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.
@nedbat @clayote that's impossible to enforce and I honestly don't want to. to each their own. the only things I can and will enforce are a) is the contribution good? and b) does it _look_ – technically and legally – as if the contribution is coming 100% from a human? I'm sure there's gonna be a ton a litigation around this stuff so I reckon it's better to be careful. I will sit out the culture war part of this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_and_copyright
Ned Batchelder
some kind of orange shape
Hynek Schlawack
Paul Moore
Tamir Bahar