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apitoday at 6:13 PM4 repliesview on HN

Just like with writing, any kind of AI detection is going to be inaccurate to the point of snake oil.

LLM detection in writing is basically today's polygraph test pseudoscience. There was a blog a while ago where someone fed classic literature into one and it was detected as probably AI.


Replies

neutrinobrotoday at 6:25 PM

I'm not sure that is the case in this instance. Certainly general writing is a lot more variable and harder to classify, and on the other extreme certain one-line code changes don't have enough information to say anything. However, a blob with a 500+ line code change and 200+ lines of comments is a dead ringer for some of the current class of LLMs. That isn't to say it this behavior couldn't be obfuscated, but some basic categorization could probably separate the majority of human authored commits vs. AI commits. Heck, you could probably train an AI to detect commit-style just by using pre-2022 code archives and existing known-to-be-AI edits/commits.

zahlmantoday at 7:04 PM

The heuristics that would be used to "detect AI" here would be things that shouldn't be happening anyway, so false positives wouldn't matter.

perrygeotoday at 6:38 PM

It's not just "the code itself looks LLM generated" - it's also LOC/hr by a particular author which suggests vibe coding. You could look at the author's github contributions to identify time periods when the author was generating code at super-human speeds. Combine the two signals and you might get something better than a pseudoscience?

verdvermtoday at 6:27 PM

An agent doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. If it can find clear examples of stuff you don't want to see in a (potential) dependency quickly, that will save you time. Give it search tools and some policies, then have it go find things. You then check them out, ask followups.

Agents as a super powered (re)search assistant is underrated.