Comment by 20k
2 hours ago
The the idea that engineers are covertly sneaking huge quantities of LLM generated code into these projects doesn't pass the smell test, as there's lots of evidence that this isn't true. It'd be incredibly obvious if new contributors were turning up en masse and contributing absolutely incredible amounts of high quality code, because everyone would be crowing about it
Instead, if you check out something like ImGui, we can see that its largely just Omar as usual with a bunch of PRs. Nothing much seems to have changed, feature development carries on at the same pace as it did previously. This is replicated across nearly every single major long term open source project I can find
The only reason developers now feel the need to hide their LLM usage is because the LLM contributions have all been shockingly bad, so you're reversing cause and effect. If LLM contributions had been incredible, they wouldn't be frowned upon socially now. Surely someone would blow the lid on this huge covert conspiracy about how incredible their contributions to.. SFML have been?
This effect also wouldn't prevent LLMgineers from creating their own open source projects that should be absolutely outstripping the existing open source space. After all how old is ImGui? With a 10x productivity gain, it should take a year of development to easily match its features if those gains are truly real now
>if they're really good and use LLMs responsibly, they probably don't even have any ethical obligation to label LLM involvement
The copyright issues means that non disclosure is inherently unethical
> The only reason developers now feel the need to hide their LLM usage is because the LLM contributions have all been shockingly bad, so you're reversing cause and effect. If LLM contributions had been incredible, they wouldn't be frowned upon socially now
You're dismissing scale of things. OSS communities were having high-profile discussions about gatekeeping and discrimination way before LLMs were a thing, because already at that point the amount of human generated slop was becoming untenable. And yet, no one argued that this must be evidence that all human contributions are bad and humanity is a bubble waiting to pop.
> ImGui
Weird choice of an example. ImGui is common infrastructure. Who in their right mind would want to mess with that? Especially when building something to solve some end-user problem (whether N=1 or N=1 billion), ImGui is a component you include, not one you rewrite.
There's hardly any reason anyone has to contribute to that project, with or without LLMs.