- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
New development policy: code generated by a large language model or similar technology (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot) is presumed to be tainted (i.e. of unclear copyright, not fitting NetBSD’s licensing goals) and cannot be committed to NetBSD.
I can understand why a project might want to do this until the law is fully implemented and testing in court, but I can tell most of the people in this thread haven’t actually figured out how to effectively use LLMs productively. They’re not about to replace software engineers, but as a software engineer, tools like GitHub copilot and ChatGPT are excellent at speeding up a workflow. ChatGPT for example is an excellent search engine that can give you a quick understanding of a topic. It’ll generate small amounts of code more quickly than I could write it by hand. Of course I’m still going to review that code to ensure it is to the same quality that hand written code would be, but overall this is still a much faster problem.
The luddites who hate on LLMs would have complained about the first compilers too, because they could write marginally faster assembly by hand.
Same for intellisense, IDEs, Debuggers, linters, static analyzers, dynamic languages, garbage collection, NoSQL databases…
Why use a computer to do the work when I could do myself? /s