5 ms·

"Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?" Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for it, and actually choose to PR

by yarn_ 6mo ago

"Why would I commit something written by AI with myself as author?" Because you're the one who decided to take responsibility for it, and actually choose to PR it in its ultimate form. What utility do the reviews/maintainers get from you marking whats written by you vs. chatgpt? Other than your ability to scapegoat the LLM? The only thing that actually affects me (the hypothetical reviewer) and the project is the quality of the actual code, and, ideally, the presence of a contributer (you) who can actually answer for that code. The presence or absence of LLM generated code by your hand makes no difference to me or the project, why would it? Why would it affect my decision making whatsoever? Its your code, end of story. Either that or the PR should just be rejected, because nobody is taking responsibility for it.

Krssst 6mo ago
As someone mostly outside of the vibe coding stuff, I can see the benefit in having both the model and the author information. Model information for traceability and possibly future analysis/statistics, and author to know who is taking responsibility for the changes (and, thus, has deeply reviewed and understood them). As long as those two information are present in the commit, I guess which commit field should hold which information is for the project to standardise. (but it should be normalised within a project, otherwise the "traceability/statistics" part cannot be applied reliably).
- corndoge 6mo ago
  Yeah, nothing wrong with keeping the metadata - but "Authored-by" is both credit and an attestation of responsibility. I think people just haven't thought about it too much and see it mostly as credit and less as responsibility.
  - josephg 6mo ago
    I disagree. “Authored by” - and authorship in general - says who did the work. Not who signed off on the work. Reviewed-by me, authored by Claude feels most correct.
    - corndoge 6mo ago
      To me, Claude is not a who, it's an it. Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine for the portions of code it completed? Same thing
      - yarn_ 6mo ago
        This mirrors my thoughts.
      - QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
        > Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine for the portions of code it completed? Code completions before LLMs was helping me type faster by completing variable names, variable types, function arguments, and that’s about it. It was faster than typing it all out character by character, but the auto completion wasn’t doing anything outside of what I was already intending to write. With an LLM, I give brief explanations in English to it and it returns tens to hundreds of lines of code at a time. For some people perhaps even more than that. Or you could be having a “conversation” with the LLM about the feature to be added first and then when you’ve explored what it will be like conceptually, you tell it to implement that. In either case, I would then commit all of that resulting code with the name of the LLM I used as author, and my name as the committer. The tool wrote the code. I committed it. As the committer of the code, I am responsible for what I commit to the code base, and everyone is able to see who the committer was. I don’t need to claim authorship over the code that the tool wrote in order for people to be able to see who committed it. And it is in my opinion incorrect to claim authorship over any commit that consists for the very most part of AI generated code.
        corndoge 6mo ago
        I do see your point. I suppose the question is what authorship entails, or should entail.
        QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
        True. Might also vary depending on how one uses the LLM. For example, in a given interaction the user of the LLM might be acting more like someone requesting a feature, and the LLM is left to implement it. Or the user might be acting akin to a bug reporter providing details on something that’s not working the way it should and again leaving the LLM to implement it. While on the other hand, someone might instruct the LLM to do something very specific with detailed constraints, and in that way the LLM would perhaps be more along the line of a fancy auto-complete to write the lines of code for something that the user of the LLM would otherwise have written more or less exactly the same by hand.
- yarn_ 6mo ago
  Future analysis is a valid reason to keep it, thats a good point and I agree with that.
waisbrot 6mo ago
Claude adds "Co-authored by" attribution for itself when committing, so you can see the human author and also the bot. I think this is a good balance, because if you don't care about the bot you still see the human author. And if you do care (for example, I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.
- yarn_ 6mo ago
  > I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy. Why is this, though? I'm genuinely curious. My code-quality bar doesn't change either way, so why would this be anything but distracting to my decision making?
  - ctxc 6mo ago
    Accountability. Same reason I want to read human written content rather than obvious AI: both can be equally shit, but at least with humans there's a high probability of the aspirational quality of wanting to be considered "good" With AI I have no way of telling if it was from a one line prompt or hundreds. I have to assume it was one line by default if there's no human sticking their neck out for it.
    - yarn_ 6mo ago
      The human who submitted the PR is 100% accountable either way, thats partly my point. Disclosing AI has its purposes, I agree, but its not like we can reliably get everyone to do it anyway, which also leads me to thinking this way.
  - 59nadir 6mo ago
    Personally it would make the choice to say no to the entire thing a whole lot easier if they self-reported on themselves automatically and with no recourse to hide the fact that they've used LLMs. I want to see it for dependencies (I already avoid them, and would especially do so with ones heavily developed via LLMs), products I'd like to use, PRs submitted to my projects, and so on, so I can choose to avoid them. Mostly this is because, all things considered, I really do not need to interact with any of that, so I'm doing it by choice. Since it's entirely voluntary I have absolutely no incentive to interact with things no one bothered to spend real time and effort on.

by yarn_ 6mo ago

Krssst 6mo ago

As someone mostly outside of the vibe coding stuff, I can see the benefit in having both the model and the author information. Model information for traceability and possibly future analysis/statistics, and author to know who is taking responsibility for the changes (and, thus, has deeply reviewed and understood them). As long as those two information are present in the commit, I guess which commit field should hold which information is for the project to standardise. (but it should be normalised within a project, otherwise the "traceability/statistics" part cannot be applied reliably).

corndoge 6mo ago
Yeah, nothing wrong with keeping the metadata - but "Authored-by" is both credit and an attestation of responsibility. I think people just haven't thought about it too much and see it mostly as credit and less as responsibility.
- josephg 6mo ago
  I disagree. “Authored by” - and authorship in general - says who did the work. Not who signed off on the work. Reviewed-by me, authored by Claude feels most correct.
  - corndoge 6mo ago
    To me, Claude is not a who, it's an it. Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine for the portions of code it completed? Same thing
    - yarn_ 6mo ago
      This mirrors my thoughts.
    - QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
      > Before AI, did you credit your code completion engine for the portions of code it completed? Code completions before LLMs was helping me type faster by completing variable names, variable types, function arguments, and that’s about it. It was faster than typing it all out character by character, but the auto completion wasn’t doing anything outside of what I was already intending to write. With an LLM, I give brief explanations in English to it and it returns tens to hundreds of lines of code at a time. For some people perhaps even more than that. Or you could be having a “conversation” with the LLM about the feature to be added first and then when you’ve explored what it will be like conceptually, you tell it to implement that. In either case, I would then commit all of that resulting code with the name of the LLM I used as author, and my name as the committer. The tool wrote the code. I committed it. As the committer of the code, I am responsible for what I commit to the code base, and everyone is able to see who the committer was. I don’t need to claim authorship over the code that the tool wrote in order for people to be able to see who committed it. And it is in my opinion incorrect to claim authorship over any commit that consists for the very most part of AI generated code.
      - corndoge 6mo ago
        I do see your point. I suppose the question is what authorship entails, or should entail.
        QuantumNomad_ 6mo ago
        True. Might also vary depending on how one uses the LLM. For example, in a given interaction the user of the LLM might be acting more like someone requesting a feature, and the LLM is left to implement it. Or the user might be acting akin to a bug reporter providing details on something that’s not working the way it should and again leaving the LLM to implement it. While on the other hand, someone might instruct the LLM to do something very specific with detailed constraints, and in that way the LLM would perhaps be more along the line of a fancy auto-complete to write the lines of code for something that the user of the LLM would otherwise have written more or less exactly the same by hand.
yarn_ 6mo ago
Future analysis is a valid reason to keep it, thats a good point and I agree with that.

waisbrot 6mo ago

Claude adds "Co-authored by" attribution for itself when committing, so you can see the human author and also the bot. I think this is a good balance, because if you don't care about the bot you still see the human author. And if you do care (for example, I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy.

yarn_ 6mo ago
> I'd like to be able to review commits and see which were substantially bot-written and which were mostly human) then it's also easy. Why is this, though? I'm genuinely curious. My code-quality bar doesn't change either way, so why would this be anything but distracting to my decision making?
- ctxc 6mo ago
  Accountability. Same reason I want to read human written content rather than obvious AI: both can be equally shit, but at least with humans there's a high probability of the aspirational quality of wanting to be considered "good" With AI I have no way of telling if it was from a one line prompt or hundreds. I have to assume it was one line by default if there's no human sticking their neck out for it.
  - yarn_ 6mo ago
    The human who submitted the PR is 100% accountable either way, thats partly my point. Disclosing AI has its purposes, I agree, but its not like we can reliably get everyone to do it anyway, which also leads me to thinking this way.
- 59nadir 6mo ago
  Personally it would make the choice to say no to the entire thing a whole lot easier if they self-reported on themselves automatically and with no recourse to hide the fact that they've used LLMs. I want to see it for dependencies (I already avoid them, and would especially do so with ones heavily developed via LLMs), products I'd like to use, PRs submitted to my projects, and so on, so I can choose to avoid them. Mostly this is because, all things considered, I really do not need to interact with any of that, so I'm doing it by choice. Since it's entirely voluntary I have absolutely no incentive to interact with things no one bothered to spend real time and effort on.