Comment by hamandcheese
12 hours ago
I'm curious why people care about such tracking? I hardly use an editor anymore, and I'm not alone. All that matters is who is signing off on the commit.
> Text a human wrote or edited should be considered close to sacred: an agent should be hesitant and have a very good reason to touch it.
Not sure I agree (particularly with code, not prose). If code is risky to change for reasons that aren't obvious, it should be commented as such. It doesn't matter how the bytes were generated.
> Another use case: the README.md, originally generated, where you rewrite the opening paragraphs. The agent should feel free to redo or append parts further downwards but should really think twice changing anything in the opener.
This, I understand.
> I hardly use an editor anymore, and I'm not alone. All that matters is who is signing off on the commit. In such a context I won't distinguish between me and an agent. But same, almost no editor these days.
For coding, this is more useful for heavily vibecoded projects. Thb, for my own projects most likely I will end up using it only for specs and documentation, maybe in rare cases for some tests. But, I use it for agentic memory, where I can edit the memories as well, and the agent should tend to preserve my edits when updating them.
In general, my main use case is tracking texts in knowledge management systems.
It may not matter for you, but it could help agents to recover context about some specific code
It’s for social signaling about the author’s effort and own sense of ownership over the work, mostly[1]. People want to know exactly how much AI was used and where if they’re gonna bother investigating a repo, paper, email, or any other doodad that has any AI smell at all. There’s so much wasted breath out there atm that any other policy would be madness, no?
It’s either this or just assume it’s all AI and stride forward with good faith regardless, but… well, what works okay on HuggingFace and GitHub doesn’t necessarily work great on Substack and Reddit, the great founts of wasted breath that they are.
Either way, MMW: you will be telling this story —the one where you saw an early version of text tinting on HN before it got big— at a dinner party within the decade.
[1]: …which is a good thing!
[2]: the problem isn’t just that AI text might be worse in both obvious and sneaky, tech-debt-y ways: we should also consider that a document with 0-5% original content (extremely common) is fundamentally a different ‘speech act’ than one with 95-100% original content. Namely, the latter implies a level of authorial ownership that the former does not.
To put it into realer terms:
- repos are more prosperous when the devs are responding substantively to bug tickets, even if many stay open.
- collaborative narratives (say, TTRPGs) are more prosperous when there’s someone responsible for the world’s lore (say, DMs) who would respond meaningfully if you brought up a plot-hole. Getting the response “lol idk who knows, AI wrote that” is surely all-too-common by now, and clearly a collaboration killer.
…etc!