It looks like git after 2.22 was dropped because it took an LLM commit. Same with ghc.
If I have to choose between this or git and the latest ghc, I think I'm going to just wait for someone to fork annex.
I don't even feel strongly one way or the other on AI stuff; pragmatically, I'm just not going to stop using the most widely used version controller, or Haskell, just for some guy's (forkable, AGPL licensed) hobby project.
> This will probably prevent git-annex from taking advantage of most new improvements to the Haskell language going forward. That is deeply unfortunate. This is the main reason why git-annex is not guaranteed to never change to depend on LLM generated code, because cutting it off from all future Haskell language improvements may be worse than the alternative.
Looks like they are aware, and git-annex has been around for decades written by one of the best Haskellers. “Some guys hobby project” is not fair
> It's nicely symmetrical, because conversely I prefer my LLM-generated code to have no dependencies.
How do you get your code to the point where it has no dependencies? How do you do any sort of database writing without a library, or web access without sockets from an os library?
What sort of code has no dependencies? I'm now very curious as I can't see how you can do anything without altest including the std lib from your OS to do any file i/o.
Was this done by manually reviewing commit messages? I think it would be interesting/useful to have a tool that could use some basic heuristics about LLM generated code to detect code-blobs even if they are not explicitly called out in a commit message.
Apparently, though not very carefully. The "particularly large LLM generated code churn" in the ram library, for example, is the LLM being used to simply git-revert a change that was not originally done by an LLM.
when i was reading this i thought of writing some quick and dirty cli tool that checks commit co-authors. wouldn't be perfect, but would eliminate a good chunk of low hanging fruit.
Just like with writing, any kind of AI detection is going to be inaccurate to the point of snake oil.
LLM detection in writing is basically today's polygraph test pseudoscience. There was a blog a while ago where someone fed classic literature into one and it was detected as probably AI.
I'm not sure that is the case in this instance. Certainly general writing is a lot more variable and harder to classify, and on the other extreme certain one-line code changes don't have enough information to say anything. However, a blob with a 500+ line code change and 200+ lines of comments is a dead ringer for some of the current class of LLMs. That isn't to say it this behavior couldn't be obfuscated, but some basic categorization could probably separate the majority of human authored commits vs. AI commits. Heck, you could probably train an AI to detect commit-style just by using pre-2022 code archives and existing known-to-be-AI edits/commits.
It's not just "the code itself looks LLM generated" - it's also LOC/hr by a particular author which suggests vibe coding. You could look at the author's github contributions to identify time periods when the author was generating code at super-human speeds. Combine the two signals and you might get something better than a pseudoscience?
An agent doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. If it can find clear examples of stuff you don't want to see in a (potential) dependency quickly, that will save you time. Give it search tools and some policies, then have it go find things. You then check them out, ask followups.
Agents as a super powered (re)search assistant is underrated.
They will absolutely be missed, maybe not by any individual but the impact of them leaving will be felt. People willing to go to bat for code quality and who are also careful about copyright and the community aspect of open source is why this whole thing worked in the first place.
Copyright won't be a problem. There's enough big business wrapped up in AI usage that the laws will bend towards them. Code quality and community don't die just because people haven't quite figured out how to use the new tools properly yet; quality merely dips for awhile, and the community continues as before. We survived PHP. We can survive this.
I disagree, but not in a downvote sort of way. I think your position is defensible, but there is a valid second perspective.
The sorts of folks who "won't be missed" put pedantry over productivity. To paint with a very broad brush, it's been my experience that they also tend to be stubborn and frustrating team members who don't understand that there's a time to debate and the rest of the time is for shipping.
5 years ago, I would agree with you. But when you go ALL IN on LLM development, and use annealing with multi-agent harnesses, these issues disappear. One caveat: I build everything off other things that originated with my own hand written code. Auth for my site, for example. Also, most of my current projects are packed with advice I've rendered to the LLM on how git commits go down and cadence of those commits into deployments. Claude Code rarely fucks this up, and has memories and plan files that it updates if we find a hole. So, I'm comfortable with an occasional hiccup in the process. It'll get caught, eventually. Maybe. ;)
A recent analysis on my Claude Code prompts showed 1.5B input tokens over the last few months. I use 4-5 provider agents (all CLI) DAILY, so this is a small subset. I spend a lot of time using transcription services to drone on about how some agent fucked things up and how I want it fixed and how to do it.
To assist with that process, I'm currently building out a search engine that is exposed via MCP to allow auditing of the dev runs. I already have the foundation of file changes (ala Splunk style) that let me keep an eye on the agents, and an agentic terminal that allows one agent to keep an eye on what the other agent is whacking on. Combined with my constant badgering for proper systems development, these things are improving the process at an acclerated rate.
Look, I get being an "engineer" on these types of things, and I think there is an absolute purity in pushing LLM generated code out of a codebase you control. That said, that's not the ONLY way to do things, and your milage will vary based on your systems thinking hat. I prefer to push hard on getting the outcomes and sacrifice the exhaustive process of reviewing every single line of code.
Consider frameworks. They make things easier to do, if they are complete and stable. There's an argument here that LLM harnesses should probably not ALSO be maintained by LLMs (something I'm completely ignoring so probably ironic I'm mentioning it). But the point being is the harnesses SHOULD have eyes on most lines of code. Eyes on every package though? Hard to say. I've settled on doing most stuff in Rust nowadays, just because it keeps the LLM more honest. And, we can build most "packages" by hand so we can change them to match our outcomes without code bloat. By bitching at it about code refactoring constantly, annealing the codebase by high level overview, not exhaustive review, I've found things get easier to work on as I go and still stay sane.
I do catch the LLMs occasionally hard coding things that belong in their own file or configs, and am a hardass about that and file length. I do read some code and hate it being overly long (and it sucks for burning tokens).
FWIW, I typed all this out on my keyboard myself. However, if I ran it through an LLM for cleanup or whatever, the very wall of text itself helps FORCE the LLM to stick to the substantive argument and steers it away from slop prompts. The same applies to code, if you are careful.
Ethically, selling code or programs built on other peoples code without consent is wrong.
Legally, it's probably also unlawful, unless you believe that smoke they're selling that it was trained on code that was open licensed or in the public domain.
Professionally, it's a poor choice to ship code that wasn't produced with human care and consideration or even thorough oversight or understanding based on recent trends.
Software developers like to call themselves "engineers", but more and more they're showing they're more than happy to be configurators of black boxes of modular software. Whether that means pulling random NPM packages with thousands of other random packages as dependencies (none of which are even browsed or licenses checked), or "vibe coding" slop the LLM spits out.
When the main problem was people assembling random packages, I always likened it to "sandwich artists" at Subway. They just stand behind the counter and configure the product of random combinations of ingredients (someone else's NPM packages). Now it's like they can't even see the selection of ingredients, they just grab handfuls and shove it together until they get something sandwich shaped. Bad times in software.
We are all figuring this new technology out and people will make mistakes. Would seem overreactionary to swear things off completely because of a single commit and reversion. Look for patterns in dependencies and your own work.
I think this is a fair and normal reaction to AI slop. Alot of work though. I think OSS projects are at serious risk of implosion due to the vigilance required which honestly may end up being a fool's errand anyway.
But maybe we are thinking about it backward. Have you ever wondered why there is so much "free software"? Beware of strangers bearing gifts.
I have always wondered and been suspicious of people who are so eager for you to use their software. Which isnt to say OSS isnt high quality. Im just saying that maybe when people are pushing free software on you they are kind of in it for themselves.
As for whats next, me personally, last year I pulled all my personal repos about 80 of them off of bitbucket and self host that all now. I think OSS projects should setup a paywall and charge money to create PRs.
Like 10-100 bucks per PR to cover the cost of the extra vigilance. Also I could see migrations away from github, to AI free dependency hosting or something like that. Its an interesting challenge. But its not insurmountable.
Either paywall OSS projects or take them off the interwebs.
Also one option the OP didnt explore I dont think is forking and freezing the dependencies. Huge maintenance burden, but its better than source corruption.
Also use fewer dependencies. Maybe set a limit of 5.
Clicking through to https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/
It looks like git after 2.22 was dropped because it took an LLM commit. Same with ghc.
If I have to choose between this or git and the latest ghc, I think I'm going to just wait for someone to fork annex.
I don't even feel strongly one way or the other on AI stuff; pragmatically, I'm just not going to stop using the most widely used version controller, or Haskell, just for some guy's (forkable, AGPL licensed) hobby project.
They said the non LLM dependency build was not default and could become untenable.
They said git-annex supports git back to 2.22. Not git after 2.22 was dropped.
An incompatible change in ghc would break compilation of other software also.
> This will probably prevent git-annex from taking advantage of most new improvements to the Haskell language going forward. That is deeply unfortunate. This is the main reason why git-annex is not guaranteed to never change to depend on LLM generated code, because cutting it off from all future Haskell language improvements may be worse than the alternative.
Looks like they are aware, and git-annex has been around for decades written by one of the best Haskellers. “Some guys hobby project” is not fair
TFA is about the dependencies of this project. How does that prevent you from using those things yourself?
It's nicely symmetrical, because conversely I prefer my LLM-generated code to have no dependencies.
> It's nicely symmetrical, because conversely I prefer my LLM-generated code to have no dependencies.
How do you get your code to the point where it has no dependencies? How do you do any sort of database writing without a library, or web access without sockets from an os library?
What sort of code has no dependencies? I'm now very curious as I can't see how you can do anything without altest including the std lib from your OS to do any file i/o.
Bingo.
These days, my only deps are TinyUSB and LVGL - stuff that would be completely pointless and absurd to recreate.
Was this done by manually reviewing commit messages? I think it would be interesting/useful to have a tool that could use some basic heuristics about LLM generated code to detect code-blobs even if they are not explicitly called out in a commit message.
The diff of the linked commit in git is completely trivial, clearly it just got tagged because of the signoff in the commit message: https://github.com/git/git/commit/d7971544fe17378f44f4998301...
I would be surprised if there is no LLM-assisted code in there prior to this commit, this is just the first where the author chose to disclose it.
Apparently, though not very carefully. The "particularly large LLM generated code churn" in the ram library, for example, is the LLM being used to simply git-revert a change that was not originally done by an LLM.
when i was reading this i thought of writing some quick and dirty cli tool that checks commit co-authors. wouldn't be perfect, but would eliminate a good chunk of low hanging fruit.
Just like with writing, any kind of AI detection is going to be inaccurate to the point of snake oil.
LLM detection in writing is basically today's polygraph test pseudoscience. There was a blog a while ago where someone fed classic literature into one and it was detected as probably AI.
I'm not sure that is the case in this instance. Certainly general writing is a lot more variable and harder to classify, and on the other extreme certain one-line code changes don't have enough information to say anything. However, a blob with a 500+ line code change and 200+ lines of comments is a dead ringer for some of the current class of LLMs. That isn't to say it this behavior couldn't be obfuscated, but some basic categorization could probably separate the majority of human authored commits vs. AI commits. Heck, you could probably train an AI to detect commit-style just by using pre-2022 code archives and existing known-to-be-AI edits/commits.
The heuristics that would be used to "detect AI" here would be things that shouldn't be happening anyway, so false positives wouldn't matter.
It's not just "the code itself looks LLM generated" - it's also LOC/hr by a particular author which suggests vibe coding. You could look at the author's github contributions to identify time periods when the author was generating code at super-human speeds. Combine the two signals and you might get something better than a pseudoscience?
An agent doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. If it can find clear examples of stuff you don't want to see in a (potential) dependency quickly, that will save you time. Give it search tools and some policies, then have it go find things. You then check them out, ask followups.
Agents as a super powered (re)search assistant is underrated.
Maybe an LLM could be used to check for this :)
This is a hill many people will choose to die on.
And the shan't be missed.
They will absolutely be missed, maybe not by any individual but the impact of them leaving will be felt. People willing to go to bat for code quality and who are also careful about copyright and the community aspect of open source is why this whole thing worked in the first place.
Copyright won't be a problem. There's enough big business wrapped up in AI usage that the laws will bend towards them. Code quality and community don't die just because people haven't quite figured out how to use the new tools properly yet; quality merely dips for awhile, and the community continues as before. We survived PHP. We can survive this.
I disagree, but not in a downvote sort of way. I think your position is defensible, but there is a valid second perspective.
The sorts of folks who "won't be missed" put pedantry over productivity. To paint with a very broad brush, it's been my experience that they also tend to be stubborn and frustrating team members who don't understand that there's a time to debate and the rest of the time is for shipping.
5 years ago, I would agree with you. But when you go ALL IN on LLM development, and use annealing with multi-agent harnesses, these issues disappear. One caveat: I build everything off other things that originated with my own hand written code. Auth for my site, for example. Also, most of my current projects are packed with advice I've rendered to the LLM on how git commits go down and cadence of those commits into deployments. Claude Code rarely fucks this up, and has memories and plan files that it updates if we find a hole. So, I'm comfortable with an occasional hiccup in the process. It'll get caught, eventually. Maybe. ;)
A recent analysis on my Claude Code prompts showed 1.5B input tokens over the last few months. I use 4-5 provider agents (all CLI) DAILY, so this is a small subset. I spend a lot of time using transcription services to drone on about how some agent fucked things up and how I want it fixed and how to do it.
To assist with that process, I'm currently building out a search engine that is exposed via MCP to allow auditing of the dev runs. I already have the foundation of file changes (ala Splunk style) that let me keep an eye on the agents, and an agentic terminal that allows one agent to keep an eye on what the other agent is whacking on. Combined with my constant badgering for proper systems development, these things are improving the process at an acclerated rate.
Look, I get being an "engineer" on these types of things, and I think there is an absolute purity in pushing LLM generated code out of a codebase you control. That said, that's not the ONLY way to do things, and your milage will vary based on your systems thinking hat. I prefer to push hard on getting the outcomes and sacrifice the exhaustive process of reviewing every single line of code.
Consider frameworks. They make things easier to do, if they are complete and stable. There's an argument here that LLM harnesses should probably not ALSO be maintained by LLMs (something I'm completely ignoring so probably ironic I'm mentioning it). But the point being is the harnesses SHOULD have eyes on most lines of code. Eyes on every package though? Hard to say. I've settled on doing most stuff in Rust nowadays, just because it keeps the LLM more honest. And, we can build most "packages" by hand so we can change them to match our outcomes without code bloat. By bitching at it about code refactoring constantly, annealing the codebase by high level overview, not exhaustive review, I've found things get easier to work on as I go and still stay sane.
I do catch the LLMs occasionally hard coding things that belong in their own file or configs, and am a hardass about that and file length. I do read some code and hate it being overly long (and it sucks for burning tokens).
FWIW, I typed all this out on my keyboard myself. However, if I ran it through an LLM for cleanup or whatever, the very wall of text itself helps FORCE the LLM to stick to the substantive argument and steers it away from slop prompts. The same applies to code, if you are careful.
Ah yes, open source will be better with less people who can actually write code.
Ethically, selling code or programs built on other peoples code without consent is wrong.
Legally, it's probably also unlawful, unless you believe that smoke they're selling that it was trained on code that was open licensed or in the public domain.
Professionally, it's a poor choice to ship code that wasn't produced with human care and consideration or even thorough oversight or understanding based on recent trends.
Software developers like to call themselves "engineers", but more and more they're showing they're more than happy to be configurators of black boxes of modular software. Whether that means pulling random NPM packages with thousands of other random packages as dependencies (none of which are even browsed or licenses checked), or "vibe coding" slop the LLM spits out.
When the main problem was people assembling random packages, I always likened it to "sandwich artists" at Subway. They just stand behind the counter and configure the product of random combinations of ingredients (someone else's NPM packages). Now it's like they can't even see the selection of ingredients, they just grab handfuls and shove it together until they get something sandwich shaped. Bad times in software.
We are all figuring this new technology out and people will make mistakes. Would seem overreactionary to swear things off completely because of a single commit and reversion. Look for patterns in dependencies and your own work.
I think this is a fair and normal reaction to AI slop. Alot of work though. I think OSS projects are at serious risk of implosion due to the vigilance required which honestly may end up being a fool's errand anyway.
But maybe we are thinking about it backward. Have you ever wondered why there is so much "free software"? Beware of strangers bearing gifts.
I have always wondered and been suspicious of people who are so eager for you to use their software. Which isnt to say OSS isnt high quality. Im just saying that maybe when people are pushing free software on you they are kind of in it for themselves.
As for whats next, me personally, last year I pulled all my personal repos about 80 of them off of bitbucket and self host that all now. I think OSS projects should setup a paywall and charge money to create PRs.
Like 10-100 bucks per PR to cover the cost of the extra vigilance. Also I could see migrations away from github, to AI free dependency hosting or something like that. Its an interesting challenge. But its not insurmountable.
Either paywall OSS projects or take them off the interwebs. Also one option the OP didnt explore I dont think is forking and freezing the dependencies. Huge maintenance burden, but its better than source corruption.
Also use fewer dependencies. Maybe set a limit of 5.