177425035627562&w=2

bt1a 6mo ago
> Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now. Thats awesome lmao
- raggi 6mo ago
  that's not a statement from a lawyer, and it's confused. there is one true thing in there which is that at least under US considerations the LLM output may not be copyrightable due to insufficient human involvement, but the rest of the implications are poorly extrapolated. there are lots of portions of code today, prior to AI authorship, that are already not copyrightable due to the way they are produced. the existence of such code does not decimate the copyright of an overall collective work.

LeFantome 6mo ago

The article is largely about the copyright concerns of LLM generated code that was almost certainly trained on the GPL original. Also, it is essentially an ext2 filesystem as it does not support journaling.

phendrenad2 6mo ago
By that logic, everything is a GPL violation, because someone has written a GPL version of everything you could conceivably think of so anything you try to use AI to write, oops, tainted. Also should apply to people's brains, too. If you looked at GPL code in your life, you're tainted. I know, the courts have ruled against this, but like, it's AI man!

charcircuit 6mo ago

>incorporate knowledge carrying an illiberal license. Copyright prevents copying. It doesn't prevent using knowledge.

bigfishrunning 6mo ago
Good luck proving an LLM has "Knowledge", and isn't just a statistical model that tries to form outputs as a copy of it's training data...

CodeWriter23 6mo ago

Well this is ironic, GPL advocate(s) declaring a clean implementation based on specifications infringing due to someone/something reading specs provided under license. Didn't Oracle lose that argument in court as pertains to Android implementation of Java libraries?

corbet 6mo ago
I'm not sure what you're reading; there is a distinct lack of GPL advocates in that conversation.

longislandguido 6mo ago

~20 years ago, the Linux camp accused OpenBSD of importing GPL'd code (a wireless driver IIRC) and cried foul. The code was removed. Fast forward to 2026, Theo says no to vibe-coded slop, prove to me your magic oracle LLM didn't ingest gobs of GPL code before spitting out an answer. People are big mad of course, but you want me to believe Theo is the bad guy here for playing it conservatively?

ksherlock 6mo ago
The history is a bit backwards but the point is good. OpenBSD atheros wireless code was imported into linux, the BSD attributions were removed, and it was re-declared as GPL. That was later changed back.
- longislandguido 6mo ago
  https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=117579116031296&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=117579116031296&w=2

hypeatei 6mo ago

> This obsession with copyrights between different free software ecosystems - who put the lawyers in charge? This comment on the article is spot on. I don't vibe code or care about AI really, but it's so exhausting to see people playing lawyer in threads about LLM-generated code. No one knows, a ton of people are using LLMs, the companies behind these models torrented content themselves, and why would you spend your time defending copyright / use it as a tool to spread FUD? Copyright is a made up concept that exists to kill competition and protect those who suck at executing on ideas.

ethin 6mo ago

> Lacking Copyright (or similarily a Public Domain declaration by a human), we don't receive sufficient rights grants which would permit us to include it into the aggregate body of source code, without that aggregate body becoming less free than it is now. Can someone explain this to me? I was under the impression that if a work of authorship was not copyrightable because it was AI generated and not authored by a human, it was in the public domain and therefore you could do whatever you wanted with it. Normal copyright restrictions would not apply here.

Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
Data theft of service or piracy from the web and "AI" users content are used in the model training sets, and when codified the statistical saliency is significant if popular content is present. For example, when an LLM does a vector search, there is a high probability of pirated content bleed-though and isomorphic plagiarism in the high dimensional vector space results. Thus, often when you coincidentally type in "name a cartoon mouse", there is a higher probability Disney "Micky Mouse" will pop out in the output rather than "Mighty Mouse". Note Trademarks never expire if the fees are paid, and Disney can still technically sue anyone that messes with their mouse. Much like em dashes "--", telling the current set of models to stop using them inappropriately often fails. Also, activation capping is used to improve the models behavioral vector, and have nothing to do with the Anthropic CEO developing political ethics. LLM are useful for context search, but can't function properly without constantly stealing from actual humans. Thus, will often violate copyright, trademark, and patents. In a commercial context it is legally irrelevant how the output has misappropriated IP, and one can bet your wallet the lawyers won't care either. No, IP is not public domain for a long time (17 to 78 years) regardless of peoples delusions, even if some kid in a place like India (no software patents) thinks it is.. This channel offers several simplified explanations of the work being done with models, and Anthropic posts detailed research papers on its website. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdKiQNw80c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDdKiQNw80c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4Tpsk_fnM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAcwtV_bFp4 Many YC bots are poisoning discourse -- so this thread will likely get negative karma. Some LLM users seem to develop emotional or delusional relationships with the algorithms. The internet is already >52% generated nonsense and growing. =3

cachius 6mo ago

I'd like to see it AFL fuzzed and compared to the original. Took 2 hours to first bug ten years ago in 2016. Discussion then https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11469535 Mirror of the slides https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slides/AFL%20filesystem%20fuzzing,%20Vault%202016_0.pdf#page=3 https://events.static.linuxfound.org/sites/events/files/slid...

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

joshstrange 6mo ago

> Who is the copyright holder in this case? It clearly draws heavily from an existing work, and it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it. It's not the AI, because only persons can own copyright. Is it the set of people whose work was represented in the training corpus? Was the it the set of people who wrote ext4 and whose work was in the training corpus? The company who own the AI who wrote the code? Someone else? I don't love this take. Specifically: > it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a good bit of "blood, sweat, and tears" invested by a human directing the LLM to make this happen. Yes, LLMs can spit out full projects in 1 prompt but that's not what happened here. From his blog the work on this spanned 5 months at least. And while he probably wasn't working on it exclusively during that time, I find it hard to believe it was him sending "continue" periodically to an LLM. Anyone who has built something large or complicated with LLM assistance knows that it takes more than just asking the LLM to accomplish your end goal, saying "it's clear the human offering the patch didn't do it" is insulting. I've done a number of things with the help of LLMs, in all but the most contrived of cases it required knowledge, input from me, and careful guidance to accomplish. Multiple plans, multiple rollbacks, the knowledge of when we needed to step back and when to push forward. The LLM didn't bring that to the table. It brought the ability to crank out code to test a theory, to implement a plan only after we had gone 10+ rounds, or to function as grep++ or google++. LLMs are tools, they aren't a magic "Make me ext4 for OpenBSD"-button (or at least they sure as hell aren't that today, or 5 months ago when this was started).

kgeist 6mo ago

Binaries are copyrightable in both the US and the EU, and they are not technically produced by a human either, they're produced by a computer program. I honestly don't understand why this isn't extended to AI-generated code. Isn't it the same thing? One could argue that compilers merely transform source code into binaries "as is," while AI models have some "knowledge" baked in that they extract and paste as code. But there are compilers that also generate binaries by selecting ready-to-use binary patches authored by compiler developers and combining them into a program. One could also argue that, in the case of compilers, at least the input source code is authored by a human. But why can't we treat prompts as "source code in natural language" too? Where is the line between authorship and non-authorship, and how is the line defined? "Your prompt was too basic to constitute authorship" doesn't sound like an objectibe criterion. Maybe for lawyers, AI is some kind of magical thing on its own. But having successfully created a working inference engine for Qwen3, and seeing how the core loop is just ~50 lines of very simple matrix multiplication code, I can't see LLMs as anything more than pretty simple interpreters that process "neural network bytecode," which can output code from pre-existing templates just like some compilers. And I'm not sure how this is different from transpilers or autogenerated code (like server generators based on an OpenAPI schema) Sure, if an LLM was trained on GPL code, it's possible it may output GPL-licensed code verbatim, but that's a different matter from the question of whether AI-generated code is copyrightable in principle. Interestingly, I found an opinion here [0] that binaries technically shouldn't be copyrightable, and currently they are because: the copyright office listened to software publishers, and they wanted binaries protected by copyright so they could sell them that way [0] https://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/what_if_copyright_didnt_apply_binary_executables/ https://freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/what_if_copyright_...

wahern 6mo ago
That linked opinion overstates the case. In the real-world, two different programs performing any non-trivial but functionally identical task will look substantially dissimilar in their source code, and that dissimilarity will carry over to the compiled binary, meaning what was expressive (if anything) is largely preserved. To the extent two different programs do end up with identical code, then that aspect was likely primarily functional and non-copyrightable, or at least the expressive character didn't carry over to the binary. Ordering and naming of APIs in source code can be expressive, and that indeed is often lost (literally or at least the expressive character) during the compilation process, but there are other expressive aspects to software programing that will be preserved and protected in the binary form. IMO, your intuition regarding AI is right--it's not a magic copyright laundering machine, and AFAIU courts have very quickly agreed that infringement is occurring. But in copyright law establishing infringement (or the possibility of infringement) is the easy, straight-forward part. Copyright infringement liability is a much more complex question. Transformative uses in particular are a Fair Use, and Fair Use is technically treated as an affirmative defense to infringement.[1] If something is Fair Use, infringement is effectively presumed. But Fair Uses are typically very fact-intensive questions, and unlike the case with search engines I'm not sure we'll get to the point where there's a well-defined fence protecting "AI". [1] There's a scholarly pedantic debate about whether Fair Use is properly a "defense", rather than "exception" to infringement, but it walks and talks like a defense in the sense that the defendant has the burden of proving Fair Use after the plaintiff has established infringement. There's a similarly pedantic (though slightly more substantive) debate in criminal law regarding affirmative defenses. But the very term "affirmative defense" was coined to recognize and avoid these pedantic debates.

ptidhomme 6mo ago

I liked this reply in the thread : There's another issue surrounding developer skill atrophy or stunting that I find \ particularly concerning on an existential level. If we allow people to use LLMs to write code for a given project/platform, experience \ in that platform will potentially atrophy or under develop as contributors \ increasingly rely on out sourcing their applicable skills and decisions to "AI". Even if you believe out sourcing the minutia of coding is a net positive, the \ "enshitification" principal in general should give you pause; as soon as the net \ developer skill for a project has degraded to a point of reliance, even somewhat, I \ think we can be confident those AI tools will NOT get less expensive. I'd rather be independently less productive, than dependent on some MegaCorp(TM)'s \ good will to rent us back access to our brains at a fair price. - achaean https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177430829313972&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177430829313972&w=2

hulitu 6mo ago

> Vibe-Coded Ext4 for OpenBSD Who wants to test it ? Preferably on real hardware. /s

throwaway270925 6mo ago

As someone handling dozens of OpenBSD servers and VMs at work, I dont care about copyright and licenses anymore. Its 2026, just shut up and give us at least one modern filesystem already!

sombragris 6mo ago

Regardless of license status, I'd be very hesitant to trust a vibe-coded filesystem implementation with my data.

majorchord 6mo ago

Why did they even mention it was vibe-coded? Would it not be a lot harder for someone to prove that fact if you just didn't tell them?