The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code.

Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it's now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected

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[–] 81 points 11 months ago (2 children)

extension developers should be able to justify and explain the code they submit, within reason

I think this is the meat of how the policy will work. People can use AI or not. Nobody is going to know. But if someone slops in a giant submission and can’t explain why any of the code exists, it needs to go in the garbage.

Too many people think because something finally “works”, it’s good. Once your AI has written code that seems to work, that’s supposed to be when the human starts their work. You’re not done. You’re not almost done. You have a working prototype that you now need to turn into something of value.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    Too many people think because something finally “works”, it’s good. Once your AI has written code that seems to work, that’s supposed to be when the human starts their work.

    Holy shit, preach!

    Once you give a shit ton of prompts and the feature finally starts working, the code is most likely complete ass, probably filled with a ton of useless leftovers from previous iterations, redundant and unoptimized code. That's when you start reading/understanding the code and polishing it, not when you ship it lol

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  • [–] 78 points 11 months ago (11 children)

    You used to be able to tell an image was photoshopped because of the pixels. Now with code you can tell it was written with AI because of the comments.

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    Emojis in comments, filename as a comment in the first line, and so on

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    I've been in the habit of putting the filename as first comment in most of my scripts forever. I don't know when or why I started but please don't make me change!

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago

    it’s how example code is often written when it’s i. a book or a webpage… there’s not really a good reason to do it in a real file because it’s in the filename.
    but if it helps you organize it doesn’t hurt anything.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    # Optional but [...]

    edit to explain my very vague comment: ChatGPT loves to offer code with some lines commented as "Optional [... explanation]". You can easily tell AI code when the monologuing comments are left in

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  • [–] 37 points 11 months ago

    Rare, so needed Gnome W

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  • [–] 35 points 11 months ago
    [–] 33 points 11 months ago (13 children)

    You know, GNOME does some stupid stuff, but I can respect them for this.

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  • [+] -57 points 11 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    you shouldn't be able to tell if someone used ai to write something. if you can then it is bad code. they're not talking about getting completion on a fn, they're talking about letting an agent go and write chunks of the project.

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  • [+] -7 points 11 months ago* (6 children)
  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    did you read their statement? they do.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    It's always some definition of works. The code never works in all cases, which works lead to people being annoyed with gnome for allowing the extension in the first place

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  • [–] 19 points 11 months ago

    I applaud the move, but man, that's gonna be a lot of work on their end.

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  • [–] 14 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    How is AI-generated content detected and what is the process for disputing such claims?

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  • [–] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    Just an example:

    I'm a programming student. In one of my classes we had a simple assignment. Write a simple script to calculate factorials. The purpose of this assignment was to teach recursion. Should be doable in 4-5 lines max, probably less. My coed decided to vibe code his assignment and ended up with a 55 line script. It worked, but it was literally %1100 of the length it needed to be with lots of dead functions and 'None->None(None)' style explicit typing where it just simply wasn't needed.

    The code was hilariously obviously AI code.

    Edit: I had like 3/4 typos here

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  • [–] 17 points 11 months ago

    if it's not clear if it's ai, it's not the code this policy was targeting. this is so they don't have to waste time justifying removing the true ai slop.

    if the code looks bad enough to be indistinguishable from ai slop, I don't think it matters that it was handwritten or not.

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    I guess the practical idea is that if your AI generated code is so good and you've reviewed it so well that it fools the reviewer, the rule did it's job and then it doesn't matter.

    But most of the time the AI code jumps out immediately to any experienced reviewer, and usually for bad reasons.

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  • [–] -4 points 11 months ago

    So then it's not really a blanket "no-AI" rule if it can't be enforceable if it's good enough? I suppose the rule should have been "no obviously bad AI" or some other equally subjective thing?

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  • [–] -5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    It's not hard, just use your eyes or an AI-detector

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago

    This is one of the things that people who use AI to vibe code don't get. Sure your AI genned code ends up working but when you actually look at the code it's sloppy as all fuck, with a lot of unnecessary junk in it. And if you ever have to fix it, good fucking luck finding what's actually going on. Since you didn't write it there's no way for you to know exactly what it is that's actually fucking up.

    Really you end up being no better than some homebody who copy-pasted some code they found on the internet and plugged it into their shit with no idea of how any of it actually works.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago

    Good.

    I'm mostly switched off SAMMI because their current head dev is all in on AI bullshit. Got maybe one thing left to move to streamerbot and I'm clear there. My two regular viewers wont notice at all but I'll feel better about it.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago
    [–] -5 points 11 months ago

    So what does this mean? Bc like (at least with my boss) whenever I submit ai generated code at work I still have to have a deep and comprehensive understanding of the changes that I made, and I have to be right (meaning I have to be right about what I say bc I cannot say the AI solved the problem). What's the difference between that and me writing the code myself (+googling and stack overflow)?

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