Olaf Schlüter
1 min readMay 5, 2024

There is a big copyright problem with using ML coding assistant bots and it goes both ways: using code without license and giving away own code for free. Even FOSS comes with a license which conditions are not satisfied if a bot copies part of that code into yours. Not even permissive ones like the MIT license.

For the time being this is somewhat mitigated by the bad quality of bot-generated code even for problems only slightly more complex than a variable assignment. Or not: if the bot comes up with something that works you can bet it is a 1:1 copy of code found in the training material. Which is probably licensed under some terms neither you nor the bot know about.

"Easy" tasks those bots can do: write API docs, benchmark and unit test skeletons. Github Copilot in VSCode is as well a more advanced code completion tool. Even a junior can do more than that.

Olaf Schlüter
Olaf Schlüter

Written by Olaf Schlüter

IT security specialist, Physicist by education, believing in God as for the exceptional harmony of the laws of nature to create and support life.

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