With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
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@jbowen@mast.hpc.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social we need a new browser, its kinda ovbious, both the major browsers are horrible companies now. We need a new browser, we need it to be big, and paid devs to work on it. Volenteer based projects are cool, but there needs to be money behind if
@skymtf @sarahjamielewis I'd like one, which is why I'd gotten excited about Ladybird, but they turned out to be anti-trans scum.
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With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
Well it can be. Maybe (but probably not) people will start to think more about the quality of code they're trying to contribute when it is their credibility and not the "xyz bots" on the line...
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@sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social according to my understanding of current copyright guidance in the United States, doing this means they forfeit their copyright to the entire Firefox codebase.
@linear @sarahjamielewis No, the issue sound like an agent writes the commit message and commits it. Not about it writing it the actual code. That shouldn’t have any impact on the actual code base.
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@linear @sarahjamielewis No, the issue sound like an agent writes the commit message and commits it. Not about it writing it the actual code. That shouldn’t have any impact on the actual code base.
@basxto@chaos.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social from the Claude documentation I have read about this feature, it is explicitly used for adding co-authorship to commits and pull requests that are written substantially by the LLM. -
@basxto@chaos.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social from the Claude documentation I have read about this feature, it is explicitly used for adding co-authorship to commits and pull requests that are written substantially by the LLM.@basxto@chaos.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social the "pr" one is for pull request descriptions, but the "commit" one is about the contents of the commit, not just the message, as far as i can tell.
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@sarahjamielewis the “ai agent” cannot own the copyright on the code it produces so that might be one reason not to add anything to the author list - that said any code produced needs to be identified as you might have to check if it was copied from any training code (and the license requirements of that code). pyOpenSci and rOpenSci just wrote up new policies on this.
@brianrepko @sarahjamielewis The issue seems to be the opposite. They don’t want the AI to add itself to the author list when hey let an AI write the commit message and commit it. The wording isn’t 100% clear, but the made changes look like that.
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With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis ssh xz bug here we goooooooo
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@basxto@chaos.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social from the Claude documentation I have read about this feature, it is explicitly used for adding co-authorship to commits and pull requests that are written substantially by the LLM.
@linear @sarahjamielewis Yep, it seems to be allowed to write commit content. One person says they only use it for commit message generation, but appears to be only that person. https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D279515?id=1186947#inline-1534420
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With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis “bug”
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@wombatpandaa @skymtf @sarahjamielewis @jbowen
Kagi is hot garbage, sorry to say.
They're also wasting tons of resources developing AI slop, and don't understand basic privacy concepts either:
@pip @skymtf @sarahjamielewis @jbowen thanks for that, I read the whole thing and it was enlightening
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@slyborg
That's... gross -
@jbowen@mast.hpc.social @sarahjamielewis@mastodon.social we need a new browser, its kinda ovbious, both the major browsers are horrible companies now. We need a new browser, we need it to be big, and paid devs to work on it. Volenteer based projects are cool, but there needs to be money behind if
@skymtf @sarahjamielewis @jbowen
Have you heard of https://servo.org/ ? -
With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis As a tester I find bug reports with titles like "When an agent commits, add itself as author" (#219842) and "When an agent commits, don't add itself as author" (#2011195) highly confusing as they read like they are describing intended behaviour. But a bug report should describe unintended behaviour like "Agentic commits are not attributed to the agent". So before jumping into conclusions about the intent of the authors, I would try to clear up the actual requirements.
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With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis I did read a bit further and found that it is because of the dev laziness.
They are too lazy to write commit messages themselves. So they ask the LLM to write them.
And then they are also too lazy to copy paste the generated text themselves, so ask claude to do that.
And they are too lazy to push the commit button, so claude has to push it for them.
And this change is to hide all this laziness. -
With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis Mozilla is so confident that Firefox users love "AI" slop in their browser that they feel the need to obfuscate its inclusion from them. "We don't need them to know, because we already know that they like it and consent to it! We know better!"
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@sarahjamielewis
Yet another reason to abandon Firefox and Mozilla in general.Edit: Use NetSurf or Lynx. Or just curl or wget.
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With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis its annoying, but i think this is a race simple ideas like this just wont win. The major problems with LLM coding tools revolve around code theft (in training data) and erosion of human skills.. Neither of which you can tell from thier outputs. By far the worst part of AI in tech is the corruption and impunity that pushes it. It is possible without that. You cant tell from the outputs any more than you can tell the political party of a developer in a patch file.
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@sarahjamielewis Good that they’re not pretending a machine is a person. Bad that they’re not coming up with a new git footer to document their bad decisions.
@mallory @sarahjamielewis willfully bad people will just ignore it
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With all the discussion around detecting when a code repo contains commits authored by an LLM, I think it is important to note commits like the following in Mozilla Firefox from 2 weeks ago:
"Bug 2011195 - When an agent commits, don't add itself as author"
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/71cc24b6a400dbd434e4df37087960d94b764791
I don't think it's a good thing that Mozilla seem to be explicitly encouraging unattributed LLM code in Firefox.
@sarahjamielewis this is the correct approach, if you supervise Ai to build a feature, it's on you to review the code and be responsible if stuff breaks. It would be useless to attribute everything to one Ai account and just be able to finger point at it.
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@sarahjamielewis I did read a bit further and found that it is because of the dev laziness.
They are too lazy to write commit messages themselves. So they ask the LLM to write them.
And then they are also too lazy to copy paste the generated text themselves, so ask claude to do that.
And they are too lazy to push the commit button, so claude has to push it for them.
And this change is to hide all this laziness.@gunstick @sarahjamielewis Also, nothing like guardrails that can be bypassed by saying "Just do it".
