My own two cents: there's an inherent tension with assistants and agents as productivity tools. The more you "let them rip", the higher the potential productivity benefits. And the less you will understand the outputs, or even if they built the "correct thing", which in many cases is something you can only crystalize an understanding about by doing the thing.

So I'm happy for all the people who don't care about code quality in terms of its aesthetic properties who are really enjoying the AI-era, that's great. But if your workload is not shifting from write-heavy to read-heavy, you inevitably will be responsible for a major outage or quality issue. And moreso, anyone like this should ask why anyone should feel the need to employ you for your services in the future, since your job amounts to "telling the LLM what to do and accepting it's output uncritically".

Yeah we get supply chain attacks (like the axios thing today) with dependencies, but on the whole I think this is much safer than YOLO git-push-force-origin-main-ing some vibe-coded trash that nobody has ever run before.

I also think this isn't really true for the FAANGs, who ostensibly vendor and heavily review many of their dependencies because of the potential impacts they face from them being wrong. For us small potatoes I think "reviewing the code in your repository" is a common sense quality check.

If AI has any benefit to creative endeavors at all it will be because of the challenges of coaxing a machine defined to produce an averaging of a large corpus of work (producing inherently mediocre slop) provides novel limitations, not because it makes art any more "accessible".

I don't disagree, I think reviewing is laborious, I just don't see how this causes any unintended consequences that aren't effectively baked into using an AI assistant.

Sounds like a problem for the platforms and model vendors to figure out!

> Do you want to target the model authors or the LLM providers? If company X is serving an LLM created by academic researchers at University Y, will you go after Y or X? Or both?

I mean providers are obviously my primary concern as the people selling something to the public, but sure, why not both.

> Ouch. Throw due process out the door!

There's lots of prior art for this, let's not pretend like this is something new. The NLRB adjudicates labor complaints and disputes, the DoT adjudicates complaints about airlines, etc.

> This is more reasonable, but for the fact that the bots can simply state the wrong model, or change it daily.

Once again, sounds like a problem for the platforms to figure out! How do they handle spammers and abusers today? Throw up their hands? Guess they won't be able to do that for long!

> Unfortunately, the simple reason your proposal will fail is that if country X does it, they'll be left far behind country Y that doesn't. It's national suicide to regulate in this fashion.

Sounds like a diplomatic problem, if it actually is a problem. In reality the social harms of AI may exceed any supposed benefits. The optimistic case seems to be that AI becomes so powerful it causes a massive hemorrhaging of jobs in knowledge work (and later other forms of work). Still waiting to see any social benefits!

Bots must advertise their model provider to every person they interact with, and platforms must restrict bots that do not or cannot abide by this. If they can't do this, the penalties must be severe.

There are many ways to put the externalities back on model providers, this is just the kernel of a suggestion for a path forward, but all the people pretending like this is impossible are just wrong.