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Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

gitlab.redox-os.org

1–10 of 504 posts

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#2
They're certainly welcome to do whatever they're like, and for a microkernel based OS it might make sense--I think there's probably pretty "Meh" output from a lot of LLMs.

I think part of the battle is actually just getting people to identify which LLM made it to understand if someones contribution is good or not. A javascript project with contributions from Opus 4.6 will probably be pretty good, but if someone is using Mistral small via the chat app, it's probably just a waste of time.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#6
I think this is a reasonable decision (although maybe increasingly insufficient).

It doesn't really matter what your stance on AI is, the problem is the increased review burden on OSS maintainers.

In the past, the code itself was a sort of proof of effort - you would need to invest some time and effort on your PRs, otherwise they would be easily dismissed at a glance. That is no longer the case, as LLMs can quickly generate PRs that might look superficially correct. Effort can still have been out into those PRs, but there is no way to tell without spending time reviewing in more detail.

Policies like this help decrease that review burden, by outright rejecting what can be identified as LLM-generated code at a glance. That is probably a fair bit today, but it might get harder over time, though, so I suspect eventually we will see a shift towards more trust-based models, where you cannot submit PRs if you haven't been approved in advance somehow.

Even if we assume LLMs would consistently generate good enough quality code, code submitted by someone untrusted would still need detailed review for many reasons - so even in that case it would like be faster for the maintainers to just use the tools themselves, rather than reviewing someone else's use of the same tools.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#8
post #3

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evidence?

Probably just an attempt to stop low effort LLM copy pasta.

Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy

#10
post #3

The LLM ban is unenforceable, they must know this. Is it to scare off the most obvious stuff and have a way to kick people off easily in case of incomplete evidence?

I suspect this is for now just a rough filter to remove the lowest effort PRs. It likely will not be enough for long, though, so I suspect we will see default deny policies soon enough, and various different approaches to screening potential contributors.
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