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PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

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Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#81

Post by UqWBcuFx6NV4r »

trollbridge wrote: post #14
ACCount37 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. Having an LLM helps, especially when you're facing a new subsystem you're not familiar with, and trying to understand how things are done there. They still can't do the heavy duty driver work by themselves - but are good enough for basic guidance and boilerplate.

Guidance and boilerplate... in other words, documentation.

No, dude.

Do you genuinely think that people don’t know what documentation is? That’s insulting.

An LLM can help surface relevant information, taking your intent / goals into account, summarising vast quantities of code and indeed other documentation. That’s, like, their single most effective use.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#82

Post by zozbot234 »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #79
zozbot234 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and clean up any LLM-ness afterwards That never happens. It's actually easier to write the code from scratch and avoid LLMness altogether.

[flagged]

The skill of cleaning up LLM-written slop to bring it to the human-like quality that any sane FLOSS maintainer would demand to begin with? It's just not worth it.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#83

Post by bitwize »

kruffalon wrote: post #67
fartfeatures wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feels pretty Luddite to me. I remember when people were crying about how much power a google search uses. This is the same thing all over again and it is as pointless now as it was back then. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-th... > Google says it dropped the energy cost of AI queries by 33x in one year. The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV.

The audacity to call an organisation that works on making mobile phones and other small PCs work with free software Luddite is impressive. That's like calling a person going for seconds a conservative (in the USA political sense).

[flagged]

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#84

Post by ZenoArrow »

fartfeatures wrote: post #74
ZenoArrow wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fun that you had to caveat it with some hand wavy homework bull. Not really. If AI is just copying someone else's code, it's not really designing it is it. If you want it to truly design something, it needs to be designing it using the same constraints that the human engineers would face, which means it doesn't get the luxury of copying from others, it has to design things like device drivers with the same level of…

Are you suggesting that a human being writes an OS in a vacuum without seeing any other OS or looking into how it is built. That feels a little facetious, no?

> Are you suggesting that a human being writes an OS in a vacuum without seeing any other OS or looking into how it is built. That feels a little facetious, no?

No, I'm suggesting in order for it to be a fair test, you need to impose the same restrictions that a human engineer would face.

For example, consider the work done by the Nouveau team in building a set of open source GPU drivers for NVIDIA GPUs. When they started out the specs were not so widely available. They could look at how GPU drivers were developed for other GPUs, but that is not going to be a substitute for exploratory work. Let's see how well AI does at that exploratory work. I think you'll find it's a lot harder than common uses for AI today.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#85

Post by plqbfbv »

imadr wrote: post #33
hu3 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not parent commenter but this is bound to happen. And I highly doubt iOS and Android are free from LLM assisted code at this point.

Yes and? Let's suppose your statement is 100% true, I genuinely don't see the point of these kinds of comments. Why every time some person/group of people enact an anti-LLM policy in their project, other people feel the personal need to stress how useful LLMs are and how that project is bound to fail if they don't use it? Postmarketos clearly exists and works, EVEN if LLMs were absolutely perfect for speeding up deve…

> Postmarketos clearly exists and works, EVEN if LLMs were absolutely perfect for speeding up development ten folds, is there any absolute moral necessity to use them?

There's no moral necessity, but if you want to survive as a project moving forward, you'll have less and less velocity compared to projects using LLMs, so you'll eventually shrink and die as a project, because less people will contribute to a project that gets less features and bug fixes.

I don't understand why these projects have such a strong "moral" stance of "no AI ever", and instead they don't deploy LLMs to automatically review PRs based on their own guidelines, so that if the contribution is valuable, it gets through no matter if it was written by an LLM or not.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#86

Post by ZenoArrow »

dist-epoch wrote: post #77
ZenoArrow wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, AI has developed quickly, but let's see it take on a real engineering challenge, rather than regurgitating boilerplate code. Writing device drivers from incomplete specs is much harder than "writing a whole application" where the specs are clearly defined and there's a lot more example code to reference. If you believe in AI so much, and believe that it's unreasonable for postmarketOS to not want to use it, put…

I don't have anything to win either. What does a developer who writes a driver from incomplete specs do? Writes some values in some registers, sees how the device behaves, updates the spec. Rinse and repeat. Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.

> I don't have anything to win either.

Sure you do, you can prove those that doubt your views wrong.

> Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.

Go for it then, you're not putting in any work into it other than giving it a task to do.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#87

Post by dist-epoch »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #86
dist-epoch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have anything to win either. What does a developer who writes a driver from incomplete specs do? Writes some values in some registers, sees how the device behaves, updates the spec. Rinse and repeat. Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.

> I don't have anything to win either. Sure you do, you can prove those that doubt your views wrong. > Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done. Go for it then, you're not putting in any work into it other than giving it a task to do.

I'm sure you know what opportunity cost is

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#88

Post by mftrhu »

fartfeatures wrote: post #59
idiotsecant wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's entirely justified when quality of code matters. They don't want a thousand gallons of unreviewable slop. They want a reasonable amount of code that can be sensibility reviewed.

There are ways to achieve that without a blanket ban, if you read their AI policy it seems more "ethically" motivated. They certainly address this first, with many more words and 7 references. They do go on to address code quality but it is more of an after thought with 0 references, less words and appears lower down the page. The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuter…

> The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on.

Why would declining sales of new smartphones have anything to do with PostMarketOS, which only supports phones more than half a decade old?

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#89

Post by zozbot234 »

mftrhu wrote: post #88
fartfeatures wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are ways to achieve that without a blanket ban, if you read their AI policy it seems more "ethically" motivated. They certainly address this first, with many more words and 7 references. They do go on to address code quality but it is more of an after thought with 0 references, less words and appears lower down the page. The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuter…

> The timing is also suspicious, shortly after publication of this report: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/smartphone-ma ... which forecasts declining smartphone sales meaning less devices for this OS to run on. Why would declining sales of new smartphones have anything to do with PostMarketOS, which only supports phones more than half a decade old?

pmOS does support recent phones, provided that they can be bootloader-unlocked - and that's only a few brands these days.

Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

#90

Post by Blackthorn »

egorfine wrote: post #57
idiotsecant wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project is simply saying what they want. If you choose to ignore that for some weird reason congratulations for being a jerk, I guess.

Can you confirm that continuing to use autocomplete in a code base against the policy of the project does make the person a jerk?

Yes, actually. Knowingly violating the policies of a project while pretending you aren't, so you can continue participating in the fully voluntary project, does make you a jerk.

If you don't like the policies they set, just leave.

I'm willing to bet that every single person on here complaining has zero contributions to PostmarketOS.

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