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hamandcheese 13 hours ago [-]
I'm curious why people care about such tracking? I hardly use an editor anymore, and I'm not alone. All that matters is who is signing off on the commit.
> Text a human wrote or edited should be considered close to sacred: an agent should be hesitant and have a very good reason to touch it.
Not sure I agree (particularly with code, not prose). If code is risky to change for reasons that aren't obvious, it should be commented as such. It doesn't matter how the bytes were generated.
> Another use case: the README.md, originally generated, where you rewrite the opening paragraphs. The agent should feel free to redo or append parts further downwards but should really think twice changing anything in the opener.
This, I understand.
8 hours ago [-]
eighttrigrams 12 hours ago [-]
> I hardly use an editor anymore, and I'm not alone. All that matters is who is signing off on the commit.
In such a context I won't distinguish between me and an agent. But same, almost no editor these days.
For coding, this is more useful for heavily vibecoded projects. Thb, for my own projects most likely I will end up using it only for specs and documentation, maybe in rare cases for some tests. But, I use it for agentic memory, where I can edit the memories as well, and the agent should tend to preserve my edits when updating them.
In general, my main use case is tracking texts in knowledge management systems.
nextaccountic 11 hours ago [-]
It may not matter for you, but it could help agents to recover context about some specific code
bbor 3 hours ago [-]
It’s for social signaling about the author’s effort and own sense of ownership over the work, mostly[1]. People want to know exactly how much AI was used and where if they’re gonna bother investigating a repo, paper, email, or any other doodad that has any AI smell at all. There’s so much wasted breath out there atm that any other policy would be madness, no?
It’s either this or just assume it’s all AI and stride forward with good faith regardless, but… well, what works okay on HuggingFace and GitHub doesn’t necessarily work great on Substack and Reddit, the great founts of wasted breath that they are.
Either way, MMW: you will be telling this story —the one where you saw an early version of text tinting on HN before it got big— at a dinner party within the decade.
[1]: …which is a good thing!
[2]: the problem isn’t just that AI text might be worse in both obvious and sneaky, tech-debt-y ways: we should also consider that a document with 0-5% original content (extremely common) is fundamentally a different ‘speech act’ than one with 95-100% original content. Namely, the latter implies a level of authorial ownership that the former does not.
To put it into realer terms:
- repos are more prosperous when the devs are responding substantively to bug tickets, even if many stay open.
- collaborative narratives (say, TTRPGs) are more prosperous when there’s someone responsible for the world’s lore (say, DMs) who would respond meaningfully if you brought up a plot-hole. Getting the response “lol idk who knows, AI wrote that” is surely all-too-common by now, and clearly a collaboration killer.
…etc!
spuz 16 hours ago [-]
> A git repository is already a history of versions each carrying a provenance marker — every revision of the file, in order, with the author of the change that made it.
Maybe I'm missing how people use AI these days but when I have an agent working locally, all git commits have my authorship attached.
eighttrigrams 16 hours ago [-]
I take care of that in two ways, 1) is via claude hooks, I make sure these are tagged as claude, 2) my sandboxed agents have git env vars set, with the same effect.
spuz 16 hours ago [-]
Does Claude run git commit on every change it makes? Doesn't that pollute your git history?
eighttrigrams 16 hours ago [-]
Although that would be an option (I've considered commit on every edit at one point), what I actually ended up doing is that I hook into all Bash tool calls, look if there's a git commit in there, and if so, I prepend it with the right git env variables.
drusepth 16 hours ago [-]
A /precommit tool can be very powerful -- not only can it run the tests, do light code review on its own, spin up sub-agents to review performance/architecture/etc impacts, but it can also write hilariously-verbose commit messages once everything passes, detailing not only what changed but why it changed.. tagged with Claude as a co-author.
eighttrigrams 1 hours ago [-]
> write hilariously-verbose commit messages […] detailing not only what changed but why it changed
this can come in super-handy from time to time
andai 9 hours ago [-]
Claude's system prompt tells it to sign git commits with "co-authored by Claude [model]".
(Codex doesn't do that.)
GitHub renders this as two authors for those commits.
what 7 hours ago [-]
It should really say “authored by Claude” and “committed by X”.
alansaber 17 hours ago [-]
Cool, we do the same thing, but we also denote when a line is "AI generated but was modified by a human" (aka human made anything upwards of a 1 character change).
eighttrigrams 16 hours ago [-]
I'll probably be annoyed enough soon that I want that level of granularity, too
gritzko 19 hours ago [-]
Interesting. I use annotations for that. But even if agents ignore them 1 out of 100 cases, I have enough cases here to see it happen.
> Text a human wrote or edited should be considered close to sacred: an agent should be hesitant and have a very good reason to touch it.
Not sure I agree (particularly with code, not prose). If code is risky to change for reasons that aren't obvious, it should be commented as such. It doesn't matter how the bytes were generated.
> Another use case: the README.md, originally generated, where you rewrite the opening paragraphs. The agent should feel free to redo or append parts further downwards but should really think twice changing anything in the opener.
This, I understand.
For coding, this is more useful for heavily vibecoded projects. Thb, for my own projects most likely I will end up using it only for specs and documentation, maybe in rare cases for some tests. But, I use it for agentic memory, where I can edit the memories as well, and the agent should tend to preserve my edits when updating them.
In general, my main use case is tracking texts in knowledge management systems.
It’s either this or just assume it’s all AI and stride forward with good faith regardless, but… well, what works okay on HuggingFace and GitHub doesn’t necessarily work great on Substack and Reddit, the great founts of wasted breath that they are.
Either way, MMW: you will be telling this story —the one where you saw an early version of text tinting on HN before it got big— at a dinner party within the decade.
[1]: …which is a good thing!
[2]: the problem isn’t just that AI text might be worse in both obvious and sneaky, tech-debt-y ways: we should also consider that a document with 0-5% original content (extremely common) is fundamentally a different ‘speech act’ than one with 95-100% original content. Namely, the latter implies a level of authorial ownership that the former does not.
To put it into realer terms:
- repos are more prosperous when the devs are responding substantively to bug tickets, even if many stay open.
- collaborative narratives (say, TTRPGs) are more prosperous when there’s someone responsible for the world’s lore (say, DMs) who would respond meaningfully if you brought up a plot-hole. Getting the response “lol idk who knows, AI wrote that” is surely all-too-common by now, and clearly a collaboration killer.
…etc!
Maybe I'm missing how people use AI these days but when I have an agent working locally, all git commits have my authorship attached.
this can come in super-handy from time to time
(Codex doesn't do that.)
GitHub renders this as two authors for those commits.