The AI hype-cyclone is bad, but so is the anti-AI witch hunt. Commits co-authored by Claude do not mean that a project has "abandoned engineering as a serious endeavor"

Would we say that accepting contributions from new developers means we've "abandoned engineering as a serious endeavor"? No.

Claude can write wrong code. New contributors can write wrong code. What matters is what you do with that code after it's been written.

@nedbat Strictly speaking, that's true; and, I think the fact of Claude being attributed as the developer of some code speaks poorly of the effort of the developers involved.

Take the attrs library's AI policy, for instance:

Every contribution has to be backed by a human who unequivocally owns the copyright for all changes. No LLM bots in Co-authored-by:s.

That seems wise! If you're not so confident in the code that you'd type it with your own fingers, you're not confident enough to commit it.

I wish CPython would adopt that, too.

@clayote "No LLM bots in Co-authored-by:s." Does this mean if Claude wrote some of the code you don't want it noted in the commit?
@nedbat I want the author to take the fall, if it turns out to be uncopyrightable
@clayote There's a person who is the author of the commit. I don't understand the requirement to not mention an LLM in a "Co-author" line.
@nedbat It could be used to argue in court that the code isn't copyrightable, and therefore its license is unenforceable
@clayote Seems like then the rule is, "You must not disclose that you did something to put the license at risk"? I feel like I'm still not understanding. I would understand if the intent of the rule was, "You must not use an LLM to create contributions."
@nedbat @clayote I can imagine that some people will look closer at the ai contributed code when committing with their own name.