Simple framework: You must not attempt to offload the actual thinking part to someone else. You should be able to answer any reasonable question about the code you submitted. If you can't you should be banned from any further contributions, permanently.

The problem with AI isn’t new, it’s the same old problem with technology: computers don’t do what you want, only what you tell them. A lot of PRs can be judged by how well they are described and justified, it’s because the code itself isn’t that important, it’s the problem that you are solving with it that is. People are often great at defining problems, AIs less so IMHO. Partially because they simply have no understanding, partially because they over explain everything to a point where you just stop reading, and so you never get to the core of the problem. And even if you do there’s a good chance AI misunderstood the problem and the solution is wrong in a some more or less subtle way. This is further made worse by the sheer overconfidence of AI output, which quickly erodes any trust that they did understand the problem.

The title doesn't make justice to the content.

I really liked the paragraph about LLMs being "alien intelligence"

   > Many engineers I know fall into 2 camps, either the camp that find the new class of LLMs intelligent, groundbreaking and shockingly good. In the other camp are engineers that think of all LLM generated content as “the emperor’s new clothes”, the code they generate is “naked”, fundamentally flawed and poison.

   I like to think of the new systems as neither. I like to think about the new class of intelligence as “Alien Intelligence”. It is both shockingly good and shockingly terrible at the exact same time.

   Framing LLMs as “Super competent interns” or some other type of human analogy is incorrect. These systems are aliens and the sooner we accept this the sooner we will be able to navigate the complexity that injecting alien intelligence into our engineering process leads to.

It's a similitude I find compelling. The way they produce code and the way you have to interact with them really feels "alien", and when you start humanizing them, you get emotions when interacting with it and that's not correct. I mean, I do get emotional and frustrated even when good old deterministic programs misbehaved and there was some bug to find and squash or work-around, but the LLM interactions can bring the game to a complete new level. So, we need to remember they are "alien".

> As engineers it is our role to properly label our changes.

I've found myself wanting line-level blame for LLMs. If my teammate committed something that was written directly by Claude Code, it's more useful to me to know that than to have the blame assigned to the human through the squash+merge PR process.

Ultimately somebody needs to be on the hook. But if my teammate doesn't understand it any better than I do, I'd rather that be explicit and avoid the dance of "you committed it, therefore you own it," which is better in principle than in practice IMO.

An idea occurred to me. What if:

1. Someone raises a PR

2. Entry-level maintainers skim through it and either reject or pass higher up

3. If the PR has sufficient quality, the PR gets reviewed by someone who actually has merge permissions

> That said it is a living demo that can help make an idea feel more real. It is also enormously fun. Think of it as a delightful movie set.

[pedantry] It bothers me that the photo for "think of prototype PRs as movie sets" is clearly not a movie set but rather the set of the TV show Seinfeld. Anyone who watched the show would immediately recognize Jerry's apartment.

The Fedora policy on AI-assisted contributions seems very reasonable: https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/council-policy-propo...

Maybe we need open source credit scores. PRs from talented engineers with proven track records of high quality contributions would be presumed good enough for review. Unknown, newer contributors could have a size limit on their PRs, with massive PRs rejected automatically.

A bit of a brutal title for what's a pretty constructive and reasonable article. I like the core: AI-produced contributions are prototypes, belong in branches, and require transparency and commitment as a path to being merged.