It's not the sky that's falling; it's the value of an SWE's labor.
Fun while it lasted, huh?
PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
91–100 of 116 posts
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Right now, their wiki page on device support [0] lists zero actual devices as "fully supported":
> These are the most supported devices, maintained by at least 2 people and have the functions you expect from the device running its normal OS, such as calling on a phone, working audio, and a functional UI.
> Besides QEMU devices, this is currently empty. The ports we had here earlier weren't as reliable as we would have liked. We plan to add new devices here with a higher standard.
The most recent smartphone in the Community section of that page is the Fairphone 4, released half a decade ago, in 2021. Pixel devices can trivially be bootloader unlocked, but that doesn't make the work that goes into supporting them much easier: the latest device in Testing is the 6a/6 Pro, from 2022, and its device page lists all the features but the most basic (touchscreen, flash, internal storage) as "Untested".
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
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]
I don't think you understand what the job entails, if you think these are the best tools
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely. But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. Asking stackoverflow and waiting for hours to get my question closed down instead of asking LLM? No way.
> But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. And doesn't that bother you a little? If you listen to podcasts, check out this podcast episode: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/flying-too-... It is about Air France 447, but also draws parallels to AI and self-driving cars
Look, every medicine is a poison as well. Every single byte of code I commit I fully understand. I am strongly against slop.
However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't work on open source stuff but I work at a financial institution and genai has been a huge productivity boost. I can easily write 2x - 5x more code than before genai.
Do you bring home 2x-5x more money every month then? Does your company make 2x 5x more profits? The vibecoder paradox, everyone is 10x as productive, no one can show even a 1.2x increase in anything (besides bot generated comments, traffick and other background noise)
2x productivity will never result in 2x profit unless you somehow monopolize the productivity gain. Better tools can even result in negative profit gains. It's pretty much econ 101.
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could AI write a highly specific camera driver or GPU driver, without any documentation at all?
Probably not and why would it need such constraint? Not even humans can do that. Documentation needs to at least be reverse-engineered and understood before implementation.
Because these are the major types of problems that pmOS solves?
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
compared to what other projects?
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
Haha, are you trying to suggest you'll have lost much by putting an AI tool to the test? You seem to think it's powerful enough to do the work of porting Alpine Linux (or equivalent) to new hardware without human intervention (beyond the initial prompt), what exactly are you losing by trying this out? It's not your time, as you would have spent less time on giving a simple instruction to an AI tool than you spent in talking to me.
Perhaps the reality is that you know AI needs more hand-holding than this, and the tools aren't up to the task you're thinking of setting them.
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#99Very happy to see PostmarketOS take an uncompromising stance and also providing justification for it.
Agreed. I would have chosen differently, but I appreciate the policy is unambiguous and explained succinctly with references.
Some people enjoy the outcome, others enjoy the process.
I find the criticism interesting. It's like one restaurant saying they'll use only electric stoves for the climate, then chefs all over the world calling them stupid naive for it.
It's like ethical arguments rationalizing local behavior are automatically interpreted as a global attack that has to be rejected.
Re: PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. And doesn't that bother you a little? If you listen to podcasts, check out this podcast episode: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/flying-too-... It is about Air France 447, but also draws parallels to AI and self-driving cars
Look, every medicine is a poison as well. Every single byte of code I commit I fully understand. I am strongly against slop. However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.
> However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.
That's not your only option.
What you're meant to do is understand the tools you're using well enough to not need to ask for help from anyone or anything else. Stack Overflow is useful, but it's a learning tool. If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code, it's no wonder that you have taken to AI, because it's just a slightly more convenient form of that.