The interesting tension here is that "no LLM-generated code" is easy to state but hard to enforce - a developer who uses an LLM to understand a concept and then writes the code themselves is indistinguishable from one who didn't. The policy probably works as a cultural signal more than a technical guarantee, which might be exactly what they want.
Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
271–280 of 504 posts
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#272Earlier 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?
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 reaso…
Basically all of my actual programming work has been done by LLMs since January. My team actually demoed a PoC last week to hook up Codex to our Slack channel to become our first level on-call, and in the case of a defect (e.g. a pagerduty alert, or a question that suggests something is broken), go debug, push a fix for review, and suggest any mitigations. Prior to that, I basically pushed for my team to do the same with copy/paste to a prompt so we could iterate on building its debugging skills.
People might still code by hand as a hobby, but I'd be surprised if nearly all professional coding isn't being done by LLMs within the next year or two. It's clear that doing it by hand would mostly be because you enjoy the process. I expect people that are more focused on the output will adopt LLMs for hobby work as well.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 quali…
Maybe! Or maybe there is really a competitive advantage to "artisanal" coding.
Personally, I would not currently expect a fork of RedoxOS that is AI-implemented to become more popular than RedoxOS itself.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're going to set a firm "no AI" policy, then my inclination would be to treat that kind of PR in the same way the US legal system does evidence obtained illegally: you say "sorry, no, we told you the rules and so you've wasted effort -- we will not take this even if it is good and perhaps the only sensible implementation". Perhaps somebody else will eventually re-implement it later without looking at the AI PR.
You not realizing how ridiculous this is, is exactly why half of all devs are about to get left behind. Like, this should be enshrined as the quintessential “they simply, obstinately, perilously, refused to get it” moment. Shortly, no one is going to care about anyone’s bespoke manual keyboard entry of code if it takes 10 times as long to produce the same functionality with imperceptibly less error.
> Shortly, no one is going to care about anyone’s bespoke manual keyboard entry of code if it takes 10 times as long to produce the same functionality with imperceptibly less error.
Well that day doesn't appear to be coming any time soon. Even after years of supposed improvements, LLMs make mistakes so frequently that you can't trust anything they put out, which completely negates any time savings from not writing the code.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#275Not sure how they can expect to make a viable full OS without massive use of LLMs, so this makes no sense. What makes sense if that of course any LLM-generated code must be reviewed by a good programmer and must be correct and well written, and the AI usage must be precisely disclosed. What they should ban is people posting AI-generated code without mentioning it or replying "I don't know, the AI did it like that" to…
> Not sure how they can expect to make a viable full OS without massive use of LLMs, so this makes no sense.
Perhaps the same way that every other viable OS was made without use of LLMs.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hyphen instead of an em dash suggests a human (though one could simply replace em dashes with hyphens to make the text more “human-like”).
I've seen skills on the various skillz marketplaces that specifically instruct the LLM-generated text to replace emdashes with hyphens (or double-hyphens), and never to use the "it's not just , it's " phrasing. Also to, intentionally introduce random innoccuous punctuation and speling errors.
I do wonder if the way people speak is starting to change because of LLMs. The “it’s not just” thing (I forgot the name for it) is something that used to be a giveaway, but I am now seeing more and more people use it IRL. Perhaps I am just more vigilant towards this specific sentence construction that I notice it more?
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not sure how they can expect to make a viable full OS without massive use of LLMs, so this makes no sense. Every single production OS, including the one you use right now, was made before LLMs even existed. > What makes sense if that of course any LLM-generated code must be reviewed by a good programmer The time of good programmers, especially ones working for free in their spare time on OSS projects, is a limited…
There are only 4 successful general purpose production OSes (GNU/Linux, Android/Linux, Windows, OS X/iOS) and only one of those made by the open source community (GNU/Linux). And a new OS needs to be significantly better than those to overcome the switching costs.
> And a new OS needs to be significantly better than those to overcome the switching costs.
Who cares if nobody switches to it as their daily driver? The goal you proposed was "viable", not "widely used". The former is perfectly possible without LLMs (as history has proved), and the latter is unrelated to how you choose to make the OS.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#278Earlier 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 don’t think you’re being serious. Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written. Maybe you haven’t used a decent harness or a model released in the last year? It’s usually verbose, whereas I would try the simplest thing that could possibly work. However, it can knock out but would have taken me multiple weekends in a few minutes. The value proposition isn’t even close.
It’s fine to write things by hand, in the same way that there’s nothing wrong with making your own clothing with a sewing machine when you could have bought the same thing for a small fraction of the value of your time. Or in the same fashion, spending a whole weekend, modeling and printing apart, you could’ve bought for a few dollars. I think we need to be honest about differentiating between the hobby value of writing programs versus the utility value of programs. Redox is a hobby project, and, while it’s very cool, I’m not sure it has a strong utility proposition. Demanding that code be handwritten makes sense to me for the maintainer because the whole thing is just for fun anyway. There isn’t an urgent need to RIIR Linux. I would not apply this approach to projects where solving the problem is more important than the joy of writing the solution.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 don’t think you’re being serious. Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written. Maybe you haven’t used a decent harness or a model released in the last year? It’s usually verbose, whereas I would try the simplest thing that could possibly work. However, it can knock out but would have taken me multiple weekends in a few minutes. The value proposition isn’t even close. It’…
> Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written
Is that really true? Like, if you took the time to plan it carefully, dot every i, cross every t?
The way I think of LLM's is as "median targeters" -- they reliably produce output at the centre of the bell curve from their training set. So if you're working in a language that you're unfamiliar with -- let's say I wanted to make a todo list in COBOL -- then LLM's can be a great help, because the median COBOL developer is better than I am. But for languages I'm actually versed in, the median is significantly worse than what I could produce.
So when I hear people say things like "the clanker produces better programs than me", what I hear is that you're worse than the median developer at producing programs by hand.
Re: Redox OS has adopted a Certificate of Origin policy and a strict no-LLM policy
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 reaso…
Basically all of my actual programming work has been done by LLMs since January. My team actually demoed a PoC last week to hook up Codex to our Slack channel to become our first level on-call, and in the case of a defect (e.g. a pagerduty alert, or a question that suggests something is broken), go debug, push a fix for review, and suggest any mitigations. Prior to that, I basically pushed for my team to do the same…
> It's clear that doing it by hand would mostly be because you enjoy the process.
This is gaslighting. We're only a few years into coding agents being a thing. Look at the history of human innovation and tell me that I'm unreasonable for suspecting that there is an iceberg worth of unmitigated externalities lurking beneath the surface that haven't yet been brought to light. In time they might. Like PFAS, ozone holes, global warming.