On 10/10/25 14:38, Markus Armbruster wrote:
The boundary between legal and illegal is a superposition of fuzzy,
squiggly lines, one per jurisdiction.
We can only try to approximate it from the legal side.
The tighter we try to approximate, the more risk we take on.
In addition, tighter approximations can be difficult to understand and
apply.
I agree.
[Strong argument why type annotations are low risk snipped...]
Note that type annotations are pretty much the upper bound of what I
would consider a mechanical change. I would expect, for most cases,
that "include the prompt in the commit message" and the boringness of
the change are together already a satisfactory explanation.
At the same time, I decided to try with a more complex change to 1)
avoid a slippery slope; it's easier to do so if you look at the hard
cases from the beginning, and Daniel did that very, very well; 2) probe
the limitations of the tool and ascertain if it's even worthwhile having
an exception.
There's a definite "slippery slope" situation. The incentive for
contributors will be to search out reasons to justify why a work
matches the AI exception,
„Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.“
Yes, and that's why we should strive for simplicity if we are to have
exceptions. If you cannot convince me with the prompt that your change
is mechanical/non-creative, don't even bother making complicated and
probably wrong legal arguments.
Paying a certain price upfront (i.e., now) is fine, but in the long term
the maintainer's job wrt AI should be and remain easy. There has to be
a cost, but then the same would be true with any policy other than
"don't ask, don't tell"---including zero tolerance.
Paolo
