Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:36 Sponsor: TuxCare
01:46 KDE’s AI policy
06:42 Existing AI policies
10:06 Going further on AI
12:58 My stance on AI
17:05 FOSS projects: yes or no to AI?
28:02 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computer
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:36 Sponsor: TuxCare
01:46 KDE’s AI policy
06:42 Existing AI policies
10:06 Going further on AI
12:58 My stance on AI
17:05 FOSS projects: yes or no to AI?
28:02 Sponsor: Tuxedo Computer
This was an issue in the computer science field well before LLMs, though (like in many areas) they did pour gas on the fire.
TBH I think it’s more of an issue for paid software. Manpower and burnout is the bottleneck for FOSS projects, and contributions are largely thankless, hence I think amongst the people who do contribute, there will be more of an interest in truly learning the codebase.
Multiple FOSS projects have been complaining over the last year or so that they are getting swamped with LLM-generate PRs that are often low-quality, but still require a similar amount of time to review. LLMs are shifting extremely lited FOSS core maintainer capacity away from development and into time-wasting code reviews with a high rejection rate.
Well, yes, and that’s exactly what the KDE policy is addressing. They’re saying “we are going to reject vibecoded PRs, unconditionally; so don’t bother submitting them.”
The biggest contributor to the backlash of the proposed policy was the additional aspect explicitly not requiring AI used in a PR to be disclosed, regardless of its quality (and which is unrelated to the ability to quickly reject obvious slop PRs).
There was some discussion on that still. Some people wanted to avoid having AI companies basically get free advertisements in PRs.
Personally I thought that was a nonsensical argument from them, as they could’ve just put in the policy to declare that AI was used, but just not mention the specific one. Better yet, IMO, would’ve been to ban all non-self hosted AI use, which basically cuts out all the corporate AI’s.
Though even with the self hosted models available, the ethical and copyright risk remains, so I’d still have personally opted for a total ban.
Well that was also discussed, the person who suggested not having an AI disclosure was against it being used for advertising, but was also open to having a general one that didn’t allow the company/model. Not sure that discussion has concluded yet btw.
The other devs were generally against any form of disclosure, saying that they didn’t want to ‘shame’ developers who used it.
The discussion was locked and then removed from public view due to public backlash.