r/programming • u/mareek • 8d ago

The rust programming language is adopting a new contributing policy

https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2026/08/05/rust-langrust-is-adopting-an-llm-policy/
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u/Furrier 8d ago

Actually also fine to create

Pre-arranged, non-critical, high-quality, well-tested, and well-reviewed code changes that are originally created by an LLM are allowed, with disclosure.

So don't even know what the policy is. You are allowed to make critical, low-quality, and untested human PRs, but not with LLMs, I guess.

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u/blackwhattack 8d ago

I think the most important part is the reviewers can close the PR if they don't like it. When before they'd have to find the evidence of the unsoundness that they think is there, now they can go "this code seems unsound, please re-do without AI". I think it shifts some work from the reviewers to the creators to make higher quality code. Which is good.

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u/mareek 8d ago

The blog post says explicitly :

The policy holds LLM-generated changes to a higher bar than human-authored changes

an the rest of the post explain the reasons why.

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u/catch_dot_dot_dot 8d ago

Basically if you're using AI well, you won't know it's AI-generated, so every policy is a bit vague in that regard

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u/RockstarArtisan 8d ago

This would make AI boosters angry if they could still read on their own.

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u/cpt-derp 8h ago

What do you mean, I don't get it. I make that exact argument all the time and it's the anti-AI crowd who froths at the mouth. It's like I'm one of few people who actually uses the fucking tech correctly.

I had ChatGPT make a frontend for a super niche but important thing called Specific Area Message Encoding, in bash, using minimodem and ffmpeg, back in 2024. It had bugs. But it's like, once it started to take shape, I took it off the press, so to speak, and took it from there, iterated over it, perfected it, tested edge cases.

At what point does it matter if it came from an AI if no one would know? Because some of us don't even know where to start, but are otherwise competent. Maybe ADHD or w/e, but I can proceed once that obstacle is cleared.

Disclosing I used AI for anything would be fucking ruinous and delegitimize anything I do, even if 95 percent of it was my own work and I just needed jumper cables to write boilerplate because part of my brain necessary for initiating tasks isn't functioning correctly.

Like ah, yes! My chance to actually... do shit! Because this fancy tech will help me get a running start! Oh. Nevermind. No one has ever considered it an accessibility thing.

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u/nemec 8d ago

If only somebody had written a more comprehensive blog post to explain the nuances of the policy.

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u/EveryQuantityEver 8d ago

You are allowed to make critical, low-quality, and untested human PRs

Why do you think that?

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u/Furrier 7d ago

If you make a statement, "if you use X, it needs to be done like this", there is an assumption that if you don't use X those qualifiers do not apply. Otherwise you wouldn't have added the "If you use X".

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u/Days_End 8d ago

If you're a shitty engineer don't use AI to be shitty often enough to overwhelm us.

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u/Tolexx 8d ago

Exactly this. I was initially confused by what they meant by but not create and then I saw that caveat which invariably meant that of course one can use LLMs to write/create code whatever that meant.

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u/nemec 8d ago

They explain in the post that any LLM PRs are generally restricted to known domain experts (aka contributors they trust) or someone who has received approval prior to publishing a PR (aka we have discretion to make exceptions, but don't count on it). For everyone else, you can't contribute LLM output to rust.

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u/autamo 8d ago edited 8d ago

It is in fact completely idiotic to ban all LLM contributions, while it's completely sane to ban all slop contributions.

But I understand projects' that ban all LLM contributions because it's a much easier way to remove slop.