LLM wrote it? Fine, but show us human documentation, demands EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation says it will accept LLM generated code from contributors to its open source projects but will draw the line at non-human generated comments and documentation.

The venerable non-profit's Alexis Hancock and Samantha Baldwin laid out its policy this week, explaining: "We strive to produce high quality software tools, rather than simply generating more lines of code in less time."

And while "LLMs excel at producing code that looks mostly human generated" they pair said these models often have "underlying bugs that can be replicated at scale."

"This makes LLM-generated code exhausting to review, especially with smaller, less resourced teams."

Or put another way, "well intentioned people" submit code with hallucinations, submissions, exaggeration or misrepresentation.

This means project maintainers can end up refactoring, not just reviewing code, when a contributor doesn't actually understand the code they’ve generated. And that’s when the code is ...