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I cringe every time I see Claude trying to co-author a commit. The git history is expected to track accountability and ownership, not your Bill of Tools. Should
by manbitesdog 6mo ago
I cringe every time I see Claude trying to co-author a commit. The git history is expected to track accountability and ownership, not your Bill of Tools. Should I also co-author my PRs with my linter, intellisense and IDE?
- rurban 5mo agoTorvalds promotes exactly that. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/process/coding-assistants.rst https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/... Assisted-by: Claude:claude-3-opus coccinelle sparse
- jamietanna 6mo agoEh, there are some very good reasons[0] that you would do better to track your usage of LLM derived code (primarily for legal reasons) [0]: https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/02/25/llm-attribute/ https://www.jvt.me/posts/2026/02/25/llm-attribute/
- butvacuum 6mo agolegally speaking.. if you're not sure of the risk- you don't document it.
- alterom 6mo ago>legally speaking.. if you're not sure of the risk- you don't document it. Ah, so you kinda maybe sorta absolve yourself of culpability (but not really — "I didn't know this was copyrighted material" didn't grant you copyright), and simultaneously make fixing the potentially compromised codebase (someone else's job, hopefully) 100x harder because the history of which bits might've been copied was never kept. Solid advice! As ethical as it is practical. By the same measure, junkyards should avoid keeping receipts on the off chance that the catalytic converters some randos bring in after midnight are stolen property. Better not document it. One little trick the legal folks don't want you to know!
- catlifeonmars 6mo agoSeems ethical
- zarp 6mo agoSent from my iPhone
- mikkupikku 6mo agoA whole lot of people find LLM code to be strictly objectionable, for a variety of reasons. We can debate the validity of those reasons, but I think that even if those reasons were all invalid, it would still be unethical to deceive people by a deliberate lie of omission. I don't turn it off, and I don't think other people should either.
- josephg 6mo agoLikewise. I don’t mind that people use LLMs to generate text and code. But I want any LLM generated stuff to be clearly marked as such. It seems dishonest and cheap to get Claude to write something and then pretend you did all the work yourself.
- pxc 6mo agoYou can disclose that you used an LLM in the process of writing code in other ways, though. You can just tell people, you can mention it in the PR, you can mention it in a ticket, etc.
- ruraljuror 6mo ago+1. If we’re at an early stage in the agentic curve where we think reading commit messages is going to matter, I don’t want those cluttered with meaningless boilerplate (“co-authored by my tools!”). But at this point i am more curious if git will continue to be the best tool.
- pxc 6mo agoI'm only beginning to use "agentic" LLM tools atm because we finally gained access to them at work, and the rest of my team seems really excited about using them. But for me at least, a tool like Git seems pretty essential for inspecting changes and deciding which to keep, which to reroll, and which to rewrite. (I'm not particularly attached to Git but an interface like Magit and a nice CLI for inspecting and manipulating history seem important to me.) What are you imagining VCS software doing differently that might play nicer with LLM agents?
- jmalicki 6mo ago[dead]
- Sharlin 6mo agoYou have copyright to a commit authored by you. You (almost certainly) don't have copyright (nobody has) to a commit authored by Claude.
- _heimdall 6mo agoAnthropic could at least make a compelling case for the copyright. It becomes legally challenging with regards to ownership if I ever use work equipment for a personal project. If it later takes off they could very well try to claim ownership in its entirety simply because I ran a test once (yes, there's a while silicon valley season for it). I don't know if they'd win, but Anthropic absolutely would be able to claim the creation of that code was done on their hardware. Obviously we aren't employees of theirs, though we are customers that very likely never read what we agreed to in a signup flow.
- windexh8er 6mo agoI think all you need to do is claim that your girlfriend is your laptop. /s
- CobrastanJorji 6mo agoUsing work equipment for a personal project only matters because you signed a contract giving all of your IP to your employer for anything you did with (or sometimes without) your employer's equipment. Anthropic's user agreement does not have a similar agreement.
- _heimdall 6mo agoMy point was that they could make a compelling case though, not that they would win. I don't know of ant precedent where the code was literally generated on someone else's system. Its an open question whether that implies any legal right to the work and I could pretty easily see a court accepting the case.
- CobrastanJorji 6mo ago
- targafarian 6mo agoWell is it actually being used as a tool where the author has full knowledge and mental grasp of what is being checked in, or has the person invoked the AI and ceded thought and judgment to the AI? I.e., I think in many cases the AI really is the author, or at least co-author. I want to know that for attribution and understanding what went into the commit. (I agree with you if it's just a tool.)
- _heimdall 6mo agoI have worked with quite a few people committing code they didn't fully understand. I don't meant this as a drive by bazinga either, the practice of copying code or thinking you understand it when you don't is nothing new
- allajfjwbwkwja 6mo agoPre-LLM, it was much easier for reviewers to discern that. Now, the AI-generated code can look like it was well thought out by somebody competent, when it wasn't.
- jhide 6mo agoHave you ever reviewed an AI-generated commit from someone with insufficient competence that was more compelling than their work would be if it was done unassisted? In my experience it’s exactly the opposite. AI-generation aggravates existing blindspots. This is because, excluding malicious incompetence, devs will generally try to understand what they’re doing if they’re doing it without AI
- allajfjwbwkwja 6mo agoI have. It's always more compelling in a web diff. These guys are the first coworkers for which it became absolutely necessary for me to review their work by pulling down all their code and inspecting every line myself in the context of the full codebase.
- 6mo ago
- LeoPanthera 6mo ago> Should I also co-author my PRs with my linter, intellisense and IDE? Absolutely. That would be hilarious.
- m132 6mo agoIf you accept the code generated by them nearly verbatim, absolutely. I don't understand why people consider Claude-generated code to be their own. You authored the prompts, not the code. Somehow this was never a problem with pre-LLM codegen tools, like macro expanders, IPC glue, or type bundle generators. I don't recall anybody desperately removing the "auto-generated do not edit" comments those tools would nearly always slap at the top of each file or taking offense when someone called that code auto-generated. Back in the day we even used to publish the "real" human-written source for those, along with build scripts!
- LelouBil 6mo agoIt's weird, because they should not consider it as their own, but they should take accountability from it. Ideally, if I contribute to any codebase, what needs to be judged is the resulting code. Is it up to the project's standards ? Does the maintainer have design objections ? What tool you use shouldn't matter, be it your IDE or your LLM. But that also means you should be accountable for it, you shouldn't defend behind "But Claude did this poorly, not me !", I don't care (in a friendly way), just fix the code if you want to contribute. The big caveat to this is not wanting AI-Generated code for ideological reasons, and well, if you want that you can make your contributors swear they wrote it by themselves in the PR text or whatever. I'm not really sure how to feel about this, but I stand by my "the code is what matters" line.
- galaxyLogic 6mo agoSounds bit like the label "organic (food)" coiuld be applied to hand-written code?
- tehjoker 6mo agoSome differences with the human source for those kinds of tools: (1) the resultant generated code was deterministic (2) it was usually possible to get access to the exact version of the tool that generated it Since AI tools are constantly obsoleted, generate different output each run, and it is often impossible to run them locally, the input prompts are somewhat useless for everyone but the initial user.
- itishappy 6mo agoI suspect vibe coders might actually want you to consider turning to Claude for accountability and ownership rather than the human orchestrator. If your linter is able to action requests, then it probably makes sense to add too.
- xdennis 6mo ago> The git history is expected to track accountability and ownership, not your Bill of Tools. The point isn't to hijack accountability. It's free publicity, like how Apple adds "Sent from my IPhone."
- paradox460 6mo agoI've heard of employers requiring people to do it for all code written with even a whiff of it
- jpollock 6mo agoYes, it sets the reviewer's expectations around how much effort was spent reviewing the code before it was sent. I regularly have tool-generated commits. I send them out with a reference to the tool, what the process is, how much it's been reviewed and what the expectation is of the reviewer. Otherwise, they all assume "human authored" and "human sponsored". Reviewers will then send comments (instead of proposing the fix themselves). When you're wrangling several hundred changes, that becomes unworkable.
- tdb7893 6mo agoIf those tools are writing the code then in general I do expect that to be included in the PR! Through my whole career I've seen PRs where people noted that code that was generated (people have been generating code since long before LLMs). It's useful context unless you've gone over the generated code and understand it and it is the same quality as if you wrote it yourself (which in my experience is the case where it's obvious boilerplate or the generated section is small). Needing to flag nontrivial code as generated was standard practice for my whole career.
- Alifatisk 6mo ago> people have been generating code since long before LLMs How? LSTM?
- TheDong 6mo agoSee, for example, this blog post from 2014: https://go.dev/blog/generate https://go.dev/blog/generate The following comment in the blog post //go:generate stringer -type=Pill generates a .._string.go file which contains a '.String()' method. I would find it very reasonable to commit that with 'Co-Authored-By: stringer v0.1.0' or such. Or 'sed s/a/b/g' and 'Co-Authored-By: sed'
- baq 6mo agoHoly shit I’m old.
- chrislo 6mo agoFor example `rails generate ...` built into the Rails CLI.
- cess11 6mo agoThere are many techniques. You're most likely to come across things like declarative DSL:s and macros, then there are things like JAXB and similar tooling that generates code from data schemas, and some people script around data sources to glue boilerplate and so on. Arguably snippet collections belong to this genre.
- 6mo ago
- EnigmaCurry 6mo agoSent from my Ipad
- bogdanoff_2 6mo ago> Should I also co-author my PRs with my linter, intellisense and IDE? Kinda, yeah. If I automatically apply lint suggestions, I would title my commit "apply lint suggestions".
- NewsaHackO 6mo agoHuh? Unless the sole purpose of the commit was to lint code, it would be unnecessary fluff to append the name of the automatically linted tools that ran in a pre-commit hook in every commit.
- sysguest 6mo agowell maybe? co-authoring doesn't hide your authorship if I see someone committing a blatantly wrong code, I would wonder what tool they actually used
- deadbabe 6mo agoCould be cool if your PRs link back to a blog where you write about your tools.
- dml2135 6mo agoYea in my Claude workflow, I still make all the commits myself. This is also useful for keeping your prompts commit-sized, which in my experience gives much better results than just letting it spin or attempting to one-shot large features.
- ambicapter 6mo agoNo, because those things don't change the logical underpinnings of the code itself. LLM-written code does act in ways different enough from a human contributor that it's worth flagging for the reviewer.
- m4x 6mo agoTools do author commits in my code bases, for example during a release pipeline. If I had commits being made by Claude I would expect that to be recorded too. It isn't for recording a bill of tools, just to help understand a projects evolution.