I saw a wild take where someone said distributions are fascist for using systemd because systemd now uses Claude for code review.
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@ariadne honestly i don't have the resources to ensure that every part of my stack is untainted and i've slowly made peace with this. I expect software quality to degrade, and I'm keeping that largely to the sphere outside my control, although I do try to keep make a note of projects which are not doing that (https://codeberg.org/brib/slopfree-software-index).
But I haven't made peace with working with code which has been slop generated without hefty hazard pay. I used to love the idea of open source as a digital commons and really wanted to contribute to it, but the recent sloppification has really crushed my dreams in this area
@brib fwiw, pkgconf does not allow agents to work autonomously in our tree as a matter of policy:
pkgconf/CONTRIBUTING.md at master · pkgconf/pkgconf
package compiler and linker metadata toolkit. Contribute to pkgconf/pkgconf development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub (github.com)
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I saw a wild take where someone said distributions are fascist for using systemd because systemd now uses Claude for code review.
okay. fine, I guess.
but if we are rejecting dependencies that use AI tooling, where do we go?
seriously. where do we go?
if the Linux kernel is using AI tools for codegen, then where do we go?
FreeBSD? I would put money on it that they use AI tools.
OpenBSD? NetBSD? HURD?
do we hard fork every dependency that is now tainted? do we even have the resources to do it?
FreeBSD and Illumos are the only ones reasonably close in the tech tree and I suspect both use AI tools too, as their development, like Linux, is driven by capital.
@ariadne yeah, its looks like more and more code it going to be tainted or produced by LLMs in some way. It seems unavoidable, so I guess we need more ergonomic tools for safely running untrusted code to protect as much as is possible from its flaws. But, I think even before there were LLMs this was the case. I haven't audited all of the code my computer runs and some is very flawed I'm sure.
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@thesamesam @bluca @lanodan i guess to me, it feels unnatural and jarring to argue with a chatbot in a code review.
but that is far less harmful than dealing with changesets where the author does not even fucking know what he is submitting and cannot defend his work.
*that* is true misery as a maintainer.
@ariadne @thesamesam @bluca @lanodan The end-user should always be responsible for what they deliver, no matter the tools. Then any excuses like "AI wrote it" would not have any rights to defend the user.
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I saw a wild take where someone said distributions are fascist for using systemd because systemd now uses Claude for code review.
okay. fine, I guess.
but if we are rejecting dependencies that use AI tooling, where do we go?
seriously. where do we go?
if the Linux kernel is using AI tools for codegen, then where do we go?
FreeBSD? I would put money on it that they use AI tools.
OpenBSD? NetBSD? HURD?
do we hard fork every dependency that is now tainted? do we even have the resources to do it?
FreeBSD and Illumos are the only ones reasonably close in the tech tree and I suspect both use AI tools too, as their development, like Linux, is driven by capital.
@ariadne well, as a developer who has been writing linux kernel code since back in about 2001 or so (actually I think it was something alsa/bluetooth related so probably user space at that point, but … I remember digging deep) - I don’t think it’s feasible to continue OSS without making use of gen AI in development.
Its like saying we can’t use C, everything has to be ASM.
That doesn’t mean developers don’t need to read or understand the code anymore before committing. But a hard ban? Idk.
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@ariadne @thesamesam @bluca @lanodan The end-user should always be responsible for what they deliver, no matter the tools. Then any excuses like "AI wrote it" would not have any rights to defend the user.
@aronowski @thesamesam @bluca @lanodan yes, that is basically the pkgconf contribution policy in a nutshell.
we have taken some steps to tell agentic tools to fuck off though, because i do not want to deal with it
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@ariadne it's protestantism but swapping the god from the ethereal one to "reason". if you are bad you are tainted permanently and must stone; if they stopped using AI tools it would also not be enough because they are "tainted".
this pattern repeats over and over from people who unlearned one piece but didn't deprogram the religious dogmatic patterns, and you end up here.
is Linux foundation funding the destruction of jobs, removing human contributions, destroying the world with debt, any of that? of course not! but it's still dogma.
I don't have a good answer to this, just to remind people what the actual goals and actions of orgs are and hope they listen.
@omnirabbit @ariadne I'm not sure. Cory Doctorow had a well-known post a month or so ago where he described a hard anti-LLM stance as "purity culture", and that produced a significant backlash, with people saying that the moral issue in this case was clear enough to justify complete abstinence. But I guess that doesn't necessarily extend to considering non-abstaining dependencies as tainted.
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@omnirabbit @ariadne I'm not sure. Cory Doctorow had a well-known post a month or so ago where he described a hard anti-LLM stance as "purity culture", and that produced a significant backlash, with people saying that the moral issue in this case was clear enough to justify complete abstinence. But I guess that doesn't necessarily extend to considering non-abstaining dependencies as tainted.
@omnirabbit @ariadne Your argument resonates with me, because I grew up immersed in evangelicalism, so I realize that I still need to deprogram the broader religious dogmatic patterns. But then you have people, especialy here on fedi, who are absolutely certain that using LLMs is bad and that the analogy to religious purity is wrong.
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@ariadne @distractions i feel like the decades we've managed already are worth something.
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I saw a wild take where someone said distributions are fascist for using systemd because systemd now uses Claude for code review.
okay. fine, I guess.
but if we are rejecting dependencies that use AI tooling, where do we go?
seriously. where do we go?
if the Linux kernel is using AI tools for codegen, then where do we go?
FreeBSD? I would put money on it that they use AI tools.
OpenBSD? NetBSD? HURD?
do we hard fork every dependency that is now tainted? do we even have the resources to do it?
FreeBSD and Illumos are the only ones reasonably close in the tech tree and I suspect both use AI tools too, as their development, like Linux, is driven by capital.
@ariadne i do wonder what a path away from this (that isn't "everyone agrees that doing that is bad") looks like
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> FreeBSD? I would put money on it that they use AI tools.
As of September they were working on a policy -- to ban it.
FreeBSD Project isn't ready to let AI commit code just yet
: But it's OK to use it for docs and translations
(www.theregister.com)
@lproven they may not allow agentic development, but i guarantee you there are people using AI tools to develop changesets.
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@ariadne well, because the world already has been changed. That’s a historic hard fact. Pretending it hasn’t won’t stop the wheel from turning. Anyone can set up a new project on GitHub (or CodeBerg for that matter) and put anything up there, and if it somehow does the trick, people won’t care how it does. It’s sad, but that’s how things progress.
I believe it more worthwhile to harden our processes **around** and with gAI, not against it. Because the train will roll.
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