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Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people)

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On 15/01/26 at 17:43 +0100, Sylvain L. Sauvage wrote:
> Le jeudi 15 janvier 2026, 17:02:05 heure normale d’Europe centrale Lucas Nussbaum a écrit :
> >[…]
> > If you haven't already, I would recommend getting first hand experience
> > with LLM-assisted coding.  Using it to modify existing code is very
> > different from using it to do "Vibe coding", where you generate large
> > amounts of code without even reading it.
> 
> Okay, but you said:
> “I let the agent write an initial version of the code, and then I review
> it.”
> 
> “Initial version,” even if that’s not “pure vibe coding,” it very much
> smells like it.

I probably should have written "initial version of the patch/change"
indeed.

> Nonetheless, if you ask the tool to add a function to one of your files…
> maybe it’s incremental… but maybe it’s just regurgitating almost verbatim
> someone else’s code (changing their tab indentation and camel case 
> notation to your code’s 4-space indentation and snake case).

My feeling is that it would not happen like that. I would first ask for
a change in the code to add a missing feature, then as a second step I
would ask for refactoring. Mainly because it's much easier to review the
two steps separately. Since the new function would be a result of the
refactoring, it's less likely to be code regurgitated from elsewhere.

But I see some people writing about first designing a detailed spec of
what they want the LLM to do, and then asking the LLM to implement. In
that case, it might be more likely to regurgitate code captured
elsewhere. I don't really know since that's not my workflow.

> Maybe you won’t agree on “regurgitating,” maybe you’d call that
> “reinventing”… but if a human studied a lot of codes (and was known to
> have done that) and managed to write a (non-trivial) function exactly as
> it was in that corpus (modulo cosmestics), they would be suspected of
> plagiarism.
> 
> 2. In any case, and more importantly, most of these tools have been
> trained on other people’s work, regardless (and stripping them) of their
> copyrights and licences.  They are poisoned.

That's true. I must admit I did not follow much the legal side of
things. However, if the original code was free software, I think it can
be argued that training falls under Freedom #0 or #1.

Lucas

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  On publicly shaming people (was "Delay slot in PowerISA?") Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@debian.org> - 2026-01-14 12:00 +0100
    Re: On publicly shaming people (was "Delay slot in PowerISA?") Tiago Bortoletto Vaz <tiago@debian.org> - 2026-01-14 17:30 +0100
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        On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> - 2026-01-15 16:00 +0100
          Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) "Sylvain L. Sauvage" <sylvain.l.sauvage@free.fr> - 2026-01-15 16:20 +0100
            Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> - 2026-01-15 17:10 +0100
              Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) "Sylvain L. Sauvage" <sylvain.l.sauvage@free.fr> - 2026-01-15 18:00 +0100
                Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org> - 2026-01-15 20:50 +0100
            Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org> - 2026-01-15 17:40 +0100
          Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) Marc Haber <mh+debian-project@zugschlus.de> - 2026-01-15 19:10 +0100
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