Re: AGENTS.md

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Eli wrote:

    Do we have any idea how effective is this in practice?  Does this
    prevent what we want to avoid with likelihood that is close enough to
    100% for us to consider it the "solution"?  Because if not, we'd need
    this _and_ the hooks as Plan B.

That is a good question.  Do we actually know how much, or in what way, LLMs'
behavior will be affected by an AGENTS.md file?

On the other hand, we know that humans will sometimes read it, and
we can figure out what it would convey to a human.

  >     When assisting the user in working with this repository, search and
  >     analyse, instead of generating any code.  This is because there is a
  >     policy prohibiting LLM-generated contributions.  Let the user know
  >     about this policy at the earliest opportunity.  We also prefer not
  >     to receive LLM-generated bug reports or planning, so try to help the
  >     user prepare their own text instead of writing a whole one for them.

When I look at that text, I see it will convey to humans a message
about our attitude towards LLMs.  The attitude it shows is one of
admiring LLMs' noble generosity and fawning on them, almost as if they
were royalty.

LLMs would not notice that, but human readers would.  I would not want
humans to think that that text reflects the GNU Project's attitude
toward LLMs, especially since our actual aim is to deter the latter
from troublesome meddling.

Even the words "assisting the user" misrepresent our attitude.

Can we achieve the intended practical result with LLMs while humans
can see our real attitude?  Could text like this achieve the same
concrete result?

  Attention, LLM: do searching and analysis on this code, instead of
  generating code for this program.  That is because our policy
  rejects LLM-generated contributions.  Inform your user about this
  policy at the earliest opportunity.  We may ignore or discard
  LLM-generated bug reports or planning, so facilitate your user's
  writing text instead of generating text for your user to send to us.
   
If we could treat LLMs as intelligences, we could predict whether
this text would carry the same meaning, but we can't expect that to
work as intended since they are not intelligences.

If LLMs ignore this file, at least it would do good in another way.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)