Stop advertising in your commits

9 points by Aks

technomancy

Any tool that adds advertising to my commits or emails or whatever messages is a really bad one.

I mean, this is obviously very accurate, but the solution is to stop using bad tools, not to make your bad tool usage harder to detect.

Personally I appreciate that people who do this are so eager to tell on themselves.

Aks

but the solution is to stop using bad tools, not to make your bad tool usage harder to detect.

I do agree, but I hope some people will stop and think why they suddenly think this behavior is even allowed.

edit: So yes, the real solution is just not to use tools that have advertisement in your product.

liberty

Many people find it to be important to avoid LLM-generated code. I don't think any move away from disclosure of LLMs is correct. Putting that information in commit-messages also makes it convenient to determine automatically whether or not codebases include LLM-generated code (such as with slopcheck).

Though I suppose the important thing is disclosure that an LLM was used, not which LLM was used. If those using such tools switched to that approach, it might mitigate the harm from advertising particular products while also accommodating the need for disclosure.

Aks

Yes, if it was just "this was generated by LLM" it would be fine, but now people are just giving free advertising to these companies.

hugoarnal

I totally see where you're coming from however I kind of disagree with one part.

I agree on the part that it's completely free advertising from the AI companies and I hate how they're invading open source software with this.

I disagree on only disclosing in merge request. Not everyone looks at merge requests and I shouldn't have to depend on anything else than the git history to know if this commit is trustworthy or not.

bsandro

What if I write "Proudly typed in nano" or something? :D

pyfisch

"edited with sed - the modern stream editor for filtering and transforming text"
owent

"Sent from my iPhone"

Maybe same reason why people wear shirts that say "Nike" or "Adidas" on it.

tomhukins

Right now I am wearing a shirt that says "London Perl Workshop 2017" on it and I realise I don't remember anything specific about that year's event. Maybe I should go for sportswear instead.
radex

I always found it baffling that people are willing (even eager) to do that.

pyfisch

btw I am not sure if the webserver is overloaded, misconfigured or has classified me as a bot, but I need to wait ~30 seconds for a HTTPS connection.

mjec

If I pair with someone and I commit, their name goes in the co-authored-by. I think the contribution of LLMs when I program is significant enough to the commit that it is worth recognizing. I am committing the code, I am responsible for the code, but I am not the sole author of the code.

Aks

It's not a real person, you're just advertising a company.

JulianSildenLanglo

I'd be pretty pissed if Visual Studio started tacking on "Made using Visual Studio" on my commits.

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