“I’m refusing to use this software because it was made by humans”
I can, with very little imagination required, come up with reasons why that could be a valid position in the near future. Especially extended to:
“I’m refusing to use this software because it was made by humans without AI support”
For a while, I was writing C++ code that had pretty serious reliability requirements. Not safety-critical but even short (like 10 seconds) downtime was quite expensive. I used a decent chunk of open source tools for doing static analysis, but also leaned pretty hard on a paid Sonar license to double-check my work. It did an excellent job and I wouldn’t hesitate to get a license again if I was working on similar stuff in the future. That cost money and it was money well-spent.
Same goes for Claude Code. It helps me find bugs. Like simonw above, that tool has helped me find multiple white whale bugs that have followed me around for years, a few of them in upstream RTOS code. I don’t use it for writing code much, other than throwaway analysis scripts and things like that. Not sure if I’m going to go through the effort of rewriting the bug analysis to put together PRs that are “human authored”. I’ve read through the couple line fixes, I’ve tested the crap out of them, and it’s unclear if my effort is actually wanted or not.
I really have a hard time understanding the comments on this post - it feels like deliberate misrepresentation to try to make projects with AI policies look absurd.
that tool has helped me find multiple white whale bugs that have followed me around for years
Ok, awesome, but
Not sure if I’m going to go through the effort of rewriting the bug analysis to put together PRs that are “human authored”
…for your “white whale,” your nemesis over literal years, writing it up yourself is suddenly too much effort?
Yes. If I have to go through an entire parallel construction effort to pretend that the bug wasn’t actually found by Claude Code while I was out for a walk with my wife, when I have a perfectly good walkthrough report already that wasn’t human authored but has been seriously human-reviewed… that’s not effort that my employer would encourage me to spend.
And it was found by Claude Code, yes, but that was informed by both my human intuition and my large collection of not-fit-for-human-consumption Markdown notes that I’ve collected over the last 3 years about the issue. The bug was ultimately found when CC was working on something entirely unrelated to the bug and had something like this in the output:
FYI, when I flashed this build it seemed like the processor locked up. I reflashed it and it worked fine. There weren’t any errors either time.
Which made me think “oh, shit, I think this might be that bug and I’ve never been able to repro it on this debug board… nice” and set in motion a whole other session to nail it down with all of the context I’d gathered over the years.
“Remember that bug we finally fixed last week boss? I want to submit it upstream but to do that I have to rewrite the report and patches by hand otherwise the upstream project will reject the fix.” isn’t an easy sell, unfortunately.
“Remember that bug we finally fixed last week boss? I want to submit it upstream but to do that I have to rewrite the report and patches by hand otherwise the upstream project will reject the fix.” isn’t an easy sell, unfortunately.
Is WONTFIX the easier sell? I don’t get it, what do you want? The permission to ignore other peoples wishes? You can either leave the bug, fork the project and shoulder the maintenance, switch to a different project or work with the project. You can’t make everything serve you like CC does.
shrug I don’t think there’s any kind of good answers here in the short term but to wait it out and see how things shake out.
My gut feeling is that the open source projects who flat-out reject contributions because of how those contributions were made (rather than rejecting the content of the contributions) are, over time, going to find themselves with fewer and fewer contributions.
I chuckled a little bit at this from the article:
I can, with very little imagination required, come up with reasons why that could be a valid position in the near future. Especially extended to:
For a while, I was writing C++ code that had pretty serious reliability requirements. Not safety-critical but even short (like 10 seconds) downtime was quite expensive. I used a decent chunk of open source tools for doing static analysis, but also leaned pretty hard on a paid Sonar license to double-check my work. It did an excellent job and I wouldn’t hesitate to get a license again if I was working on similar stuff in the future. That cost money and it was money well-spent.
Same goes for Claude Code. It helps me find bugs. Like simonw above, that tool has helped me find multiple white whale bugs that have followed me around for years, a few of them in upstream RTOS code. I don’t use it for writing code much, other than throwaway analysis scripts and things like that. Not sure if I’m going to go through the effort of rewriting the bug analysis to put together PRs that are “human authored”. I’ve read through the couple line fixes, I’ve tested the crap out of them, and it’s unclear if my effort is actually wanted or not.
score 3 · canonical
I really have a hard time understanding the comments on this post - it feels like deliberate misrepresentation to try to make projects with AI policies look absurd.
Ok, awesome, but
…for your “white whale,” your nemesis over literal years, writing it up yourself is suddenly too much effort?
score 3 · canonical
Yes. If I have to go through an entire parallel construction effort to pretend that the bug wasn’t actually found by Claude Code while I was out for a walk with my wife, when I have a perfectly good walkthrough report already that wasn’t human authored but has been seriously human-reviewed… that’s not effort that my employer would encourage me to spend.
And it was found by Claude Code, yes, but that was informed by both my human intuition and my large collection of not-fit-for-human-consumption Markdown notes that I’ve collected over the last 3 years about the issue. The bug was ultimately found when CC was working on something entirely unrelated to the bug and had something like this in the output:
Which made me think “oh, shit, I think this might be that bug and I’ve never been able to repro it on this debug board… nice” and set in motion a whole other session to nail it down with all of the context I’d gathered over the years.
“Remember that bug we finally fixed last week boss? I want to submit it upstream but to do that I have to rewrite the report and patches by hand otherwise the upstream project will reject the fix.” isn’t an easy sell, unfortunately.
score 1 · canonical
Is WONTFIX the easier sell? I don’t get it, what do you want? The permission to ignore other peoples wishes? You can either leave the bug, fork the project and shoulder the maintenance, switch to a different project or work with the project. You can’t make everything serve you like CC does.
score 1 · canonical
Private small-delta soft-fork is often an easy sell, yes.
For people not to say that full blanket AI ban costs neither users nor quality contributions. Because it is not true.
score 1 · canonical
shrug I don’t think there’s any kind of good answers here in the short term but to wait it out and see how things shake out.
My gut feeling is that the open source projects who flat-out reject contributions because of how those contributions were made (rather than rejecting the content of the contributions) are, over time, going to find themselves with fewer and fewer contributions.
score 1 · canonical