Before breaking out the champagne, let's consider several major problems. First, if we can improve open-source code with AI, what's to stop someone from copying and rewriting existing code and then putting it under a proprietary license? The lawyers are going to have a field day with this. Oh, wait! -- they soon will: Dan Blanchard, maintainer of an important Python library called chardet, just released the latest "clean room" version of the program under the MIT license, replacing its GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). By "clean room," he means he used Anthropic's Claude to rewrite the library entirely. Claude is now listed as a project contributor.

A person claiming to be the project's original developer, Mark Pilgrim, is not happy. Pilgrim says, "[The maintainers'] claim that it is a 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code. Adding a fancy code generator into the mix does not somehow grant them any additional rights."

Blanchard, however, claims that "chardet 7 is not derivative of earlier versions." Did I mention that using AI to modify or clone open-source code will end up in court?

There's another problem: Although it appears that AI is much more useful than it used to be for fixing code issues, there's still a lot of AI slop out there, and open-source project maintainers are drowning in it. Just ask Daniel Stenberg, creator of the popular open-source data transfer program cURL.

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