Comment by zeroonetwothree
2 months ago
I think it depends a lot if you reviewed it as carefully as you would your own code.
Of course most people don’t do that
2 months ago
I think it depends a lot if you reviewed it as carefully as you would your own code.
Of course most people don’t do that
I don't put human code reviewers down as coauthors let alone the sole authors of my commit. So honestly, the fact that a vibe coded commit lists me as the author at all is a little bit dodgy but I think I'm okay with it. The LLM needs to be coauthor at least though, if not outright the author.
So even if I go over the commit with a fine tooth comb and feel comfortable staking my personal reputation on the commit, I still can't call myself the sole author.
The implementor only got credit in the day where the implementor was a human who had to do a lot of the work, often all of the work.
Now that the cost of writing code is $0, the planner gets the credit.
Like how you don't put human code reviewers down as coauthors, you also don't put the computer down as a coauthor for everything you use the computer to do.
It used to be the case where if someone wrote the software, you knew they put in a certain amount of work writing it and planning it. I think the main issue now is that you can't know that anymore.
Even something that's vibe-coded might have many hours of serious iterative work and planning. But without using the output or deep-diving the code to get a sense of its polish, there's no way to tell if it is the result of a one-shot or a lot of serious work.
"Coauthored by computer" doesn't help this distinction. And asking people to opt-in to some shame tag isn't a solution that generalizes nor fixes anything since the issue is with people who ship poor quality software. Instead we should demand good software just like we did when it was all human-written and still low quality.
> And asking people to opt-in to some shame tag isn't a solution that generalizes nor fixes anything. Instead we should demand good software just like we did when it was all human-written and still crappy.
It’s not about shame. It’s about disclosure of effort / perceived-quality. And you’re right about the second part, but there’s even less chance of that being enforced / adopted.
1 reply →
Characterizing it as a "shame tag" is a value judgement I simply don't share, but if that framing is made common them you're definitely asking for people to lie about it.
In my project's readme I put this text:
It's not that I want to hide the use of llms, I just modified code a lot before pushing, which led me to this approach. As llms improve, I might have to change this though.
Interested to read opinions on this approach.
> * I don't want to push unreviewed code to the repo, so I have set up a git hook refusing to push commits done by an LLM agent."
Seems... Not that useful?
Why would someone make commits in your local projects without you knowing about it? That git hook only works on your own machine, so you're trying to prevent yourself from pushing code you haven't reviewed, but the only way that can happen is if you use an agent locally that also make commits, and you aren't aware of it?
I'm not sure how you'd end up in that situation, unless you have LLMs running autonomously on your computer that you don't have actual runtime insights into? Which seems like it'd be a way bigger problem than "code I didn't reviewed was pushed".
The agents run in a container and have an other git identity configured. It happens that agents commit code and I don't want to push it accidentally from outside the container, which is where I work.
Not just review but how you worked with the AI.
If you gave it four words and waited and hour maybe you're not the author. But that's not how these tools are best used anyway.