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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

#241

Post by emperorxanu »

zozbot234 wrote: post #123
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…

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…

I feel like every person stating things of this nature are literally not able to communicate effectively (though this is not a barrier anymore, you can get a dog to vibe code games with the right workflow, which to me seems like quite an intellectual thing to be able to do.

Despite that, you will make this argument when trying to use copilot to do something, the worst model in the entire industry.

If an AI can replace you at your job, you are not a very good programmer.

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

#242

Post by short_sells_poo »

baq wrote: post #200
r_lee wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

did you write this with an LLM?

You’re talking to someone’s clanker

I find the fact that people can't even be bothered to put their own thoughts into text and communicate via an LLM to be the most grotesque and dystopian aspect of this new AI era.

It looks like we are going to have large numbers of people whose entire personality is projected via an AI rather than their own mind. Surely this will have an (likely deleterious) effect on people's emotional and social intelligence, no? People's language centers will atrophy because the AI does the heavy lifting of transforming their thoughts into text, and even worse, I'm not sure it'll be avoidable to have the AIs biases and start to leak into the text that people like this generate.

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

#243

Post by steve-chavez »

One thing that is missing is a standard no-LLM policy, like the "Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct". On PostgREST we recently added a strict no-LLM policy [1], basically linking Gentoo's AI policy, which we found the most apt in lack of a standard.

[1]: https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/blob/main/CONTRIBUTIN...

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

#244

Post by khalic »

_zagj wrote: post #51
tentacleuno wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an aside, I've noticed a huge drop off in license literacy amongst developers What do you mean by this? I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses. I typically had a "fuck it" attitude when it came to the license, and I assume quite a lot of other people shared that sentiment. The code is the fun bit.

> I always assumed this was the case anyway; MIT is, if I'm not mistaken, one of the mostly used licenses No, it wasn't that way in the 2000s, e.g., on platforms like SourceForge, where OSS devs would go out of their way to learn the terms and conditions of the popular licenses and made sure to respect each other's license choices, and usually defaulted to GPL (or LGPL), unless there was a compelling reason not to: h…

... you think It was good time?

Not being able to publish anything without sifting through all the libs licences? Remembering legalese, jurisprudence, edge cases, on top of everything else?

MIT became ubiquitous because it gives us peace of mind

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

#245

Post by short_sells_poo »

logicprog wrote: post #182
sillysaurusx wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project

And this is why eventually you are likely to run the artisanal coders who tend to do most of the true innovation out of the room.

Because by and large, agentic coders don't contribute, they make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them and the code quality is questionable at best.

Eventually, I'm sure LLM code quality will catch up, but the ease with which an existing codebase can be forked and slightly tuned, instead of contributing to the original, is a double edged sword.

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

#246

Post by duskdozer »

hijnksforall956 wrote: post #220
zhangchen wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How is that different than before LLMs? You have no idea how the person came up with it, or whether they really understood. We are inventing problems here. Fact is, an LLM writes better code than 95% of developers out there today. Yes, yes this is Lake Wobegone, everyone here is in the 1%. But for the world at large, I bet code quality goes up.

It's a lot harder for someone who has no clue what they're doing to write a lot of plausible-but-wrong code.

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

#247

Post by short_sells_poo »

adjfasn47573 wrote: post #227
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…

> 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 Wait but under that assumption - LLMs being good enough - wouldn't the maintainer also be able to leverage LLMs to speed up the review? Often feels to me like the current stance of arguments is missing something.

This is not even about capabilities but responsibility. In an open source context where the maintainers take no responsibility for the code, it's perhaps easier. In a professional context, ultimately it's the human who is responsible, and the human has to make the call whether they trust the LLM enough.

Imagine someone vibe codes the code for a radiotherapy machine and it fries a patient (humans have made these errors). The developer won't be able to point to OpenAI and blame them for this, the developer is personally responsible for this (well, their employer is most likely). Ergo, in any setting where there is significant monetary or health risk at stake, humans have to review the code at least to show that they've done their due diligence.

I'm sure we are going to have some epic cases around someone messing up this way.

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

#248

Post by ptnpzwqd »

adjfasn47573 wrote: post #227
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…

> 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 Wait but under that assumption - LLMs being good enough - wouldn't the maintainer also be able to leverage LLMs to speed up the review? Often feels to me like the current stance of arguments is missing something.

It was maybe not quite clear enough in my comment, but this is more of a hypothetical future scenario - not at all where I assess LLMs are today or will get to in the foreseable future.

So it becomes a bit theoretical, but I guess if we had a future where LLMs could consistently write perfect code, it would not be too far fetched to also think it could perfectly review code, true enough. But either way the maintainer would still spend some time ensuring a contribution aligns with their vision and so forth, and there would still be close to zero incentive to allow outside contributors in that scenario. No matter what, that scenario is a bit of a fairytale at this point.

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

#249

Post by surgical_fire »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #219
surgical_fire wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, to outright ban a technology in 2026 on pure "vibes" is not something I'd say is reasonable. To outright accept LLM contributions would be as much "pure vibes" as banning it. The thing is, those that maintain open source projects have to make a decision where they want to spend their time. It's open source, they are not being paid for it, they should and will decide what it acceptable and what is n…

>Or you can complain to the void that open source maintainers don't want to deal with low effort vibe coded bullshit PRs. If you look back and think about what your saying for a minute, it's that low effort PRs are bad. Using an LLM to assist in development does not instantly make the whole work 'low effort'. It's also unenforceable and will create AI witch hunts. Someone used an em-dash in a 500 line PR? Oh the horr…

> Using an LLM to assist in development does not instantly make the whole work 'low effort'.

Instantly? No, of course not.

I do use LLMs for development, and I am very careful with how I use it. I throughly review the code it generated (unless I am asking for throwaway scripts, because then I only care about the immediate output).

But I am not naive. We both know that a lot of people just vibe code the way through, results be damned.

I am not going to fault people devoting their free time on Open Source for not wanting to deal with bullshit. A blanket ban is perfectly acceptable.

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

#250

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

swiftcoder wrote: post #202
MadameMinty wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Why would I ask annoying questions when I can identify, reproduce, pinpoint the bug, locate it in code, and fix it? Because if the bug is sufficiently simple that an outsider with zero context to fix, there's a non-zero chance that the maintainers know about it and have a reason why it hasn't been addressed yet i.e. the bug fix may have backwards-compatibility implications for other users which you aren't aware of.…

If the maintainers are already bandwidth limited, how is first asking annoying questions not also a drain on that bandwidth?
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