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eighttrigrams releases diff-based tool to track human vs. AI authorship in code

New open-source tool identifies which lines of text were written by humans versus AI agents in collaborative editing workflows.

6 items43 engagement9 comments Hacker NewsMastodonPress

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Aug 9

Summary, timeline and people extracted by Claude from 6 items across 3 sources · 8h ago. Quotes are verbatim.

Developer eighttrigrams released "Us vs. Them," an open-source tool that tracks line-level authorship provenance in text under agentic editing by analyzing git version history. The tool uses diff-based algorithms to identify "islands" of human-authored content within "seas" of machine-generated text, enabling AI agents to respect human-written sections while freely modifying agent-produced content.

  • Tool uses git version history and diff algorithms to identify human-authored vs. AI-generated text ranges without requiring special markup
  • Output assigns provenance scores: 1.0 for fully human-authored, 0.0 for fully agent-authored, and intermediate values for mixed authorship
  • Designed to enable AI agents to respect human-written code sections while freely modifying machine-generated content in collaborative workflows

How it unfolded

  1. Reaction Continued social media sharing

    [email protected] shares the tool on Mastodon with cross-referenced HN discussion and hashtags.

  2. Reaction Mastodon and tech community amplification

    Multiple Mastodon accounts and tech news feeds ([email protected], CuratedHackerNews, [email protected]) share the tool across social platforms.

  3. Event Tool released on GitHub and Hacker News

    eighttrigrams publishes "Us vs. Them" repository and posts to Hacker News, where it gains early traction with score of 12.

What people are saying verbatim

“Text a human wrote or edited should be considered close to sacred: an agent should be hesitant and have a very good reason to touch it.”

eighttrigrams, Tool creator · GitHub repository README

“Slop another agent has produced, on the other hand, is completely up for grabs.”

eighttrigrams, Tool creator · GitHub repository README

“You surely don't want another agent bulldoze over this piece of code in the next session.”

eighttrigrams, Tool creator · GitHub repository README