Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

postmarketos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 116 posts

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#101

Post by egorfine »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #100
egorfine wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, every medicine is a poison as well. Every single byte of code I commit I fully understand. I am strongly against slop. However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.

> However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers. That's not your only option. What you're meant to do is understand the tools you're using well enough to not need to ask for help from anyone or anything else. Stack Overflow is useful, but it's a learning tool. If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code, it's no wonder that yo…

> If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code

Aren't we all in a sense?

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#102

Post by ptnpzwqd »

There are some really baffling takes here. And it doesn't really matter how good or bad coding agents are.

Coding agents greatly reduce the barrier to contributing something that at least looks okay at the surface, so reviewing contributions will quickly become even more of a bottleneck. Manual contributions used to filter away most low effort attempts, or at least they could easily be identified and rejected.

That dynamic is now different and the maintainers risk being swarmed with low effort contributions, that will take a lot of time to review and respond to. Some AI contributions might be reviewed and revised and overall be of acceptable quality, but how can the maintainers know which without reviewing everything, good and bad alike.

I think we will see multiple attempts like this to shift things back to the old dynamic, by rejecting things that can be identified as AI generated a glance, but I suspect over time it will be difficult to do so, so my prediction is that we will soon see more open source repos stop accepting outside contributions entirely.

Even if LLMs one day will be good enough to quickly produce code that is on par with humans (which I strongly doubt), why would the contributors have any incentive to have someone else do that (the easy part), rather than just doing it themselves?

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#103

Post by fartfeatures »

mftrhu wrote: post #88
fartfeatures wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to achieve that without a blanket ban, if you read their AI policy it seems more "ethically" motivated. They certainly address this first, with many more words and 7 references. They do go on to address code quality but it is more of an after thought with 0 references, less words and appears lower down the page. The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuter…

> The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma ... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on. Why would declining sales of new smartphones have anything to do with PostMarketOS, which only supports phones more than half a decade old?

PostmarketOS doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s the final stage of a device's life cycle. If the initial sales of new devices decline, the pool of available hardware for enthusiasts to tinker with in five years will be significantly smaller.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#104

Post by fartfeatures »

egorfine wrote: post #94
cuu508 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. And doesn't that bother you a little? If you listen to podcasts, check out this podcast episode: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/flying-too-... It is about Air France 447, but also draws parallels to AI and self-driving cars

Look, every medicine is a poison as well. Every single byte of code I commit I fully understand. I am strongly against slop. However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.

StackOverflow was also full of knowledgeable but objectionable people. I'm very glad not to have that energy in my life any more. Those that hate LLMs are welcome to continue using StackOverflow but I shan't be.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#105

Post by mftrhu »

fartfeatures wrote: post #103
mftrhu wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma ... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on. Why would declining sales of new smartphones have anything to do with PostMarketOS, which only supports phones more than half a decade old?

PostmarketOS doesn't exist in a vacuum. It’s the final stage of a device's life cycle. If the initial sales of new devices decline, the pool of available hardware for enthusiasts to tinker with in five years will be significantly smaller.

Yes. In five years, once the PMOS devs manage to get a 2025 device in working state, they might have less devices to play around with, so there could be an indirect effect on the project.

What I struggle to believe - what I don't believe - is that there any sort of connection between the report about likely declining sales and PMOS' announcement.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#106

Post by dist-epoch »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #98
dist-epoch wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you know what opportunity cost is

Haha, are you trying to suggest you'll have lost much by putting an AI tool to the test? You seem to think it's powerful enough to do the work of porting Alpine Linux (or equivalent) to new hardware without human intervention (beyond the initial prompt), what exactly are you losing by trying this out? It's not your time, as you would have spent less time on giving a simple instruction to an AI tool than you spent in…

I never said it requires zero hand holding.

You are also strangely fixated on today's capabilities, completely missing the exponential we are on.

In a few months will have posts here from device driver writers explaining how they hooked up a phone to an Arduino and a video camera and how the AI is automatically writing device drivers.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#107

Post by ZenoArrow »

egorfine wrote: post #101
ZenoArrow wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers. That's not your only option. What you're meant to do is understand the tools you're using well enough to not need to ask for help from anyone or anything else. Stack Overflow is useful, but it's a learning tool. If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code, it's no wonder that yo…

> If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code Aren't we all in a sense?

> Aren't we all in a sense?

Once you get good enough at a programming language, you can code a lot from memory and logic. As in, you can think of a design and how to build it without having to look up someone else's code. It's still useful to keep notes to refer back to, and look up information online to jog your memory, but it's not always a question of finding other people's code to modify.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#108

Post by ZenoArrow »

dist-epoch wrote: post #106
ZenoArrow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, are you trying to suggest you'll have lost much by putting an AI tool to the test? You seem to think it's powerful enough to do the work of porting Alpine Linux (or equivalent) to new hardware without human intervention (beyond the initial prompt), what exactly are you losing by trying this out? It's not your time, as you would have spent less time on giving a simple instruction to an AI tool than you spent in…

I never said it requires zero hand holding. You are also strangely fixated on today's capabilities, completely missing the exponential we are on. In a few months will have posts here from device driver writers explaining how they hooked up a phone to an Arduino and a video camera and how the AI is automatically writing device drivers.

> You are also strangely fixated on today's capabilities

I am talking about today's capabilities because this comment thread started with the suggestion that the benefits of AI for coding was no longer avoidable after the launch of Codex 5.3.

> In a few months will have posts here from device driver writers explaining how they hooked up a phone to an Arduino and a video camera and how the AI is automatically writing device drivers.

A few months? Almost zero chance. If it happens in the next 5 years I'd be less surprised, but I suspect it'll take longer.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#109

Post by idiotsecant »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #60
idiotsecant wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's entirely justified when quality of code matters. They don't want a thousand gallons of unreviewable slop. They want a reasonable amount of code that can be sensibility reviewed.

[flagged]

This is incredibly simple. If a project doesn't want machine generated code, don't force machine generated code into the project. This isn't anything here that warrants multiple paragraphs of freakout.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#110

Post by plqbfbv »

fruitworks wrote: post #97
plqbfbv wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Postmarketos clearly exists and works, EVEN if LLMs were absolutely perfect for speeding up development ten folds, is there any absolute moral necessity to use them? There's no moral necessity, but if you want to survive as a project moving forward, you'll have less and less velocity compared to projects using LLMs, so you'll eventually shrink and die as a project, because less people will contribute to a project t…

compared to what other projects?

Mine was more a generic argument against the "ban all AI" stance that I've recently seen pop up more often.

At the moment, there isn't another project (that I know of) like PostmarketOS filling the same niche. If a new project were to appear, and were using LLMs, it'd likely progress faster.

Regardless, I've had success with LLMs and while I understand the maintainers' concern, if used properly they're a powerful tool to quickly iterate on huge amounts of information. They could be used to automate reviews of the spam of low-quality PRs, for instance (if they were to materialize).

But having read their policy page, their stance is more on ethical grounds, not moral: https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop... . So while I still stand by my argument in the general case, here it's not applicable, and while I see their ethical concerns, one project boycotting a tool doesn't really fix the systemic issues they mention.

Post reply on HN