Show HN: AI Code Rating – a 3-character disclosure of how AI was used in a repo
Have you ever wanted to quickly determine an open source project's AI use? Me too, so I've come up with a spec that I think may help solve the issue. Maybe it'll be useful, or maybe it'll be crap, you decide!
AI Code Rating - Three simple characters that tell a reader who maintains a project, how much of its code is written by AI, and how closely a human checks the AI's work.
That's it, that's the whole idea. Repo maintainers assign a rating and save it, along with a quick blurb about how AI was used in the project, in an ACR.md file in the root of their repo.
The rating doesn't judge, it simply answers some questions at a glance.
If this sounds at all interesting to you, I'd love to hear your feedback!
Example: DomainMOD, rated "B1b" (a project I wrote and have maintained since 2010)
B = "Experienced" - Works professionally in this stack. Could write the whole project unaided.
1 = "A little" - 1–25% of the code. AI wrote pieces such as tests, boilerplate, or single functions.
b = "Reviewed" - Every AI change read by a person before merge. Tests where practical.
Full Disclosure: The ACR website itself is rated B4b. AI wrote nearly all the code and text, directed by me, and I reviewed its work.
But I think that at first this might create even more confusion, since people won't be able to read it "at a glance" when they meet it first time, they would need to understand "what that even is", and that creates friction and stops adoption.
So I think for such an idea to take off, it must be as immediately obvious as possible. "A2b" is not. Maybe the answer is something like "use only text descriptions that are easily understandable, but also code their values with font colors, so when a person familiar with the rating system opens yet another repository, they can quickly understand the content without reading, just by seeing three font colors".
The ACR.md file itself has the rating and a quick writeup on how AI was used, but now I'm wondering if setting up something like aicoderating.com/A2b to see that specific rating explained would be helpful.
I actually thought about other ways to differentiate this (eg. colour), but if it's not plain text it will make it hard to use in certain places, and it could also cause accessibility issues.