Code completions before LLMs was helping me type faster by completing variable names, variable types, function arguments, and that’s about it. It was faster than typing it all out character by character, but the auto completion wasn’t doing anything outside of what I was already intending to write.

With an LLM, I give brief explanations in English to it and it returns tens to hundreds of lines of code at a time. For some people perhaps even more than that. Or you could be having a “conversation” with the LLM about the feature to be added first and then when you’ve explored what it will be like conceptually, you tell it to implement that.

In either case, I would then commit all of that resulting code with the name of the LLM I used as author, and my name as the committer. The tool wrote the code. I committed it.

As the committer of the code, I am responsible for what I commit to the code base, and everyone is able to see who the committer was. I don’t need to claim authorship over the code that the tool wrote in order for people to be able to see who committed it. And it is in my opinion incorrect to claim authorship over any commit that consists for the very most part of AI generated code.

For example, in a given interaction the user of the LLM might be acting more like someone requesting a feature, and the LLM is left to implement it. Or the user might be acting akin to a bug reporter providing details on something that’s not working the way it should and again leaving the LLM to implement it.

While on the other hand, someone might instruct the LLM to do something very specific with detailed constraints, and in that way the LLM would perhaps be more along the line of a fancy auto-complete to write the lines of code for something that the user of the LLM would otherwise have written more or less exactly the same by hand.