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

gitlab.redox-os.org

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

#121

Post by pjc50 »

eesmith wrote: post #43
throwaway2037 wrote: post #12

> any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed Note the word "clearly". Weirdly, as a native English speaker this term makes the policy less strict. What about submarine LLM submissions? I have no beef with Redox OS. I wish them well. This feels like the newest form of OSS virtue signaling.

As a native English speaker I read this as two parts. If it's obvious, the response is immediate and not up for debate. If it's not obvious then it falls in the second part - "any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project". A submarine submission, if discovered, will result in a ban. Using the phrase "virtual signaling" long ago became a meaningless term other than to indicate one's views in…

People who talk about "virtue signalling" are usually engaging in vice signalling.

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

#122

Post by pjc50 »

hparadiz wrote: post #30
BlackFly wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is enforceable, I think you mean to say that it cannot be prevented since people can attempt to hide their usage? Most rules and laws are like that, you proscribe some behavior but that doesn't prevent people from doing it. Therefore you typically need to also define punishments: > This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge reques…

What happens when the PR is clear, reasonable, short, checked by a human, and clearly fixes, implements, or otherwise improves the code base and has no alternative implementation that is reasonably different from the initially presented version?

How would you tell that it's LLM-generated in that case?

If the submitter is prepared to explain the code and vouch for its quality then that might reasonably fall under "don't ask, don't tell".

However, if LLM output is either (a) uncopyrightable or (b) considered a derivative work of the source that was used to train the model, then you have a legal problem. And the legal system does care about invisible "bit colour".

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

#123

Post by zozbot234 »

stabbles wrote: post #67
ptnpzwqd wrote: post #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 g…

For well-intended open source contributions using GenAI, my current rules of thumb are: * Prefer an issue over a PR (after iterating on the issue, either you or the maintainer can use it as a prompt) * Only open a PR if the review effort is less than the implementation effort. Whether the latter is feasible depends on the project, but in one of the projects I'm involved in it's fairly obvious: it's a package manager…

Unfortunately, LLMs generate useless word salad and nonsense even when working on issues text, you absolutely have to reword the writing from scratch otherwise it's just an annoyance and a complete waste of time. Even a good prompt doesn't help this all that much since it's just how the tool works under the hood: it doesn't have a goal of saying anything specific in the clearest possible way and inwardly rewording it until it does, it just writes stuff out that will hopefully end up seeming at least half-coherent. And their code is orders of magnitude worse than even their terrible English prose.

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

#124

Post by zigzag312 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #20

I think we will be getting into an interesting situation soon, where project maintainers use LLMs because they truly are useful in many cases, but will ban contributors for doing so, because they can't review how well did the user guide the LLM.

Some sort of LLM audit trail is needed (containing prompts used, model identifier and marking all code written by LLM). It could be even signed by LLM providers (but that wouldn't work with local models). Append only standard format that is required to be included in PR. It wouldn't be perfect (e.g. deleting the log completely), but it might help with code reviews.

This would probably be more useful to help you see what (and how) was written by LLMs. Not really to catch bad actors trying to hide LLM use.

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

#125

Post by MadameMinty »

Muromec wrote: post #81
oytis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How to differentiate between a drive-by contribution and a first contribution from a potentially long-time contrubutor. And I would say especially for operating systems if it gets any adoption irregular contributions are pretty legit. E.g. when someone wants just one specific piece of hardware supported that no one else has or needs without being employed by the vendor.

This sounds complicated in theory, but it's easier in practice. Potential long time contributor is somebody who was already asking annoying questions in the irc channel for a few months and helped with other stuff before shooting off th e PR. If the PR is the first time you hear from a person -- that's pretty drive-by ish.

Why would I ask annoying questions when I can identify, reproduce, pinpoint the bug, locate it in code, and fix it? Doing it alone should make it clear I don't need to ask to understand it. And why would I be interested in small talk? Doubt many people are when they patch up their work tools. It's a dispassionate kind of kindness.

Not to mention LLMs can be annoying, too. Demand this, and you'll only be inviting bots to pester devs on IRC.

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

#126

Post by vladms »

holyra wrote: post #40
lifis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes a massive amount of developer work (perhaps more than anything else), and it's very unlikely they either have the ability to attract enough human developers to be able to do it without LLM assistance. Not to mention that even finding good developers willing to develop without AI (a significant handicap, even more so for coding things like an OS that are well represented in LLM training) seems difficu…

The LLM has brainwashed so many devs that they now think they are nothing without it.

That's an optimistic view. Maybe they really are 10x slower on any task without a LLM.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

nananana9 wrote: post #76
algoth1 wrote: post #72

What would constitute "clearly llm generated" though

if (foo == true) { // checking foo is true (rocketship emoji) 20 lines of code; } else { the same 20 lines of code with one boolean changed in the middle; } Description: (markdown header) Summary (nerd emoji): This PR fixes a non-existent issue by adding an *if statement** that checks if a variable is true. This has the following benefits: - Improves performance (rocketship emoji) - Increases code maintainability (ri…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by orf »

pmarreck wrote: post #94
yla92 wrote: post #82

Zig has a similar stance on no-LLM policy https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy

Yep, that’s why my forks of all their libraries with bugs fixed such as https://github.com/pmarreck/zigimg/commit/52c4b9a557d38fe1e1... will never ever go back to upstream, just because an LLM did it. Lame, but oh well- their loss. Also, this is dumb because anyone who wants fixes like this will have to find a fork like mine with them, which is an increased maintenance burden.

just like... don't tell them a LLM did it?

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

#130

Post by 8organicbits »

pmarreck wrote: post #94
yla92 wrote: post #82

Zig has a similar stance on no-LLM policy https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig#strict-no-llm-no-ai-policy

Yep, that’s why my forks of all their libraries with bugs fixed such as https://github.com/pmarreck/zigimg/commit/52c4b9a557d38fe1e1... will never ever go back to upstream, just because an LLM did it. Lame, but oh well- their loss. Also, this is dumb because anyone who wants fixes like this will have to find a fork like mine with them, which is an increased maintenance burden.

The commit you listed was merged upstream.

https://github.com/zigimg/zigimg/pull/313

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