Discussion

Rust Project Perspectives on AI

_pdp_: AI ultimately breaks the social contract.Sure, people are not perfect, but there are established common values that we don't need to convey in a prompt.With AI, despite its usefulness, you are never sure if it understands these values. That might be somewhat embedded in the training data, but we all know these properties are much more swayable and unpredictable than those of a human.It was never about the LLM to begin with.If Linus Torvalds makes a contribution to the Linux kernel without actually writing the code himself but assigns it to a coding assistant, for better or worse I will 100% accept it on face value. This is because I trust his judgment (I accept that he is fallible as any other human). But if an unknown contributor does the same, even though the code produced is ultimately high quality, you would think twice before merging.I mean, we already see this in various GitHub projects. There are open-source solutions that whitelist known contributors and it appears that GitHub might be allowing you to control this too.https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/185387

ghosty141: The title is misleading. It says in one of the first sentences:> The comments within do not represent “the Rust project’s view” but rather the views of the individuals who made them. The Rust project does not, at present, have a coherent view or position around the usage of AI tools; this document is one step towards hopefully forming one.So calling this "Rust Project Perspectives on AI" is not quite right.

JoshTriplett: Correct. This is one internal draft by someone quoting some other people's positions but not speaking for any other positions.

throwaway27448: An agent is still attached to an accountable human. If it is not, ignore it.

andai: >It takes care and careful engineering to produce good results. One must work to keep the models within the flight envelope. One has to carefully structure the problem, provide the right context and guidance, and give appropriate tools and a good environment. One must think about optimizing the context window; one must be aware of its limitations.In other words, one has to lean into the exact opposite tendencies of those which generally make people reach for AI ;)

eholk: I took it as meaning "perspectives of people in the Rust Project about AI."

yonran: Seems like a lot of people’s problems with AI come from talking to the dumber models and having it not provide sufficient proof that it fixed a bug. Maybe instead of banning AI, projects should set a minimum smarts level. e.g. to contribute, you must use gpt-5.4-codex high or better for either writing it or code reviewing it.

bluefirebrand: > AI ultimately breaks the social contractBusiness schools teach that breaking the social contract is a disruption opportunity for growth, not a negative,The Hacker in Hacker News refers to "growth hacking" now, not hacking code

_pdp_: It depends who you ask.You cannot say that breaking the social contract (the fabric of society, if you will) is generally a good thing, although I am sure some will find opportunities for growth.After all, the phoenix must burn to emerge, but let's not romanticise the fire.

bluefirebrand: > You cannot say that breaking the social contract (the fabric of society, if you will) is generally a good thingI am not saying it's a good thing, just that it's a common attitude hereI suppose it didn't come through in my original post, but I was trying to be critical

olalonde: I feel bad for people who reject LLMs on moral grounds. They'll likely fall behind, while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoral.

pton_xd: I don't necessarily agree with the LLM moral objection, but this point of view is unconvincing. Change the topic to say, slavery, and the "I feel bad for those who reject slavery on moral grounds, they'll fall behind..." argument becomes fairly absurd.You're essentially saying the very concept of a moral objection is to be pitied. Maybe you believe that's true but I'd say that reflects poorly on our values today.

YorickPeterse: This is just the typical FOMO nonsense pushed by AI fans.It's the exact same as seen with many past hypes, and every time the result is a lot more nuanced than those fans claim. It wasn't that long ago that people were claiming MongoDB was going to revolutionize the world and make relational databases obsolete, or how cryptocurrencies were going to change the world, or NFTs, and the list goes on.

monkaiju: > They'll likely fall behindSo far this doesn't seem to be the case, despite it being repeated endlessly over the last few years.>while also having to live in a world increasingly built around something they see as immoralShould people just decide that things they think are immoral are actually fine and get over it? Doesnt really seem coherent...

muglug: No, he's saying this specific moral objection is to be pitied.When I say "I feel bad for people who feel a need to own guns", I'm not saying I feel bad for people who feel a need to lock their doors at night.

deadbabe: Are the people who aren’t born or haven’t even entered a workforce also falling behind?

henry_bone: The industry and the wider world are full steam ahead with AI, but the following takes (from the article) are the ones that resonate with me. I don't use AI directly in my work for reasons similar to those expressed here[1].For the record, I'll use it as a better web search or intro to a set of ideas or topic. But i no longer use it to generate code or solutions.1. https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-...

ronsor: When the moral perspective isn't that sound and isn't that important, yeah, they usually do. Everyone gets tired of complaining.

bluefirebrand: I feel bad for people who accept AI. They're going to wind up just as replaced by it as I will, but it will somehow come as a surprise to them despite the writing being on the wall for agesI imagine there will be a lot of regrets in the future from people that were early adopters that eventually got pushed out by the AI they love so much

exfalso: Regret? Of what? The tech is here. You won't slow it down by not using it. People need to either adapt by moving to more and more niche areas, or become the person to be retained when the efficiency gains materialize. We still don't have the proper methodology figured out, but people are working on it.That said, I'd agree that people who currently claim 20x speedups will indeed be replaced.

kellpossible2: There must be plenty of people who "accept" it in a fatalistic manner, where the final result will not be a surprise.

tayo42: Yeah that's why you go to school, learn, get trained etc..

_pdp_: I forgot to mention why I brought up the idea of who is making the contribution rather than how (i.e., through an LLM).Right now, the biggest issue open-source maintainers are facing is an ever-increasing supply of PRs. Before coding assistants, those PRs didn't get pushed not because they were never written (although obviously there were fewer in quantity) but because contributors were conscious of how their contributions might be perceived. In many cases, the changes never saw the light of day outside of the fork.LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent.So I don't think the question is whether machine-generated code is low quality at all, because that is hard to judge, and frankly coding assistants can certainly produce high-quality code (with guidance). The question is who made the contribution. With rising volumes, we will see an increasing amount of rejections.By the way, we do this too internally. We have a script that deletes LLM-generated PRs automatically after some time. It is just easier and more cost-effective than reviewing the contribution. Also, PRs get rejected for the smallest of reasons.If it doesn't pass the smell test moments after the link is opened, it get's deleted.

pear01: > LLMs don't second-guess whether a change is worth submitting, and they certainly don't feel the social pressure of how their contribution might be received. The filter is completely absent.Of course you could have an agent on your side do this, so I take you to mean a LLM that submits a PR and is not instructed to make such a reflection will not intrinsically make it as a human would, that is as a necessary side effect of submitting in the first place (though one might be surprised).It would be curious to have an API that perhaps attempts to validate some attestation about how the submitting LLM's contribution was derived, ie force that reflection at submission time with some reasonable guarantees of veracity even if it had yet to be considered. Perhaps some future API can enforce such a contract among the various LLMs.

ares623: > You won't slow it down by not using it.Then why is it forced into everywhere and everyone and everything?

jojomodding: How do you figure out which is the case, at scale?

throwaway27448: You don't.

forgetfulness: LLMs are very easy to pick up, the point of them for their makers is to commoditize skill and knowledge, you can't be left behind in learning to use them, AI providers don't have economic incentives to make them into anything other than appliances.The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.

duskwuff: > The people more at risk of being left behind are the ones that don't learn when not to trust their output.Or the ones who fall out of practice writing software themselves because they've been relying on AI to do all the work.(Or the same, but with "long-form English text" instead of "software".)

ysleepy: I enjoyed reading theses perspectives, they are reasoned and insightful.I'm undecided about my stance for gen AI in code. We can't just look at the first order and immediate effects, but also at the social, architecural, power and responsibility aspects.For another area, prose, literature, emails, I am firm in my rejection of gen AI. I read to connect with other humans, the price of admission is spending the time.For code, I am not as certain, nowadays I don't regularly see it as an artwork or human expression, it is a technical artifact where craftsmanship can be visible.Will gen AI be the equivalent of a compiler and in 20 years everyone depends on their proprietary compiler/IDE company?Can it even advance beyond patterns/approaches that we have built until then?I have many more questions and few answers and both embracing and rejecting feels foolish.

tracerbulletx: I'm worried about a few big companies owning the means of production for software and tightening the screws.

kvirani: This is my immediate concern as well. Sam said in an interview that he sees "intelligence" as a utility that companies like OpenAI would own and rent out.

arcanemachiner: Hopefully it continues to get commoditized to the point where no monopoly can get a stranglehold on it, since the end product ("intelligence") can be swapped out with little concern over who is providing it.