This post was cool, but this disclaimer should have been at the beginning, not the end:
Transparency
This post was written by Claude Code based on our actual development session. The narrative document was also created by Claude. All code is public domain
can a compiler be assigned copyright? And yet a binary is copyright protected, despite the fact a compiler made it not a human. It is a derived work from the source code. I'm sure you could make a similar argument in court that a piece of software made with an LLM is derived from the context and prompt you feed it, thus granting it similar protections. Although training data's licenses becomes tricky as it might be seen as derived from that.
An LLM is also just running an algorithm, they are just as deterministic* as a compiler. The only difference is that the algorithm was trained rather than hand crafted.
*: provided temperature is 0 ofc. But you could just as easily modify a compiler to have some temperature analogy, it would still be a compiler.
I mean an algorithm to do the thing being done, not an algorithm to produce the next most probable word. I apologize, I thought that was highly self-evident.
i guess this also applies to humans as well, right?
Imagine accidently adding code you think isba good idea, but you're actually copying code from a non-free open source thing you read a while ago? isn't that the same problem then?
i guess this also applies to humans as well, right?
Yes, of course. It has always been a possibility. The difference is that we humans are able to reflect and communicate, while the LLM is not able to even grasp what copyright is, let alone determine if its output has copied another project's code.
The difference is that we humans are able to reflect and communicate,
Sure, but both a human and the LLM can either actively take code from somewhere, or can accidently take code from protected sources.
the first case isn't worth discussing because it's on purpose (in case of the LLM by the prompter).
the latter case is a more interesting part, because you can't even probove you made all the code yourself.
this is a weird problem because even a tool that recursively generates solutions ti code problems might replicate copyrighted code, as code is also just data.
while the LLM is not able to even grasp what copyright is
I mean, this is quite bluntly an idiotic statement, of course it knows what copyright is, otherwise ChatGPT wouldn't keep refusing to put Transformers on my kids' photos for fun
If your argument is whether or not it can understand things... Well now, that's a deeper problem, which is why I call what it does "thunking", not "thinking", so as to sidestep that whole philosophical argument
this would be a problem if you were copying the code, that's why in reverse engineering you don't want people who have read the closed source code that you want to replace.
Huge brag post and nothing to brag about. Guess I'll remove stuff like this from my mental list of what kinda of content are still worth reading unless they're 4+ years old or have a no-AI disclaimer
Ever looked at how many "hobby" Unix-like kernels are on Github? There are hundreds of them. A tiny kernel is a very common learning exercise, and most people seem to get it to boot, run a few tasks, find that moving on is hard, drivers for real hardware are hard, and give up soon after getting it booting and displaying some text.
There are umpteen implementations of Forth, too. Recent discussions I've seen on HN and I think here were on the theme of how Forth is a wrapper around assembly, implementing it in higher and higher level languages is wrong, it's pointless, you learn by implementing it brick by brick in assembly, and you'll never use it but you learn a lot by doing that.
So although I've not looked, I bet there are lots and lots of hobby implementations of Forth, too.
LLMs can't think, can't code, can't analyse, can't build... but they are very good at remixing what's in the training corpus, and all of Github and all of every public Gitlab and every other Git instance the crawlers can find is in there -- and crawlers don't care about licences. They ingest whatever they can get, no matter if there's warning text saying you're not allowed to. And that means that all the leaked Windows source code is in there, too.
Claude didn't write this. The slacker issuing prompts didn't write this. Claude is an automatic jigsaw-puzzle builder, and it can make arbitrary pictures from the jigsaw puzzle pieces it has. Don't look too close because there are a lot of overlapping tabs, unfilled blanks, tabs forced into blanks where they don't fit, and so on. But squint at it from a distance and it looks like a picture.
Lots of people like burgers and hotdogs. I wouldn't eat them if you paid me. Meat nauseates me anyway, and the idea of mechanically-recovered meat, of "lips, eyelids, and xrsxholes" as my father called the stuff, dyed pink and salted and mixed with MSG, then cut into tubes and patties and fried, is about as appetising as feeling hungry and nipping down to the graveyard with a shovel. It's vile beyond belief.
And yet, McDonald's is worth nearly $30Bn.
Of stuff that is beyond disgusting to me.
The "I don't care how well your AI works" post had people happily saying "I use LLMs a lot" and complaining about the negativity.
Yes I am complaining about your slop. I detest slop. I don't care who you are, what your slop is shaped into, how you moulded it... it's slop. You're covered in blood and urine and excrement. You smell of it. You are tainted by it, and you will remain tainted by it even after a dozen showers. I will see you in my mind, covered in blood and bodily waste, proudly holding up what you shaped from it.
That was mechanically recovered by grinding up humans' hard work and craft, fuelled on my daughter's future, fuelled on forests and pollution and death.
You are stained by it, and I will not stop judging you.
Sticking our heads in the sand provides only short term relief. That can be practical at times. But given the viewpoint you replied to, do you think your response here will have a constructive or dismissive effect?
I, and millions of others around the world, really wish we could take a break from hearing sapiophobes rave about automated plagiarism machines, but we can't.
Filtering one tag on one small quiet minority-interest tech-discussion site would make no difference at all. My job is gathering info about tech news from around the world and distilling down the important bits/
But more to that, it is a duty to remind the book-refusers that it's a con: it's not real. It isn't intelligent. It can't think. It can't code. All it can do it rehash human-written code.
It is as much of a civic duty as it was 300 years ago to say, and keep saying at every opportunity, SLAVERY IS BAD.
LLMs destroy jobs, destroy the environment, and destroy lives. They are built on theft. They can't program and anyone who thinks they can should do the industry a favour and never write so much as a batch file again. I do not venerate authority like many in this industry: because someone is big and famous and wrote a famous program once doesn't mean they are always correct. They are wrong just as often as the rest of us.
That means I don't care who endorses LLMs. I don't care if 100% of celebrity programmers say AI is great. They are wrong. Most great programmers are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, because that is a positive professional asset in this field, and that means a tendency to fail to perceive the bigger picture and consider elements and aspects outside of certain areas of interest.
That means that they don't think about the catastrophic impact of the power needs, the appetite for new machinery in a post Dennard-scaling era, where it's in kit vendors' direct interest to encourage demand for NPUs because sales are falling.
The great and the good do not see the downsides in life. They do not see how it's destroying jobs for those who are not great. They don't see the environmental cost, or the stolen material. They just see a time saver, and that is fake news anyway.
Minutes of your life you’ll never get back. Maybe go out for a breath of fresh air or work on a masterwork that will rally the public to regulate data centers.
As someone who has to use these tools due to the practical necessities of feeding a family, I completely agree with GP. His reaction is the only valid one.
I unwillingly and indirectly participate in many grave society-scale crimes, but unfortunately I wasn't given the blessing of turning blind to them just because I'm too powerless to resist.
And this is not just some mental exercise on the philosophy of ethics. The way LLMs got introduced to our lives, it's societal self-cannibalism. I asked the latest ChatGPT to draw a horse hanging upside down, and it messed up so many details since it never saw an upside down horse before. I gave it back the image and asked it what was wrong, it couldn't spot any of them. Yet, even in this state, it has already destroyed entire classes of visual career paths.
See, human professionals produce all sorts of creative work that these LLMs steal and regurgitate. But human professionals mostly earn their living from mundane work, and this applies to software too. These LLMs are great at writing the duct tape that constitutes the app layer, which sits on top of the countless layers of abstractions human programmers have built while they fed their families by writing the mundane code.
LLMs are great by themselves, how can one complain about automating away the boring stuff! But the way our current economic and political systems work, I don't like where this is going.
Hobby kernels and Forth implementations have existed for decades, they’re learning exercises, not industrial products, and that’s fine. LLMs aren’t magical, but they also aren’t just ‘remixing’: they generalize patterns, which is why they can produce working code outside the exact training data. Critique is welcome, but exaggeration and disgust metaphors don’t make the argument stronger.
Speaking as an AI hater, examples like this are important to stay in the realm of reality. If folks say "AI is absolutely useless in every instance," I think that's incorrect, you could easily give a human without AI assistance this task or a similar one and, like the story of John Henry, the best of the best would only barely keep up with an AI, and their pace would not be sustainable. I don't know of many other devs who could produce an artifact like this in 6 hours, on their own.
I still keep my overall hater opinions, however, because I think such a challenge is rarely actually that useful? Like, it's very entertaining to say things like "make a poem about putting a sandwich in the VCR in the style of King James bible," but how often do you need that to happen? How big is the market for "bespoke, extremely odd requests, on demand"?
Like, a food analogy would be a robot that could either produce prototypes of foods that have never really existed, because such a mix would obviously taste terrible ("make a recipe for ground beef and anise in a 5-layer sweet custard parfait" / "make me a steak with fresh grapes on it") or the robot would make extremely popular foods at an extremely mid level that will still contain occasional mistakes ("make me a recipe for a pot roast," and every now and then it'll give you the wrong advice on oven temperatures or mixing order). I think it's a marvel such a robot exists, and there's a lot about humans and culture and language we can explore for the following decades on the implications of it. But is it useful in the things that matter?
(to say nothing about power usage/environmental considerations, what it means to unleash these on society, the financial speculative bubble and its ramifications, killing the commons like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and hosting via bot DDoS...)
There are times such a bot will be useful, and I love an example like this OS, which I'll point to if I find someone who's out of their mind about LLMs. But I think you can still be a hater who's "in your mind," as it were.
The definition for NEXT seems wrong? It loads the next word, not pop from the function stack. The source code on GitHub has a section labeled "Core Forth Words (64-bit)" that are Forth word assembly labels that use NEXT, but they are never called and also wrong afaik; it says that rbp is the function return stack, but lodsq loads from rsi instead and none of them ever manipulate them.
There is instead an entire separate "Forth" interpreter later in the source file, which has each word ret into the next. I also don't really get that one, however, because it has a loop with lodsq as well despite likewise not touching rsi, instead of a normal threaded interpreter where you setup a sled of words and each ret is treated like a tailcall.
Though I didn't go look at the code for this, I don't think there's a specific timeout. For example, you can still suggest tags on this 9 day-old post. I think once one suggestion has been applied, the site no longer offers the "suggest" link. In this case, if you look at the moderation log, you can see that:
Action: changed tags from "ai osdev" to "osdev vibecoding"
I asked Claude Code to help me build “Simplicity OS” - an operating system where everything is a Forth word. The entire OS would be like Lego blocks: simple, composable words that directly control hardware. Want to know your screen resolution? SCREEN returns all parameters to the stack. Want to change brightness? SCREEN-SET takes parameters from the stack and applies them.
It seems really odd to try so hard to write an OS controlled by code, while refusing to write code
This was a pure experiment - based on the situation where I had a fever and were really not up to writing any code myself. And it was an interesting exercise.
I thought it was interesting, too. Thank you for sharing it. It wouldn't be something I'd enjoy replicating, but it's neat to see what happened with your experiment.
I'm curious: was the last sentence in your "Transparency" section written by Claude?
The point: Show what’s possible. No gatekeeping. No mystery. Just: “Here’s what we did, here’s how we did it, go build something.”
It seems like a very Claude voice, but I couldn't decide whether I thought that was Claude commenting on itself or you commenting on Claude.
That's fair; I see it as my job to keep track of what LLMs are capable of, even if I fucking hate using them. So I try them out regularly. I just found the concept of the project very ironic when juxtaposed with doing it entirely with LLMs.
This turned out to be an interesting (albeit surprising) discussion about the current landscape of AI code and copyright. As a copyright abolitionist, my dream may accidentally come true when AI code floods the space to the point where no legal system can keep up and copyright in this area is abandoned.
This post was cool, but this disclaimer should have been at the beginning, not the end:
Actually that reminds me - LLMs can't be assigned copyright... So I guess a lot of code is going to be in the public domain going forward?
Has this already been discussed?
This an ongoing topic of legal debate and court cases.
No one yet knows if making code with this tool means you own the code (like code you make with other tools) or if it's some new thing.
can a compiler be assigned copyright? And yet a binary is copyright protected, despite the fact a compiler made it not a human. It is a derived work from the source code. I'm sure you could make a similar argument in court that a piece of software made with an LLM is derived from the context and prompt you feed it, thus granting it similar protections. Although training data's licenses becomes tricky as it might be seen as derived from that.
A compiler isn't producing creative work, it's just running an algorithm
An LLM is also just running an algorithm, they are just as deterministic* as a compiler. The only difference is that the algorithm was trained rather than hand crafted.
*: provided temperature is 0 ofc. But you could just as easily modify a compiler to have some temperature analogy, it would still be a compiler.
I mean an algorithm to do the thing being done, not an algorithm to produce the next most probable word. I apologize, I thought that was highly self-evident.
if it produces a piece of copyrighted code that it was trained on, there is a risk that you will be liable…
i guess this also applies to humans as well, right?
Imagine accidently adding code you think isba good idea, but you're actually copying code from a non-free open source thing you read a while ago? isn't that the same problem then?
Yes, of course. It has always been a possibility. The difference is that we humans are able to reflect and communicate, while the LLM is not able to even grasp what copyright is, let alone determine if its output has copied another project's code.
Beyond that, we actively seek out people who haven’t seen the competing implementation to write a clean-room version.
Sure, but both a human and the LLM can either actively take code from somewhere, or can accidently take code from protected sources.
the first case isn't worth discussing because it's on purpose (in case of the LLM by the prompter).
the latter case is a more interesting part, because you can't even probove you made all the code yourself.
this is a weird problem because even a tool that recursively generates solutions ti code problems might replicate copyrighted code, as code is also just data.
I mean, this is quite bluntly an idiotic statement, of course it knows what copyright is, otherwise ChatGPT wouldn't keep refusing to put Transformers on my kids' photos for fun
If your argument is whether or not it can understand things... Well now, that's a deeper problem, which is why I call what it does "thunking", not "thinking", so as to sidestep that whole philosophical argument
"Thunking" is already a technical term within computer science, and it has nothing to do with LLMs or AIs.
Yes, that is indeed what I meant...
It is, for instance Wine and ReactOS refuse contributions from anyone who has been anyway near the microsoft codebases
this would be a problem if you were copying the code, that's why in reverse engineering you don't want people who have read the closed source code that you want to replace.
Huge brag post and nothing to brag about. Guess I'll remove stuff like this from my mental list of what kinda of content are still worth reading unless they're 4+ years old or have a no-AI disclaimer
Ever looked at how many "hobby" Unix-like kernels are on Github? There are hundreds of them. A tiny kernel is a very common learning exercise, and most people seem to get it to boot, run a few tasks, find that moving on is hard, drivers for real hardware are hard, and give up soon after getting it booting and displaying some text.
There are umpteen implementations of Forth, too. Recent discussions I've seen on HN and I think here were on the theme of how Forth is a wrapper around assembly, implementing it in higher and higher level languages is wrong, it's pointless, you learn by implementing it brick by brick in assembly, and you'll never use it but you learn a lot by doing that.
So although I've not looked, I bet there are lots and lots of hobby implementations of Forth, too.
LLMs can't think, can't code, can't analyse, can't build... but they are very good at remixing what's in the training corpus, and all of Github and all of every public Gitlab and every other Git instance the crawlers can find is in there -- and crawlers don't care about licences. They ingest whatever they can get, no matter if there's warning text saying you're not allowed to. And that means that all the leaked Windows source code is in there, too.
Claude didn't write this. The slacker issuing prompts didn't write this. Claude is an automatic jigsaw-puzzle builder, and it can make arbitrary pictures from the jigsaw puzzle pieces it has. Don't look too close because there are a lot of overlapping tabs, unfilled blanks, tabs forced into blanks where they don't fit, and so on. But squint at it from a distance and it looks like a picture.
Lots of people like burgers and hotdogs. I wouldn't eat them if you paid me. Meat nauseates me anyway, and the idea of mechanically-recovered meat, of "lips, eyelids, and xrsxholes" as my father called the stuff, dyed pink and salted and mixed with MSG, then cut into tubes and patties and fried, is about as appetising as feeling hungry and nipping down to the graveyard with a shovel. It's vile beyond belief.
And yet, McDonald's is worth nearly $30Bn.
Of stuff that is beyond disgusting to me.
The "I don't care how well your AI works" post had people happily saying "I use LLMs a lot" and complaining about the negativity.
Yes I am complaining about your slop. I detest slop. I don't care who you are, what your slop is shaped into, how you moulded it... it's slop. You're covered in blood and urine and excrement. You smell of it. You are tainted by it, and you will remain tainted by it even after a dozen showers. I will see you in my mind, covered in blood and bodily waste, proudly holding up what you shaped from it.
That was mechanically recovered by grinding up humans' hard work and craft, fuelled on my daughter's future, fuelled on forests and pollution and death.
You are stained by it, and I will not stop judging you.
I think maybe you’d do your blood pressure a favor by taking a break from the vibecoding tag?
Sticking our heads in the sand provides only short term relief. That can be practical at times. But given the viewpoint you replied to, do you think your response here will have a constructive or dismissive effect?
I think maybe the top commenter has expressed their point of view a lot and seems to be no happier.
I, and millions of others around the world, really wish we could take a break from hearing sapiophobes rave about automated plagiarism machines, but we can't.
Filtering one tag on one small quiet minority-interest tech-discussion site would make no difference at all. My job is gathering info about tech news from around the world and distilling down the important bits/
But more to that, it is a duty to remind the book-refusers that it's a con: it's not real. It isn't intelligent. It can't think. It can't code. All it can do it rehash human-written code.
It is as much of a civic duty as it was 300 years ago to say, and keep saying at every opportunity, SLAVERY IS BAD.
LLMs destroy jobs, destroy the environment, and destroy lives. They are built on theft. They can't program and anyone who thinks they can should do the industry a favour and never write so much as a batch file again. I do not venerate authority like many in this industry: because someone is big and famous and wrote a famous program once doesn't mean they are always correct. They are wrong just as often as the rest of us.
That means I don't care who endorses LLMs. I don't care if 100% of celebrity programmers say AI is great. They are wrong. Most great programmers are somewhere on the autistic spectrum, because that is a positive professional asset in this field, and that means a tendency to fail to perceive the bigger picture and consider elements and aspects outside of certain areas of interest.
That means that they don't think about the catastrophic impact of the power needs, the appetite for new machinery in a post Dennard-scaling era, where it's in kit vendors' direct interest to encourage demand for NPUs because sales are falling.
The great and the good do not see the downsides in life. They do not see how it's destroying jobs for those who are not great. They don't see the environmental cost, or the stolen material. They just see a time saver, and that is fake news anyway.
Ok but maybe your energy would be better spent elsewhere than writing long rants here?
I read fast, I type fast. (Not very accurately, mind.) That was a few minutes' work.
Minutes of your life you’ll never get back. Maybe go out for a breath of fresh air or work on a masterwork that will rally the public to regulate data centers.
This takes Angry Vegan to a whole new level :)
As someone who has to use these tools due to the practical necessities of feeding a family, I completely agree with GP. His reaction is the only valid one.
I unwillingly and indirectly participate in many grave society-scale crimes, but unfortunately I wasn't given the blessing of turning blind to them just because I'm too powerless to resist.
And this is not just some mental exercise on the philosophy of ethics. The way LLMs got introduced to our lives, it's societal self-cannibalism. I asked the latest ChatGPT to draw a horse hanging upside down, and it messed up so many details since it never saw an upside down horse before. I gave it back the image and asked it what was wrong, it couldn't spot any of them. Yet, even in this state, it has already destroyed entire classes of visual career paths.
See, human professionals produce all sorts of creative work that these LLMs steal and regurgitate. But human professionals mostly earn their living from mundane work, and this applies to software too. These LLMs are great at writing the duct tape that constitutes the app layer, which sits on top of the countless layers of abstractions human programmers have built while they fed their families by writing the mundane code.
LLMs are great by themselves, how can one complain about automating away the boring stuff! But the way our current economic and political systems work, I don't like where this is going.
Tell me, if you think it's so funny, would you still find it amusing if someone was angrily complaining about...
Point proven, I guess.
Hobby kernels and Forth implementations have existed for decades, they’re learning exercises, not industrial products, and that’s fine. LLMs aren’t magical, but they also aren’t just ‘remixing’: they generalize patterns, which is why they can produce working code outside the exact training data. Critique is welcome, but exaggeration and disgust metaphors don’t make the argument stronger.
[[citation needed]]
Speaking as an AI hater, examples like this are important to stay in the realm of reality. If folks say "AI is absolutely useless in every instance," I think that's incorrect, you could easily give a human without AI assistance this task or a similar one and, like the story of John Henry, the best of the best would only barely keep up with an AI, and their pace would not be sustainable. I don't know of many other devs who could produce an artifact like this in 6 hours, on their own.
I still keep my overall hater opinions, however, because I think such a challenge is rarely actually that useful? Like, it's very entertaining to say things like "make a poem about putting a sandwich in the VCR in the style of King James bible," but how often do you need that to happen? How big is the market for "bespoke, extremely odd requests, on demand"?
Like, a food analogy would be a robot that could either produce prototypes of foods that have never really existed, because such a mix would obviously taste terrible ("make a recipe for ground beef and anise in a 5-layer sweet custard parfait" / "make me a steak with fresh grapes on it") or the robot would make extremely popular foods at an extremely mid level that will still contain occasional mistakes ("make me a recipe for a pot roast," and every now and then it'll give you the wrong advice on oven temperatures or mixing order). I think it's a marvel such a robot exists, and there's a lot about humans and culture and language we can explore for the following decades on the implications of it. But is it useful in the things that matter?
(to say nothing about power usage/environmental considerations, what it means to unleash these on society, the financial speculative bubble and its ramifications, killing the commons like Wikipedia and Stack Overflow and hosting via bot DDoS...)
There are times such a bot will be useful, and I love an example like this OS, which I'll point to if I find someone who's out of their mind about LLMs. But I think you can still be a hater who's "in your mind," as it were.
This is quite interesting - it would be nice to see how following along might produce slightly different implementations....
The definition for
NEXTseems wrong? It loads the next word, not pop from the function stack. The source code on GitHub has a section labeled "Core Forth Words (64-bit)" that are Forth word assembly labels that use NEXT, but they are never called and also wrong afaik; it says thatrbpis the function return stack, butlodsqloads fromrsiinstead and none of them ever manipulate them.There is instead an entire separate "Forth" interpreter later in the source file, which has each word
retinto the next. I also don't really get that one, however, because it has a loop withlodsqas well despite likewise not touchingrsi, instead of a normal threaded interpreter where you setup a sled of words and each ret is treated like a tailcall.I suggest the concatenative tag as well. What's the timeout on being able to suggest tags? I guess something under 6 hours.
Though I didn't go look at the code for this, I don't think there's a specific timeout. For example, you can still suggest tags on this 9 day-old post. I think once one suggestion has been applied, the site no longer offers the "suggest" link. In this case, if you look at the moderation log, you can see that:
one suggestion was already applied.
It seems really odd to try so hard to write an OS controlled by code, while refusing to write code
This was a pure experiment - based on the situation where I had a fever and were really not up to writing any code myself. And it was an interesting exercise.
I thought it was interesting, too. Thank you for sharing it. It wouldn't be something I'd enjoy replicating, but it's neat to see what happened with your experiment.
I'm curious: was the last sentence in your "Transparency" section written by Claude?
It seems like a very Claude voice, but I couldn't decide whether I thought that was Claude commenting on itself or you commenting on Claude.
I directed it to write something to the effect of: Make this about showing off what CC can do and make sure I get no credit for any of it.
That's fair; I see it as my job to keep track of what LLMs are capable of, even if I fucking hate using them. So I try them out regularly. I just found the concept of the project very ironic when juxtaposed with doing it entirely with LLMs.
This turned out to be an interesting (albeit surprising) discussion about the current landscape of AI code and copyright. As a copyright abolitionist, my dream may accidentally come true when AI code floods the space to the point where no legal system can keep up and copyright in this area is abandoned.
[Comment removed by author]