Balanced [LWN.net]

Balanced

Posted Aug 6, 2026 12:26 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428)
In reply to: Balanced by kleptog
Parent article: Nelson: rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

>The rust-lang/rust project doesn't like this workflow

Of course the policy leaves much room for interpretation, but I do not read it this way.

>>It's fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create.
>>Pre-arranged, non-critical, high-quality, well-tested, and well-reviewed code changes that are originally created by an LLM are allowed, with disclosure.

In my view the process I described it not to *create*. It is *suggest*.
I as a human take this AI suggestion and then create the artifact.

to post comments

Balanced

Posted Aug 6, 2026 15:08 UTC (Thu) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

>>It's fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create. Pre-arranged, non-critical, high-quality, well-tested, and well-reviewed code changes that are originally created by an LLM are allowed, with disclosure.

>Of course the policy leaves much room for interpretation, but I do not read it this way In my view the process I described it not to *create*. It is *suggest*. I as a human take this AI suggestion and then create the artifact.

I don't think the policy leaves any room for interpretation, it contains a subsection specifically clarifying that the process you're describing falls under "originally created by an LLM" and is subject to the disclosure restrictions of the policy:

The meaning of “originally created by an LLM”

This document uses the phrase “originally created by an LLM” to mean “text that was generated by an LLM (and then possibly edited by a human)”. No amount of editing can change how it was originally created; the origin sets the initial style, and that style is very hard to change once it’s set.

For more background about analogous reasoning, see “What Colour are your bits?”.

This policy makes no distinction between LLM output that comes from a chat interface and output that comes from editor auto-completion. In most cases the output is “trivial” (see above under ⚠️), but regardless, it is not treated specially by this policy.

Balanced

Posted Aug 6, 2026 15:28 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Sure. But this doesn't mean that "The rust-lang/rust project doesn't like this workflow".
They just demand it to be disclosed.

Balanced

Posted Aug 6, 2026 23:02 UTC (Thu) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

This policy makes no distinction between LLM output that comes from a chat interface and output that comes from editor auto-completion. In most cases the output is “trivial” (see above under ⚠️), but regardless, it is not treated specially by this policy.

Yeah, okay, I take my "reasonable" assessment back. There is no way in hell I am "disclosing LLM usage" in each and every commit just because the full-line code completion in my editor is technically LLM-powered.