The AI hype-cyclone is bad, but so is the anti-AI witch hunt. Commits co-authored by Claude do not mean that a project has "abandoned engineering as a serious endeavor"
Would we say that accepting contributions from new developers means we've "abandoned engineering as a serious endeavor"? No.
Claude can write wrong code. New contributors can write wrong code. What matters is what you do with that code after it's been written.
@nedbatNed Batchelder Strictly speaking, that's true; and, I think the fact of Claude being attributed as the developer of some code speaks poorly of the effort of the developers involved.
Take the attrs library's AI policy, for instance:
Every contribution has to be backed by a human who unequivocally owns the copyright for all changes. No LLM bots in
Co-authored-by:s.
That seems wise! If you're not so confident in the code that you'd type it with your own fingers, you're not confident enough to commit it.
I wish CPython would adopt that, too.
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