I'm damn sure the answer is "no", but the devs at my workplace are all in on it in a way that's not as absurd on the surface as the "coding is a solved problem" kind of tech bros. There's an emphasis on the "human in the loop" that I think is far from sufficient; we used to have a human in the loop, it's called actually writing your fucking code!
As a sample, this is from a transcript of a recent discussion about AI with some devs on my team:
Me, a senior dev:
To be clear, I'm not saying not to forego the human in the loop. I'm pointing out that there is an inherent contradiction between using agent as our main means of writing code and actually being able to review all of its output -- be it before or after opening the PR. I'm worried that we'll end up in a position that we're expected to do something intractable, if not strictly speaking impossible.
New mid-level dev:
I just think we should still be responsible for reviewing all the output. Like how I see the before vs now is:
- Before: human plan -> human write -> human review
- Now: human plan -> claude write -> human review (+ claude review)
And in effect we're just as responsible for reviewing every line of the Al code as we were for reviewing every line of human code. Once that changes that's when the Al slop starts coming out So we should never end up posting a PR where we're like "hey guys claude wrote this so do the thing you do for claude PRs"
Team tech lead:
@AppetiteOfExcess, this is a problem across all dev teams in every industry. It's a huge issue. I think we need to lean on Al to speed up PRs, but how we do that is not well defined yet. I think it can help us get our head around a PR faster. Maybe we need to made an artifact for some PRs that give a breakdown of what is changing. Then we can grill Al once it understands the changes. That might speed things up a bit. The important thing is to really understand the code and the impact of the change.
@mid-level_dev I agree with you but I think the new process will be more like the following
- Humans (the whole team) plan by making highly defined stories
- Al makes an implementation and test plan
- Human reviews plan
- Al executes the plan with human oversight at certain steps
- Al does a review using /code-review (new context by default)
- PR is posted with change overview
- Human uses Al to understand the changes and review the code
I don't know how to push back on this while being taken at all seriously. It has me considering that maybe I'm in the wrong for rejecting a tool that is considered useful by all but a few stick in the mud devs, and that those devs will never have a shot at a job again unless they pull their heads out of their asses and join our modern "AI"-driven world.
Copyleft software licenses come with the requirement that you must publish and distibute your changes in a practical form, and that you are not allowed to restrict how people use those changes. They use copyright as a legal mechanism to do the exact opposite of what copyright is normally intended to do, which is to prohibit distribution, transparency, creation of derivative works, and to place arbitrary restrictions on how a work can be used. By circumventing copyleft, we are ushering in the final enclosure of computation.
This process will not bring about the end of copyright. Disney will still sue you for seeding their movies or creating works with their trademarked characters, and the courts will still enthusiastically rule in their favor. On the other hand, it will be (it already is) impossible to develop any aspect of digital infrastructure without it being scraped and incorporated into the labor-theft machine so your expertise can be re-applied by some dickhead at Microsoft to build surveillance tech for Israel.
There is also a difference between distribution ("copyright infringement") and plagiarism (taking someone else's work and hiding the source). There is absolutely no reason why we should abandon attribution in a post-copyright world. We should still venerate the authors of meaningful works. We should understand the origins of ideas, discoveries, and cultural trends. The technology which exists today is designed to do the exact opposite. To completely separate our understanding of history, culture, and the development of technology from its actual historical roots.
Do proletarian coders right now get attribution for their contributions or derive any benefit from the current form of gatekeeping?
I dont disagree with attributing, of course, but I consider that short term small beans compared to gutting the usefulness of IP and making that contradiction much sharper (as you say, right now LLM companies are trying to have their cake and eat it, which will sharpen that contradiction).