this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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I was writing some math code, and not being an idiot I'm using an open source math library for doing something called "QR decomposition", and its efficient, and it supports sparse matrices (matrices where many numbers are 0), etc.
Just out of curiosity I checked where some idiot vibecoder would end up. AI simply plagiarizes from some shit sample snippets which exist purely to teach people what QR decomposition is. It's actually unusable, due to being numerically unstable.
Who in the fuck even needs this shit to be plagiarized, anyway?
It can't plagiarize a production quality implementation, because you can count those on the fingers of one hand, they're complex as fuck and you can't just blend a few together to try to pretend you didn't plagiarize.
The answer is, people who are peddling the AI. They are the ones who ordered plagiarism with extra plagiarism on top. These are not coding tools, these are demos to convince the investors to buy the actual product, which is company's stock. There's a little bit of tool functionality (you can ask them to refactor the code), but it's just you misusing a demo to try to get some value out of it.
And to that end, the demos take every opportunity to plagiarize something, and to talk about how the "AI" wrote the code from scratch based on its supposed understanding of fairly advanced math.
And in coding, it is counter productive to plagiarize. Many of the open source libraries can be used in commercial projects. You get upstream fixes for free. You don't end up with some bugs or worse yet security exploits that may have been fixed since the training cut-off date.
No fucking one in the right mind would willingly want their product to contain copy pasted snippets from stale open source libraries, passed through some sort of variable-renaming copyright laundering machine.
Except of course the business idiots who are in charge of software at major companies, who don't understand software. Who just failed upwards.
They look at plagiarized lines and count them as improved productivity.