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mirror of https://https.git.savannah.gnu.org/git/gnulib.git synced 2026-04-28 06:33:36 +00:00

HACKING: Add an LLM policy.

* HACKING (Acceptable use of LLM generated code): New section.
This commit is contained in:
Bruno Haible
2026-02-16 09:29:10 +01:00
parent d6b8c8a05e
commit 7995867749
2 changed files with 42 additions and 0 deletions

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@@ -1,3 +1,8 @@
2026-02-16 Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>
HACKING: Add an LLM policy.
* HACKING (Acceptable use of LLM generated code): New section.
2026-02-15 Collin Funk <collin.funk1@gmail.com>
parse-datetime: Prefer ckd_add to checking overflow by hand.

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HACKING
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@@ -223,6 +223,43 @@ For C source code:
Only static variables are better kept declared upfront in a function or block.
Acceptable use of LLM generated code
====================================
General-purpose LLMs as well as LLMs specialized for software programming
can produce ready-to-use and, in many cases, actually working code.
We need to avoid two problems with that:
* Copyright and license issue: An LLM may regurgitate a piece of copyrighted
code without the copyright header, thus violating the code's license.
(Most code licenses require that the copyright header remains intact when
the code is copied or becomes the basis of derivative works.)
* Maintainability issues: Such generated code has initially not been
reviewed by a human programmer. It is often greater in size than what a
careful programmer would write. Sometimes it also lacks comments.
People who use "vibe coding" often also observe that the code is of
lower quality.
Where software in general can be qualified as for long-term use vs.
short-term use, vibe coding tends to be more suitable for short-term used
software.
To this end:
1) Code included in this package that comes from a single LLM prompt
must be limited in size: it must be at most 5 lines long.
2) As a submitter, you assert that you have reviewed such code that you
submit.
Rule 1 guarantees that the LLM generated code size is smaller than the
"legally significant for copyright purposes" threshold, see
https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Legally-Significant.html
Rule 2 encourages you to not submit unreviewed garbage.
Warning Options
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