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Gentoo AI Policy

wiki.gentoo.org

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Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#181

Post by wodenokoto »

JohnBooty wrote: post #162
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…

There are a number of other issues such the ethical and environmental ones. However, this one in isolation... Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough I'm struggling to understand this particular angle. Humans are capable of generating extremely poor code. Improperly supervised LLMs are capable of ge…

It means, if you can’t write it, they don’t trust you to be able to evaluate it either.

As for humans who can’t write code, their code doesn’t tend to look like they can.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#182

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

JohnBooty wrote: post #162
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…

There are a number of other issues such the ethical and environmental ones. However, this one in isolation... Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough I'm struggling to understand this particular angle. Humans are capable of generating extremely poor code. Improperly supervised LLMs are capable of ge…

> Nobody should be submitting unexpected, large, hard-to-review quantities of code in the first place,

Without LLMs, people are less likely to submit such PRs. With LLMs they're more likely to do so. This is based on recent increases in such PRs pretty much all projects have seen. Current LLMs are extremely sycophantic & encourage people to think they're brilliant revolutionary thinkers coming up with the best ever. Combined with the marketing of LLMs as experts it's pretty easy to see why some people fall for the hype & believe they're doing valuable work when they're really just dumping slop on the reviewers.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#184

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

dizlexic wrote: post #171
const_cast wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's stop bullshitting, nobody here is going to contribute to Gentoo and is now put off because of this policy change. What we're looking at is mostly JavaScript monkeys who feel personally offended because they're unable to differentiate criticism of their tools from criticism of their own personal character. The outrage is purely theoretical.

As a JavaScript monkey I believe you have a point, and this was the core of my original question. How many contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Probably none. How many potential contributors to gentoo are upset by this? Maybe dozens? I'll be amazed if this has any notable negative outcomes for Gentoo and their contributions.

I suspect most of the people upset by this are the sort to dump a pile of unreviewed slop on the maintainers & get upset when it gets rejected, i.e. they're the problem this is aimed at fixing.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#185

Post by jjmarr »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #103
jjmarr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. That being said, my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check. I am learning far more about compilers at a much faster pace than if I took the "normal route" of tiny bugfixes. I also try to do review passes on my own code before asking for code review…

> I've been using AI to contribute to LLVM, which has a liberal policy. This is a different decision made by the LLVM project than the one made by Gentoo, which is neither right nor wrong IMHO. > The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR. This may be part of the justification of the published Gentoo policy. I am not a maintainer of same so cannot say for certain. I can say it is implie…

   I would also ask - of the requested changes reviewers have made, what percentage are due to LLM generated changes? If more than zero, does this corroborate the Gentoo policy position of "Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content."
I can only speak for my own PR, but most requested changes were related to formatting and other stylistic issues that I didn't fully grasp as a new LLVM contributor. e.g. Not wrapping at 80 characters, forgetting to declare stuff as const, or formatting the documentation incorrectly.

Previous codebases I've worked on during internships linted the first two in CI. And the documentation being formatted incorrectly is because I hand-wrote it without AI.

Out of the AI-related issues that I didn't catch, the biggest flaws were redundant comments and the use of string manipulation/parsing instead of AST manipulation. Useless comments are very common and I've gotten better at pruning them. The AI's insistence on hand-rolling stuff with strings was surprising and apparently LLVM-specific.

However, there was plenty of erroneous and invalid behaviour in the original AI-generated code, such as flagging `uint32_t` because the underlying type was an `unsigned int` (which wouldn't make sense as we want to replace `unsigned int` with `uint32_t`).

I prevented most of this from reaching the PR by writing good unit tests and having a clear vision of what the final result should look like. I believe this should be a basic requirement for trying to contribute AI-generated code to an open-source project but other people might not share the same belief.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#186

Post by globular-toast »

adastra22 wrote: post #175
globular-toast wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it just sounds like you've been sold on "AI" being a thing and don't have any idea how any of it works. I don't even know what you're referring to with "more accurate than doctors". Classifying scans or something? Do you realise how different that is to generative LLMs writing code etc? Scan classification may well have been shown to be more accurate, but generative LLMs have never been shown to be "better"…

LLMs perform better than doctors in a randomized trial: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... And here: https://arxiv.org/html/2503.10486v1

> the use of an LLM did not significantly enhance diagnostic reasoning performance compared with the availability of only conventional resources.

The other one isn't peer reviewed. Your précis doesn't appear to be warranted.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#187

Post by paulcole »

Kwpolska wrote: post #108
paulcole wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it telling at all? It’s just what every other tech bro on here wants to believe, that using LLM code is somehow less pure than using free-range-organic human written code.

Tech bros want the exact opposite, so that they can sell their AI crap and replace human developers with AI bots.

That has not been what I have seen in the comments here on HN lol

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#188

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

hjdjeiejd wrote: post #14

This is on-brand. There was a time that I used Gentoo, and may again one day, but for the past N years, I’ve not had time to compile everything from source, and compiling from source is a false sense of security, since you still don’t know what’s been compromised (it could be the compiler, etc.), and few have the time or expertise to adequately review all of the code. It can be a waste of energy and time to compile e…

> I’ve not had time to compile everything from source,

Then use the official binary packages?

> and compiling from source is a false sense of security, since you still don’t know what’s been compromised (it could be the compiler, etc.), and few have the time or expertise to adequately review all of the code.

That would still leave you in a strictly better position, surely? Any other distro would pull the same code and build with compilers, so that attack surface exists regardless.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#189

Post by jjmarr »

perching_aix wrote: post #178
totallymike wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only bothering to mention it in response to one of many review comments is nearly the same as not disclosing it.

We might know the word "disclose" very different then. I'm amenable to taking issue with them not disclosing it up front , but then their guidelines - if the person above is to be believed - don't require it, and they did disclose it a few days after opening it. It was also not them responding to an allegation or anything, they disclosed it completely on their own terms. And that was two months ago. I find that latte…

In the future I plan on disclosing the use of AI in the body of the original PR so it's clearer.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#190

Post by mikepurvis »

Cyph0n wrote: post #52
mikepurvis wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nix is another route as far as a compile-from-source package manager with lots of options on many packages.

I feel like most Gentoo folks probably moved over to Nix/NixOS. The security argument for recompiling from source is addressed by the input addressed (sic) package cache. The customization aspect is mostly covered by Nix package overrides and overlays. You can also setup your own package cache.

Sibling comment aside, I could definitely picture it being a fairly narrow slice of folks who are ideologically motivated enough to choose a niche distro over Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or even Arch, but pragmatic enough to still prefer gentoo over Nix.
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