Comment by gorgoiler
2 days ago
In general (I’m not saying this is the case with this project) if you don’t have their prompt history and you can’t re-run the LLM “compilation” yourself, is it open source? It feels a bit more like those “source available” projects where you can read the code but don’t have access to the build system.
On the other hand, aside from the commit messages, one didn’t ever have access to the underlying thought process of human developers either, so maybe it’s not equivalent to say that secret prompts mean closed-source.
What an incredibly bad take. "It's not open source because we have the source but not the thought process of the developer" - well then no project on this earth is truly open source by your definition.
Rather depends on definitions; GPL does contain:
> The "source code" for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
With that definition, there's definitely space for arguing that the AI tooling for modifying the code is necessary for the modification process to be sane therefore "preferable" for any human, if the code is "designed" (or lack of design thereof) around the idea of being AI-maintained.
Otherwise, it's not source-code, it's not meaningfully-modifiable, it's basically equivalent to just decompiling a binary. (similarly-bad quality may of course be human-produced too, though then at least you have direct proof of it being the preferred form for at least one person - the author)
Excellent point