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

gitlab.redox-os.org

311–320 of 504 posts

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

#311
post #52

Hm, wondering how to enforce this rule. Rules without any means to enforce them can put the honest people into a disadvantage.

> This policy is not open to discussion, any content submitted that is clearly labelled as LLM-generated (including issues, merge requests, and merge request descriptions) will be immediately closed, and any attempt to bypass this policy will result in a ban from the project. It sounds serious and strict, but it applies to content that's 'clearly labelled as LLM-generated'. So what about content that isn't as clear?…

Very next sentence lists the penalty for lying. So you can defraud the project, but only if you can walk the walk and talk the talk well enough for them to never notice you’re using an LLM. At that point it’s more effort than just complying with the policy.

That’s the point.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It can certainly be true for several reasons. Even in domains I'm familiar with, often making a change is costly in terms of coding effort. For example just recently I updated a component in one of our modules. The work was fairly rote (in this project we are not allowed to use LLMs). While it was absolutely necessary to do the update here, it was beneficial to do it everywhere else. I didn't do it in other places be…

I can agree with that. So essentially: "Claude and GPT regularly write programs that are way better than what I would’ve written given the amount of time I was willing to spend."

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

#313
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…

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

#314
the skills that protect against displacement long-term are exactly what vibe coding erodes. an engineer who built with AI but never developed the instincts to spot its mistakes has a gap they don't know they have. this maintainer problem is a preview: when you can't tell the difference between a PR from someone who understood the code and one from someone who just prompted into it, the verification burden doesn't disappear. it shifts to whoever has enough skill to catch the errors.

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

#315
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their boundaries. If they don’t want to accept the code, cool. Nobody is forcing them to, and I respect that. But if they can’t enforce their boundaries, because they can’t tell the difference between AI code and non-AI code without being told, then their boundaries they made up are unenforceable nonsense. About as nonsense and enforceable as asking me to code upside down.

I'll make this blunt: if you're a guy then half the population is not capable of 'enforcing their boundaries' against you, more so if you count children. The problem you seem to have is to think that if someone is not capable of enforcing their boundaries that they are not allowed to have those boundaries and that it is your god given right to do whatever the F* you want just because you can. That's not how the world…

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

#316

Earlier 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’…

Having reviewed a lot of Ai-written python code, I think it's absolute nonsense.

It never picks a style, it'll alternate between exceptions and then return codes.

It'll massively overcomplicate things. It'll reference things that straight up don't exist.

But boy is it brilliant at a fuzzy find and replace.

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

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lot of computer users are domain experts in something like chemistry or physics or material science. Computing to them is just a tool in their field, e.g. simulating molecular dynamics, or radiation transfer. They dot every i and cross every t _in_their_competency_domain_, but the underlying code may be a horrible FORTRAN mess. LLMs potentially can help them write modern code using modern libraries and tooling.

My go-to analogy is assembly language programming: it used to be an essential skill, but now is essentially delegated to compilers outside of some limited specialized cases. I think LLMs will be seen as the compiler technology of the next wave of computing.

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

#318

If you're curious to see what everyone else is doing, I did a survey of over 100 major source available projects and four of them banned AI assisted commits (NetBSD, GIMP, Zig, and qemu). On the other hand projects with AI assisted commits you can easily find include Linux, curl, io_uring, MariaDB, DuckDB, Elasticsearch, and so on. Of the 112 projects surveyed, 70 of them had AI assisted commits already. https://thec…

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NetBSD has a very reasonable stance:

  If you commit code that was not written by yourself, double check that the license on that code permits import into the NetBSD source repository, and permits free distribution. Check with the author(s) of the code, make sure that they were the sole author of the code and verify with them that they did not copy any other code.

  Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core.
https://www.netbsd.org/developers/commit-guidelines.html

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

#319

Dangerous that all these projects keep going MIT. We wouldn't have an open source community if it weren't for protections against modification without sharing. Almost all software today would be proprietary, as it was before.

No. People shared code because they wanted to. Open standards are great tools against emerging monopolies. So the losing side used that. IBM lost OS/2 vs NT war. They propped up Linux. Intel wanted to have a second option to Microsoft in server space. AMD wants to gain some developers against Nvidia Cuda monopoly. That's the reason they contribute. Even Linux's own leadership decided against extra freedoms for users; they rejected GPLv3 to keep company contributions going. That's why LLVM gets the first implementations of certain optimizations and architectures, yet being permissive licensed.

Quite a bit of the Linux userspace is already permissively licensed. Nobody has built a full-fledged open source alternative yet. Because it is hard to build an ecosystem, it is hard to test thousands of different pieces of hardware. None of that would happen without well-paid engineers contributing.

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

#320

Earlier 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…

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