This implies that "create" is the hard part that we should not offload to machines.
But IME all of the other things are the hard part.
So basically it's fine to get the LLM to think for you and give you the answers as long as you understand Rust syntax well enough to type it all out yourself?
This also seems like it will produce worse code, because it's preventing the LLM from doing the easy/boring part that it's good at.
> Harassment is not allowed. You may not harass people for using an LLM, regardless of whether or not their use is banned by the policy. You must follow the Code of Conduct at all times when interacting with the Rust project.
> Pre-arranged, non-critical, high-quality, well-tested, and well-reviewed code changes that are originally created by an LLM are allowed, with disclosure.
They clearly put a lot of thought into this and it shows. Huge respect.
> New contributors cannot create a PR using an LLM unless they first talk with a reviewer.
New contributors do not have community connections. I don't know any rust-lang/rust reviewer.
What is the correct procedure for this?
> Harassment is not allowed.
> You may not harass people for using an LLM, regardless of whether or not their use is banned by the policy.
Refreshing take. Not a fan of heavy handed moderation, but I'm still very happy to see that they have this stance given the racism-tier insults I've gotten on forums without it.
I especially like this rule:
> Don’t try to be the police for whether someone has used an LLM. You are not required to “actively look” for whether an LLM was involved.
The question is: is such policy even enforceable? If someone is "clever" enough to drop em-dashes and some bold highlights how one would know if something is AI generated or not?
I really dislike every kind of rule that says something along the lines "if it's LLM generated you must self-disclose otherwise it is against the rules". Because this quickly leads to witch hunting and easy persecution of IC's under the pretense "it looks generated by an LLM" or they just investigate you and put you on cooldown from being able to contribute while they check for signs of "LLM-generated code". It's no different than laws giving any officer the right to violate your rights based on flaky probable cause "you have slurred speech therefore I will search your car to see any open containers". This can lead to a soft coup by anti-llm individuals which will make communities slowly drift towards a group of elitists that gatekeep any newcomer.
Thats why they also added the no harassing about LLM rule. Im not sure how the moderators will actually discern AI use, but I imagine if the code is high quality they dont actually care if its LLM, they just want to stop the obvious spam of drive-by PRs from first time contributors.
I think LLM policies which ban usage are ultimately self-defeating. They neatly switch concerns about quality of contributions to concerns about "AI slop". These two things are not the same. But the biggest problem is that they ignore the (unevenly distributed) future.
The future: SWEs will no longer write code by hand. The era of hand coding is over. We only saw that for sure in the last 6 - 9 months. But it's over.
Many coders have not yet made this transition, true, but it's happening regardless. You may not like it, but as a coder, you will not be hired if you refuse these tools. You will look as ridiculous as an accountant that refuses to use spreadsheets.
For now, we're not there yet.
As a profession, we are learning how to deal with the massive influx of review work that occurs because of LLMs. The bottleneck has moved. And as of now, there aren't good answers. But there will be. We will figure it out, like we figured out CI/CD and agile.
So personally, I'd focus my policies much more on dealing with the issues that this new era presents, and how to make LLM contributions work, and I'd avoid banning LLMs.
> We have long had the problem that there are more people who want to write code than people willing to review it.
I think this is an important thing to mull over. The world is going to be a different place for those who wanted to write code but not review it compared to those who are willing to carefully review code.
11 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.9 ms ] threadBut IME all of the other things are the hard part.
So basically it's fine to get the LLM to think for you and give you the answers as long as you understand Rust syntax well enough to type it all out yourself?
This also seems like it will produce worse code, because it's preventing the LLM from doing the easy/boring part that it's good at.
This policy I like.
https://forge.rust-lang.org/policies/llm-usage.html
https://rustc-dev-guide.rust-lang.org/llm-guidance/writing.h...
> Pre-arranged, non-critical, high-quality, well-tested, and well-reviewed code changes that are originally created by an LLM are allowed, with disclosure.
They clearly put a lot of thought into this and it shows. Huge respect.
> New contributors cannot create a PR using an LLM unless they first talk with a reviewer.
New contributors do not have community connections. I don't know any rust-lang/rust reviewer.
What is the correct procedure for this?
> Harassment is not allowed.
> You may not harass people for using an LLM, regardless of whether or not their use is banned by the policy.
Refreshing take. Not a fan of heavy handed moderation, but I'm still very happy to see that they have this stance given the racism-tier insults I've gotten on forums without it.
I especially like this rule:
> Don’t try to be the police for whether someone has used an LLM. You are not required to “actively look” for whether an LLM was involved.
The future: SWEs will no longer write code by hand. The era of hand coding is over. We only saw that for sure in the last 6 - 9 months. But it's over.
Many coders have not yet made this transition, true, but it's happening regardless. You may not like it, but as a coder, you will not be hired if you refuse these tools. You will look as ridiculous as an accountant that refuses to use spreadsheets.
For now, we're not there yet.
As a profession, we are learning how to deal with the massive influx of review work that occurs because of LLMs. The bottleneck has moved. And as of now, there aren't good answers. But there will be. We will figure it out, like we figured out CI/CD and agile.
So personally, I'd focus my policies much more on dealing with the issues that this new era presents, and how to make LLM contributions work, and I'd avoid banning LLMs.
I think this is an important thing to mull over. The world is going to be a different place for those who wanted to write code but not review it compared to those who are willing to carefully review code.