GCC steering committee announces AI policy

unprovable

The comments are worth it... the full spectrum of personalities and the hottest of takes. 10/10, would recommend to a bored friend.

broodbucket

This is a pretty good middle ground, I think. You can't prevent LLM usage and there's significant downsides to doing so universally, so restricting contributions to things that a human needs to demonstrably understand circumvents a lot of problems.

vkaku

15 lines of code is a great middle ground. Those changes involve a lot of tests though

tommytman

caveat about test cases is a good add

ALLTaken

For until the end of the article I was thinking GCC as in Gulf Cooperation Council. No idea why, but I was surprised this being about the gcc compiler and AI rules.

wxw

The policy source is worth reading: https://forge.sourceware.org/redi/gcc-wwwdocs/commit/4d0793a... > We welcome all contributors to the community even if they have not yet followed our policies; we should guide such contributors on how to do so. Kudos to the GNU project for their attitude.

jdw64

>Why is anyone not surprised that some folks are not enthusiastically building their own gallows? Their way of putting it is funny. I like this person's opinion, but I disagree with it. It's just their own framework, but I think it could also serve as a foundation for building other things. Speaking of PRs, honestly, I've done the same thing before—it was just a one-line fix, but I asked the LLM to add 30 lines of tests just to look more professional

witx

That comment section is filled with HN types

UnfitFootprint

It’s definitely interesting watching the OSS and commercial world swing in seemingly opposite directions on this. It would be nice to see some companies sharing more balanced successful practices they’ve implemented with AI

javier_e06

The 3 big ones, Linux, GCC and Git require a human to vouch/explain the work in question. Once the 3 big ones start using LLM to review/accept the work for speed reliability sake, who knows what is going to happen.

ilaksh

For people who feel it's too restrictive, I wonder if a good alternative is to work on improving clang instead?

prologic

Do we have any idea what "legally significant" or "legally insignificant" means here?

Jedd

I don't use gcc directly - not in a long while - but almost everything I rely on uses it, and it's hugely encouraging to have the stewards of this project contemplate, and then determine to have this policy. Meanwhile, I don't know who quotemstr is, but they don't sound sane in any of the exchanges in this thread.

tonyhart7

how do enforce 'human only code' anyway ???? at some point, what's stopping people from lying or make the code like human writing one ????

etaioinshrdlu

I wonder how they plan to detect it something is LLM generated. I think what this leads to is people just working hard to make their outputs appear human generated.

unprovable

Even GCC admit... nobody likes writing tests.

khaelenmore

It's extremely disturbing to see literally all foundational projects succumbing to the slop-monster. It's only a matter of time now until the critical mass of hard to detect bugs accumulate in the project, making gcc completely unusable for any practical purpose. What's worse - those will be subtle bugs The kind you get from having a defective RAM chip, somewhere in the upper addresses. And if we can't trust the compiler, we can't trust anything compiled with it.

red_admiral

2028: AI can generate a compiler suite to rival GCC overnight, but faster and with fewer bugs. That'll be fun. (Extra fun if the AI generated compiler is under BSD licence.)

bogwog

It's always fun to see the people throwing fits over this kind of thing. No matter what approach/wording they use, and no matter how hard I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, the mental images my mind forms of these people is always entertaining. Ofc, it's less fun to accept that many of them are probably bots, but whatever.

INTPenis

I think if the submitter can answer questions about the code, and exhibit understanding for every line then it should be indistinguishable. But I don't maintain any busy projects. The moderating should focus on good user participation, and a reputation to give old users leeway. I'd be as specific as requesting new users to respond as succinctly as possible to avoid AI ranting