Mastodawn

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@swags/116235865719541791

Today was the SuperTux 0.7.0 release (yay!), but some of us were alarmed by the "Claude contributed to this repo" message on GitHub (oh no!)

Well, I've learned a few things from the discussion about this topic.

A single PR "co-authored by Claude" has slipped through. The code was written by a human (according to the commit), then properly reviewed and eventually merged by a maintainer. The Claude contribution is attributed solely to the code comments added through a mid-PR-flow commit update.

And now the commit history will show Claude as a contributor. It might be impossible to rewrite it. Rewriting kind of goes against the idea of having the git history, too. Even if that was possible, it's an extra effort which not all maintainers can prioritise.

So: seeing "Claude was here" in a GitHub repo is a "red flag", but it shouldn't be "therefore guilty of slop and LLM proliferation by default"; please use your head/best judgement.

I guess it is a cautionary tale for the maintainers, too

@nina_kali_nina This happened in Godot too!

https://github.com/godotengine/godot/pull/112471#issuecomment-4047941693

Fix glow visual compatibility regression by Rudra-ravi · Pull Request #112471 · godotengine/godot

Reverts the default value of Environment.glow_hdr_threshold from 0.0 back to 1.0 to restore the expected glow appearance in existing projects. The default was inadvertently changed from 1.0 to 0.0 ...

GitHub

@nina_kali_nina nah if you can't trace your sources to the extent that such shit gets in it means someone somewhere is an asshole who should not be trusted to write "human code"

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@wyatt tbh if I wasn't seeing AI generated PRs daily I can imagine not noticing it myself. Because in this case it wasn't obvious to me at what point Claude got involved, even more so than in the Godot case mentioned in this thread.

Fritz Adalis 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina
Sorry...

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@FritzAdalis I don't think you have anything to apologise for - not to me, at the very least :)

Sharp Cheddar Goblin 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina Problem is, once that red flag flies, even if you check the commits and find out it's innocuous you have lost your ability to determine if something less innocuous appears. You have to check for new Claude commits continuously.

For many it may be easier just to move on to something else that has no red flags rather than commit to constant vigilance.

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@SharpCheddarGoblin yep :( well, this is why it is a cautionary tale for maintainers, I suppose.

A disturbing thought: it's not like we can control what GitHub shows us as a "contributor". If one day Microslop decides to consider PRs, comments or issues as "contributions", it might not be even possible to completely defend from having this label - as long as the project is hosted on GH.

やれやれ、this whole thing is such a... Betrayal of the FOSS?

@nina_kali_nina @SharpCheddarGoblin hence, the only real solution to the slop is to leave slophub behind

オチュー (stop colonialism 🇵🇸)1d ago

@nina_kali_nina @SharpCheddarGoblin
>it might not be even possible to completely defend from having this label - as long as the project is hosted on GH.

I feel like migrating the project to gitlab or self-hosted would solve things (and further IA meddling considering github is their flagship).

Also kinda feels silly to focus on "Claude", how many names will we have to track down some day ? I think we're still not safe from "X was IA all along, got you !"

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@otyugh @SharpCheddarGoblin this is why I'm thinking that this whole thing is a massive compromise of trust :(
Moving from GH might be a good thing in theory but in practice it likely will hurt many projects...

オチュー (stop colonialism 🇵🇸)1d ago

@nina_kali_nina @SharpCheddarGoblin I'm lacking the knowledge to understand this problem >_<

Aren't we talking about devs ? How is switching git hoster a deal worth mentioning ? Aren't they the apt-est to not be stuck with "big platform" and rely on tools that makes it effortless ?

(I'm a noob-dev since forever and I don't care much about where a project is hosted or moved for one)

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@otyugh @SharpCheddarGoblin it's less about existing developers (those will be fine anywhere), and more about project discovery. If the project is hard to find in a web search, it might be a game over

オチュー (stop colonialism 🇵🇸)1d ago

@nina_kali_nina @SharpCheddarGoblin Isn't there strat to mirror an existing project into github ? You just don't take contribution, but are here and visible.

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@otyugh @SharpCheddarGoblin it is an option, yes, but I'm not sure if there's a zero-maintenance solution for this

@nina_kali_nina @otyugh @SharpCheddarGoblin i dont care if my software is hard to discover
it'd be nice if it were easy but i also won't make concessions

@nina_kali_nina @otyugh @SharpCheddarGoblin is that actually what people do? browsing github, looking for projects to contribute to?

what i normally do is to look for their official website or the package details on the distro i install from, which likely has a link to the source code.

Nina Kalinina 14h ago

@xarvos @SharpCheddarGoblin @otyugh if one is choosing a library or an engine, that's not uncommon, I'd say.

@SharpCheddarGoblin @nina_kali_nina That is pretty much inherently inevitable from using tools controlled by the opposition.

Github is adversarial here. It's purely incidental the tool is available at all, nevermind remotely reliable in any sense.

Better Free Software tools that are not based on SaaSS are absolutely necessary going forward.

🌸 Ⓐnarkitty lumi-nhac

@nina_kali_nina yeah, it's a thorny issue. it could also be the case that the maintainer used to accept slop but now does not anymore. and i feel in that case we should not be as harsh. people sometimes do change for the better

Kerfuffle 1d ago

@nina_kali_nina GitHub is kind of a red flag itself unfortunately.

@kerfuffle @nina_kali_nina and trailer on YouTube, not peertube 😠
Well, kind of joking. Would have been better with no Claude mentioned, no github and no YouTube, bit it's cool anyway to have this release, thanks to the maintainers !

@nina_kali_nina I had questioned this before (and cautioned similarly) and it still begs the question I asked back then: if you rewrite all the changes, does the notification go away?

Because I suspect it might not.

Nina Kalinina 1d ago

@lispi314 I haven't tried yet, but I suspect it will stay 🤔

@nina_kali_nina also happened to #BOSL2, a great library adding a lot of fancy stuff to #OpenSCAD.
Now, I have no moral ground to criticize, I'm in no way smart enough to contribute; and even for the things LLM-generations seem to be used - code formatting and grammar - well, I didn't contribute that either, so who am I to judge people who contributed using LLM?
Still, I found myself not using this library in my latest project somehow, so I guess I do criticize deeply inside :D