Comment by awesome_dude
19 hours ago
I personally don't mind if an AI inserts it's "Co-Authored by" tag into commits it has worked on - it's transparency, I used its help and it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad.
But, just inserting the tag because it's being used for git commands - there's a line there.
> it should get credit for good work, or disdain for bad
Hard disagree. The "credit" it gets is through the form of charging my credit card.
Imagine for a moment that you are a company which hired a human developer to create your app rather than AI. In this case, the developer sold his or her right to credit by way of becoming a paid employee. All credit/rights/etc to the code become the ownership of Company, not the developer.
I am paid by my company to write code - does that mean I shouldn't be given credit for the work I create?
DMR, Kevin Thompson are credited with creating C and Unix, but they were paid employees of AT&T - where's the issue with them being credited for their work?
You, and those others, are people. The clanker is not, and should not get the privileges of a person.
1 reply →
I’m sorry, I don’t get it: a piece of software needs credit for creating another piece of software? Like, would you credit GCC for adding optimisations to your binary?
It's useful as metadata (like how JPEGs can store the camera model it was taken on, or PDFs contain the program used to generate it), but yes, I don't like LLMs giving themselves co-author credit. I turn this off in Claude Code.
It's a useful warning label for LLMed code. (When an editor isn't gratuitously adding it to non-LLMed code.)
GCC isn't making editorial decisions.
The LLM is just a database. Would you be fine if this was done when cribbing stuff from Github, StackOverflow, tutorials and so on, or do you think some databases are more special than others in this regard, and if so, on what merit?
I regularly link comments in my code pointing to the source of the code I have "cribbed"
It means that future readers understand where it came from, and can look at that source to see more rationalisation about it than what I can provide.