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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

#181

Post by orf »

jacquesm wrote: post #167
orf wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but back in reality no you’re not? No more than any other contributor? If I want to use an auto-complete then I can, and I will? Restricting that is as regressive as a project trying to specify that I write code from a specific country or… standing on my head. Sure, if they want me to add a “I’m writing this standing on my head” message in the PR then I will… but I’m not.

No, you can't. See, that's where you are just wrong: when you don't respect the boundaries an open source project sets that you want to contribute to then you are a net negative. Restricting this is their right, and it is not for you to attempt to overrule that right. Besides the fact that you do not oversee the consequences it also makes you an asshole. They're not asking for you to write standing on your head, they…

They are asking me to author my contributions in a way that they approve of. The essence of the request is the same as asking someone to author them whilst standing on their head.

Except they don’t, won’t and can’t control that: the very request is insulting.

I’ll make a change any way I choose, upright, sideways, using AI. My choice. Not theirs.

Their choice is to accept it or reject it based purely on the change itself, because that’s all there is.

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

#182

Post by logicprog »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #170
jacquesm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rules of thumb is much shorter: don't. The open source world has already been ripped off by AI the last thing they need is for AI to pollute the pedigree of the codebase.

Suppose almost all work in the future is done via LLMs, just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses. Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?

I say let people hold this stance. We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features or refinements we wanted, and use that fork for ourselves, but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well. With AI, it's very easy to form a good architectural understanding of a large code base and figure out how to modify it in a sane, solid way that matches the existing patterns. And it's also very easy to resolve conflicts when you rebase your changes on top of whatever is new from upstream. So, maintaining a fork is really not that serious of and endeavor anymore. I'm actually maintaining a fork of Zed with several additional features (Claude Code style skills and slash commands, as well as a global agents.md file, instead of the annoying rules library system, which I removed, as well as the ability to choose models for sub-agents instead of always inheriting the model from the parent thread; and yes, master branch Zed has subagents! and another tool, jjdag)

That seems like a win-win in a sense: let the agentic coders do their thing, and the artisanal coders do their thing, and we'll see who wins in the long run.

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

#183

Post by lkjdsklf »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #170
jacquesm wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My rules of thumb is much shorter: don't. The open source world has already been ripped off by AI the last thing they need is for AI to pollute the pedigree of the codebase.

Suppose almost all work in the future is done via LLMs, just like almost all transportation is done today via cars instead of horses. Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?

But all work isn't done by LLMs at the moment and we can't be sure that it will be so the question is ridiculous.

Maybe one day it will be.. And then people can reevaluate their stance then. Until that time, it's entirely reasonable to hold the position that you just don't

This is especially true with how LLM generated code may affect licensing and other things. There's a lot of unknowns there and it's entirely reasonable to not want to risk your projects license over some contributions.

I use them all the time at work because, rightly or wrongly, my company has decided that's the direction they want to go.

For open source, I'm not going to make that choice for them. If they explicitly allow for LLM generated code, then I'll use it, but if not I'm not going to assume that the project maintainers are willing to deal with the potential issues it creates.

For my own open source projects, I'm not interested in using LLM generated code. I mostly work on open source projects that I enjoy or in a specific area that I want to learn more about. The fact that it's functional software is great, but is only one of many goals of the project. AI generated code runs counter to all the other goals I have.

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

#184

Post by xmodem »

dana321 wrote: post #127

Generating small chunks of code with llms to save time works well, as long as you can read and understand the code i don't see what the problem is.

The problem is that the well you are drinking from has in fact been poisoned. Maybe you think you can tolerate it but some projects are taking a policy decision that any exposure is too dangerous and that is IMO perfectly reasonable.

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

#185

Post by duskdozer »

olmo23 wrote: post #162
stabbles wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another great take I found online: "Don't send us a PR, send us the prompt you used to generate the PR."

What I've been begging for every time someone wants me to read their AI "edited" wall of text.

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

#186

Post by logicprog »

8organicbits wrote: post #130
pmarreck wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So does that mean they contradicted their own no LLM policy?

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

#187

Post by naasking »

advancespace wrote: post #158
konschubert wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bottlenecks today are: * understanding the problem * modelling a solution that is consistent with the existing modelling/architecture of the software and moves modelling and architecture in the right direction * verifying that the the implementation of the solution is not introducing accidental complexity These are the things LLMs can't do well yet. That's where contributions will be most appreciated. Producing c…

[flagged]

I don't know, I've had good experiences getting LLMs to understand and follow architecture and style guidelines. It may depend on how modular your codebase already is, because that by itself would focus/minimize any changes.

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

#188

Post by lpcvoid »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #147
lpcvoid wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hugely unpopular opinion on HN, but I'd rather use code that is flawed while written by a human, versus code that has been generated by a LLM, even if it fixes bugs. I'd gladly take a bug report, sure, but then I'd fix the issues myself. I'd never allow LLM code to be merged.

Any thoughts on why you have that preference?

Because human errors are, well, human. And producing code that contains those errors is a human endeavor. It bases on years, decades of learning. Mistakes were made, experience was gained, skills were improved. Reasoning by humans is relatable.

Generating slop using LLMs takes seconds, has no human element, no work goes into it. Mistakes made by an LLM are excused without sincerity, without real learning, without consequence. I hate everything about that.

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

#189

Post by ptnpzwqd »

amelius wrote: post #179
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…

> It doesn't really matter what your stance on AI is, the problem is the increased review burden on OSS maintainers. But the maintainers can use AI too, for their reviewing.

Yes, but LLM-based reviews are not nearly a compensation for human review, so it doesn't change much.

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

#190

Post by kpcyrd »

swiftcoder wrote: post #132
pmarreck wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how in the heck do you disambiguate a first time long term contributor and a first time drive by contributor?

Mostly by whether they check in first to see if the fix is actually welcome? Drive-by folks tend to blindly fix the issue they care about, without regard to how/whether it fits into the overall project direction

Your open source experience is very different from my open source experience.
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