r/linux • • 1d ago

Desktop Environment / WM News System 76's COSMIC Desktop Environment will no longer accept LLM-generated content in PRs

/r/pop_os/comments/1wuej40/cosmic_projects_will_no_longer_accept/
629 Upvotes

197 comments sorted by

148

u/0riginal-Syn 1d ago edited 1d ago

Like many others the reasoning is simple. It is creating too much load on the reviewers.

It makes sense when you are getting overloaded by crap being submitted for things. Especially when it is for non-prioritized areas. I think they gave a great explanation of the why.

Will it stop LLM from getting in? Absolutely not, but it should slow down the amount of submissions and help the team.

Edited for spelling.

15

u/onceuponalilykiss 1d ago

I think something the internet and popularization/accessibility of digital tools started demonstrating around the 90s/00s is that sometimes the barrier of entry is good, actually. Think of all the mediums where, yes, they were "democratized" like music production, photography, etc. but now there's so much human made slop that it's overwhelming to find the good things. On the other hand it did lead to so many great projects that would have never seen the light of day so overall people agreed it was a good thing.

LLMs are sort of this dialed up to a trillion and we're now forced to consider that this mild annoyance of signal:noise can now become so overwhelming it can just destroy discovery entirely.

8

u/RB5Network 1d ago

I may push back a little on the first point. I don't really think there's much "human slop". If anything I think the really cool part of the internet is all the random shit people are able to share and create with computers. Some of it is objectively bad, but it's rare something isn't interesting nonetheless. I'm all for humans doing shit and sharing it around. Unless it's slurs and verbal abuse and shit.

That said, with you on the LLM point. AI "art" fucking sucks and should be burned at the stake.

0

u/ByronScottJones 9h ago

Linus would disagree with you, if the kernel mailing list is any indication.

-56

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

24

u/0riginal-Syn 1d ago

According to them, they do not. I certainly cannot confirm that.

-31

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/AliceCode 21h ago

Who cares if Linus Torvalds uses it? That only shows that he's a fucking hack.

-1

u/[deleted] 20h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/AliceCode 18h ago

No, I'm not on the linux subreddit, I'm in this thread. I'm not subscribed to the subreddit. I use Linux, but I don't worship Linus Torvalds, I just hate Windows and Mac more.

23

u/berryer 1d ago

The output is a derivative work of everything in the LLM's corpus. Once the legal system actually gets around to enforcing the existing copyright laws, that's a hell of a licensing mess.

30

u/Willybrown93 1d ago

Dignity

-17

u/crwcomposer 1d ago

I'm not saying I like it, but AI assisted coding is quickly becoming the new normal, including at my job. A quick glance at professional developers across social media confirms it. Soon it won't be seen as undignified.

22

u/AliceCode 1d ago

Social media can't tell you anything. It's heavily botted and astroturfed.

-16

u/crwcomposer 1d ago

Sure, if you just trust what the algorithm serves you up. But there are real developers out there that people follow.

12

u/AliceCode 1d ago

Real developers that definitely can't be swayed by a fat check from Anthropic.

-17

u/crwcomposer 1d ago

Do you work for a large company? The kind that employs probably the majority of programmers? I find it hard to believe you haven't seen it for yourself.

If you don't work for a large company then you are overconfident about something that you don't have first-hand experience with.

12

u/AliceCode 1d ago

Oh yeah, I've seen loads of people drink the koolaid. I've also seen their code.

1

u/crwcomposer 1d ago

I didn't say it was a good thing. Just that it was becoming the new normal. And it sounds like your experience doesn't even contradict that.

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u/RatherNott 1d ago

If it becomes the norm, it will be by force, not by choice.

5

u/crow-t-robot-42 1d ago

Yep. Software factories are becoming the norm at bigger companies. I don't like it. It strips the joy from actually solving problems. However, it's definitely becoming a norm.

3

u/hysan 1d ago

I don’t think this matters?

I think a lot of orgs have not realized that LLMs do improve productivity which means more code by every dev. BUT that also means everyone has to increase the amount of time dedicated to reviewing all of their coworkers’ increased output. You’ll need more people to scale the scaled productivity. The gains aren’t free and it’s a simple math problem.

My read of the reason is an explicit acknowledgement of this very problem. Unless they are going to hire more so they can review more, it’s unrealistic for their devs to try and keep this kind of review pace. It sucks but until someone makes a breakthrough on how to scale up code reviews, this is a pretty pragmatic stance.

-1

u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/hysan 1d ago

Hmm let me extend on it. Your question is the lead in to a deeper question that isn’t clear from your post. For example, if you want to get a sense of a timeline on when they might reopen the door, then that one question doesn’t give you enough insight. Leveraging agentic coding well to scale in a way that absorbs public contributions requires capital (to pay for their own LLM uses + whatever is needed to reduce code review burden), time (figuring out both how to use agentic coding individually and in their org structure), human resources (more devs), etc.

I think your post would be better received if you asked a more pointed question about what you want to know. If it really is just wanting to know just this one thing, then it’s kinda worded weirdly and doesn’t chain well of the OP you replied to.

108

u/Cephell 1d ago

At this point I think >every single< open source project will implement a rule like this.

Most AI generated PRs are total garbage and this will not improve, because it's unrelated to the capabilities of the model. It's purely a function of people who SHOULD NOT submit PRs in the first place, suddenly being deluded into thinking that they have the ability to do so. The takeaway is that unless you are smarter than the AI, you cannot use AI properly, so it's a waste of effort for you to try. Current LLM architectures FUNDAMENTALLY cannot replace the human in this way, AI is a tool, and there's a minimum skill level required to operate the tool correctly. You cannot skip the learning steps for yourself.

It's not worth leaving the door open for the 1% of AI generated PRs that are actually decent.

Because of compliance and other legal reason we will NEVER hit the point where open source projects will simply use their own agents to review and merge code without human oversight, that's the future the vibe bros actually want, but that's simply not how liability works. It's the same reason why we will never get truly self driving cars (meaning, you can read a book while the car drives you to your destination).

8

u/yawkat 1d ago

In the OSS projects I work on, many of the main contributors (including myself) are using llms, so a rule rejecting llm code will not work. 

56

u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

It's one thing to use LLMs for assistance, it's another thing to use LLMs because you don't know how to write code

23

u/noobjaish 1d ago

This ^

People always make it a black and white distinction. Sloppy PRs are easily distinguishable

11

u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

LLMs are genuinely useful, for, say, isolating and testing security issues or multiple scenarios, or helping with boilerplate, and the code is useful only if used by a human for reference and/or review.

"Vibe-coding" is when you don't know what you are submitting, straight off claude

(I personally am against even those cases for various reasons, but okay?

4

u/AAdmiral5657 22h ago

Exactly. I use LLMs sometimes to write config files and such. But i know what i am looking at. Thats the difference.

8

u/Zomunieo 1d ago

I do for my projects. But I know my code and how it works, and I’m experienced enough to know where I want it to go. I also have my own rules, written and unwritten, my priorities, my knowledge of project history. I have data that drive by PRs don’t.

Drive by PRs are quite annoying. The cognitive load is high - and often the PRs focus on why they want to fix some nit rather than the impact on users. You second guess yourself. An AI code review often surfaces more problems, then you have even more work.

4

u/Hypfer 22h ago

I believe the spirit of most rules is going to be to reject code that looks like an LLM did it.

Apart from hardliners, I think no one really cares how something came to be, as long as it is effectively identical to what would have happened if a human that cares sat down.

The whole LLM PR debate is a proxy war for the same old problem of FOSS lacking merit filters, which have been lost as a side effect of purging a lot of old toxic patterns from the space.

Our job I believe is to put the friction back in, without pulling the old toxicity back in too.

0

u/CanYouEatThatPizza 1d ago

It's good actually to keep the spam away. Doesn't matter that it doesn't work 100%.

3

u/SanityInAnarchy 1d ago

I don't think compliance is really the problem. Open source projects already frequently ask contributors to sign CLAs. Seems like it should be possible to require anyone submitting those PRs to take on that liability.

I'm also not sure you have to be smarter than AI, and I'm not sure if that's even a meaningful thing to measure, but I agree there's a skill floor, because you need to be able to supervise it. And I think the problem is that it's too easy for slop to shift the burden of that supervision onto the maintainer.

3

u/GolbatsEverywhere 16h ago

Because of compliance and other legal reason we will NEVER hit the point where open source projects will simply use their own agents to review and merge code without human oversight, that's the future the vibe bros actually want, but that's simply not how liability works. It's the same reason why we will never get truly self driving cars (meaning, you can read a book while the car drives you to your destination).

Why would open source projects with no legal entities or legal departments care about liability?

Big projects like systemd already have AI pull request reviews. I have not yet seen any notable projects landing changes without human review, but it's only a matter of time, and probably not long off either. I don't have much experience with AI code review, but AIs are already better than humans at reporting bugs and writing code, and I strongly suspect they are better at code review as well.

2

u/LowOwl4312 22h ago

Idk I have received some good AI-made PRs. They were simple fixes though, not "change 20 files and add 1000 lines" slop

-1

u/sheeproomer 1d ago

You have no idea how things are running already in the normal businesses, but you do you.

Also, the situation is quite more nuanced.

0

u/mrlinkwii 18h ago

Because of compliance and other legal reason we will NEVER hit the point where open source projects will simply use their own agents to review and merge code without human oversight

what legal reasons their has been like 3 legal judgements that AI use is fair use

i have 0 issue with the use of AI , the issue is AI slop

-4

u/nft420nft420 16h ago

This comment sounds like someone yelling at the Wright brothers about how flight is impossible, it will always be impossible, even if it was possible it would be unsafe, no company will ever use it for serious business, etc etc wah wah.

103

u/AestheticalGL 1d ago

you mentioned the word LLM now the bots are gonna come to shill about how their claude boosted their productivity or some bullshit

31

u/Analog_Account 1d ago

BUT MY CLAUDE AGENTS BOOSTED MY PRODUCTIVITY

14

u/AndrewNeo 1d ago

"This is what AI is good for!"

13

u/0riginal-Syn 1d ago

Claude the new "blue pill" for "enhancement"

2

u/Easy-Truck4725 13h ago

The opiate of the masses

-8

u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 1d ago

I didn't use Claude, but I did give a LLM agent a task of converting hundreds of markdown files when I did some work on my personal site. Could've I done it? Yes, in fact I did already years before, it worked but it was a massive chore. (Tooling also wasn't as good but that's another matter entirely). I did inspect the output, and so I even found stuff that hadn't worked for a decade (urgh..). It spared me time and I could focus on getting other things right.

-28

u/furain 1d ago

Truth is, agents CAN easily boost your productivity by 2x or 3x even if you only use them for reviews and checks.

But we're not happy with that, we need 20x, 50x productivity. Or to replace our work altogether.

22

u/RatherNott 1d ago

All the studies I've seen on AI use show no actual gain in productivity, just the perception from the coder that they are more productive.

1

u/blisteringjenkins 23h ago

Yeah this is not true anymore. I am as much of an AI hater as the next guy but here I am sitting basically doing all the work that took me weeks, external contractors and juniors with a few prompts on a $20 subscription. Calling it productivity gains is comically underselling it, we're talking replacing a factory full of woodcarvers with a CnC machine levels of gains here.

Do I like these developments? Fuck no, I hate it, it's the most boring technology ever invented and I too went into CS because I liked coding. But denying it is just cope or ignorance at this point.

-1

u/Ghost_x_Knight 1d ago

Productivity in what type of projects in specific? Some large-scale rewrite projects (example, bun) that would previously take years became possible in a short time due to LLM, and LLM is crucial in mitigating vulnerabilities.

The same non-profit that produced the famous 'no productivity gain, just perception' study in 2025 reported productivity gains in 2026. Though the results are less reliable as many participants now refuse to do most of their work without LLM, as they feel that would be too unproductive.

A recent study found that LLM boosts early-stage professional coding activity by up to 180%, but it translates into only 50% more projects and a 30% increase in software releases. There is no increase in late-stage review and refinement.

There is the aspect of LLM models becoming more powerful (and useful as Linux Torvalds said), and there is project management becoming more optimized to leverage LLM.

-14

u/furain 1d ago

People who believe that haven't updated their opinions since 2024

14

u/RatherNott 1d ago

Personally even if they did actually prove in a more recent study that they increased productivity, I don't think that would outweigh the other problems with their use.

2

u/SanityInAnarchy 1d ago

Of those, I think the community argument (which is what COSMIC is saying here) is the most defensible. It's way too easy for a slop PR to push everything onto the maintainers.

The others are harder. Any tech bubble seems likely to contribute to climate change unless regulated out of it; traditional pre-AI datacenters only started getting efficient after the dotcom crash, so here's hoping the bubble pops soon. And if it really does increase productivity dramatically, open source is a social good anyway, even if (say) written on proprietary operating systems, or on hardware built under questionable working conditions, etc.

If it's ok to cite Youtube, I would strongly recommend How to Anti-AI Better. The TL;DW is that shaming people for a behavior you don't like doesn't get them to change the behavior, it just stops them from talking about it with you.

6

u/RatherNott 1d ago edited 23h ago

Based on what that video suggests, I would say that my posts fall under the 'informing of the dangers' part, which she says is still a good thing worth doing.

Ultimately I'm not sure I fully agree with her thesis, at least in terms of climate change.

I would liken it to the concept of a group of people trapped in a submarine with a limited amount of air, and thus limited amount of time until death. If there's a group in one compartment that is cold and decides to light a small fire for warmth, it'll eventually use up the remaining oxygen before a rescue team can arrive.

There is another option for them; there's some blankets in the storage room, but it's half filled with freezing cold water, and only a couple of people are willing or able enough to go through that to get them (akin to self-hosting a local AI as a form of harm reduction). Thus they ignore the pleas from the other crew mates to just put the fire out (continuing to use corporate AI instead since it's hard or requires powerful hardware to self-host instead, or they don't like how the self-hosted models feel less powerful).

In that scenario, the harm reduction path doesn't seem to work, and ultimately everyone in the sub suffocates. In a way, we're not too far off from that conceptually with climate change; drastic, fundamental changes need to happen on a scale fairly unprecedented for humanity, and it's possible the slower harm reduction path might be too late before too many irreversible domino effects occur.

That may just be the reality that we face, and there's too much human psychology in the way for humanity to act quickly enough to ultimately avoid walking down that path to hell. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Edit: There's also a good comment on that video:

I feel like the "harm reduction" suggestion conflates two structurally different kinds of situations:

  1. the heroin/AIDS or especially sex/STDs describe cases where there's a specific outcome people desire (whether harmful or not) that is largely separate from a significantly more negative optional side effect

  2. "AI" use falls into a somewhat different situation where people desire an outcome that can be achieved in lots of different ways but the specific chosen action is itself harmful, the worst harm is not merely an optional side effect also, the slop generators are largely subsidized by various large companies, so replacing them with something else that provides the same result but doesn't have the harms (e.g. a better search engine or in some cases even a better chatbot) would solve the problem pretty much instantly once it happens moreover, we're not dealing with natural harms here where reduction is the only option, keeping LLMs alive and accessible is a conscious choice that a small number of people make on a regular basis

edit 2:

Also, I really have no qualms with anyone using a self-hosted AI to find bugs in software or even to vibe code their own personal projects, so I guess that's 'harm reduction'. It doesn't contribute to climate change, and doesn't infect FLOSS projects with copyright violations, that would be meaningful harm reduction.

But if someone wants to use AI to generate code to submit to a FLOSS project, and that FLOSS project gets shut down from being sued for copyright violations, then... There is no harm-reduction version of that, they just need to learn to code it themselves if they want to contribute to a project. In that scenario it's not much different from a person having access to a closed source project from a leak and wanting to submit some of that code to a FLOSS project, there is no way to have a harm reduction version of that scenario, they simply cannot submit that copyrighted code, even if it would solve a problem they have.

-1

u/furain 17h ago

Nice goalpost moving buddy.

-2

u/mrlinkwii 18h ago

AI can save up to a years work doing repetitive work , saying AI show no actual gain in productivity is a bit misleading

5

u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

They CAN'T. They just produce more code in place of the human

2

u/CunningRunt 16h ago

How are you measuring productivity here?

-1

u/furain 17h ago

These downvotes are telling me that you people are in for a brutal wake up call. And I can't say I feel sorry, it's wilful ignorance at this point.

I wonder what Linus would have say about your delusions.

3

u/AestheticalGL 16h ago

such a lack of autonomous thinking that you rely on daddy slopvalds to be the source of reason?

0

u/furain 15h ago

As opposed to... you?

15

u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

LLMs for assistance is one thing, LLMs because you feel like it and don't know how to code is the issue here.

Overloaded PRs for silly issues bringing more issues

58

u/aymswick 1d ago

Applause!

30

u/adamkex 1d ago

Tbh this makes a lot of sense. It's software primarily developed by a for-profit company for their operating system. I wouldn't be surprised if they do use some AI themselves given the primarily motive is to save time from low-quality PRs.

39

u/RatherNott 1d ago

According to them, they don't use AI at all.

-45

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

The Linux kernel does though

46

u/Pugs-r-cool 1d ago

They aren’t developing the kernel, so that’s frankly irrelevant.

-44

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

They're happy to use it though

25

u/Pugs-r-cool 1d ago

Using other people’s code that was developed with AI is a different thing from using AI in your own development process.

-31

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

No it isn't. If the concern is code quality it makes no difference at all. If anything, AI code in the kernel should be more concerning to them. Of course, the whole thing is masturbatory grandstanding

17

u/Irverter 1d ago

So according to you, buying a product that had child labor in one of it raw materials is the same as forcing a child to work yourself.

-10

u/tiffanytrashcan 1d ago

Yeah that's been the public opinion for decades now I think.

5

u/NatoBoram 1d ago

Public opinion doesn't really care about child labour in other countries, it's mostly activists that bring it up

12

u/Oblivion__ 1d ago

Why are you purity testing this?

-2

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

What are you even talking about? I'm saying it's fine to use LLMs. That's the opposite of a purity test.

10

u/Oblivion__ 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm referring to your objection to the previous comment

Using other people’s code that was developed with AI is a different thing from using AI in your own development process.

I know you are fine with using LLMs, that's obvious. Cosmic is not, so they are banning those contributions.

Cosmic does not control what code gets accepted into the kernel, so it's outside of the scope for their policy. They are not maintaining the kernel, they are maintaining their DE. Trying to purity test them on "oh well if they are concerned with AI code they should be worried about the kernel" is just whataboutism.

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u/Pugs-r-cool 20h ago

If the concern is code quality it makes no difference at all

The quality of the code you use has no bearing on the quality of the code you write.

AI code in the kernel should be more concerning to them

Whose to say it isn't concerning for them, yet because their name isn't Linus Torvalds they're powerless to do anything about it.

masturbatory grandstanding

says the Top 1% Commenter

18

u/RatherNott 1d ago

And I wish they wouldn't, but switching away from it isn't viable for my needs, as the BSD's and Haiku don't support all the software I need like Linux does. I know I won't be able to prevent it entirely, I'm happy just limiting as much AI code on my system as much as I can while maintaining my workflow.

4

u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

AI help is reviewed by humans thoroughly, not the same as vibe-coding

18

u/Silent-Orbit-7 1d ago

a huge W

6

u/Content-Economics-34 20h ago

Fine, I'll try COSMIC. 🙄

14

u/NotQuiteLoona 1d ago

Can't wait until a war will start in this thread.

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u/gavff64 1d ago

There’s a surprising amount of people around the FOSS community that have no idea how open source software works.

I don’t understand why they can’t see that project maintainers don’t want to review generated slop from people that don’t know what they’re doing all day. It really is a massive waste of time. And I think LLMs in coding can be useful, but the absolute lazy widespread misuse of it sucks.

22

u/Irverter 1d ago

Because people think open source means they're entitled to have any project accept their "contributions".

29

u/RatherNott 1d ago

Personally I applaud the move.

17

u/NotQuiteLoona 1d ago

The same, if to be honest.

1

u/firetruckpilot 14h ago

Why wouldn't you just fork it and create your own?

1

u/teerre 1d ago

It seems the LLM point is moot and the other bulletpoints would already fix the problem

22

u/mmstick Desktop Engineer 1d ago edited 1d ago

They did not. That was the policy over the last 7 months. It just allowed the floodgates to open to being spammed with LLM-generated issues and LLM-generated pull requests containing long-winded walls of text and large quantities of poor quality code. Sifting the good from the bad required a lot of time and genuinely hand-written code by people who put serious effort into contributing was being buried by it.

In fact, there was one regular contributor who outperformed every LLM-generated pull request combined in both quality and output over this timeframe. We are underestimating the capabilities of a professional Rust developer writing Rust code.

-17

u/teerre 1d ago

I dont see how that's possible considering the other rules mention proper issue relevancy and full understanding of the change

But regardless, if that's the case then the new points should be about wall of texts and poor quality code, not LLMs

-8

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

The thing is, it's going to be almost impossible to tell if many PRs have any LLM generated code. It's going to encourage people to lie that none of it is LLM generated.

13

u/berryer 1d ago

It can be pretty obvious when somebody slops a generated PR at you, doesn't understand what it does themselves, and just copy/pastes Claude responses back to every comment you leave. Those people are the actual problem, and this policy makes it way easier to just close the PR on them & move on.

-2

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

You don't need to ban LLMs to do that though. It's banning a thing adjacent to the thing instead of just banning the thing you don't like.

7

u/berryer 1d ago edited 1d ago

That was more in response to it being impossible to tell - IME that's just not the case. I'd imagine the primary reason is that an LLM's outputs are pretty clearly derivative works of its corpus, and they don't want to have to deal with the licensing issues once that shoe drops.

edit: realizing my intial "those people are the actual problem" would cause confusion / seem like goalpost-moving though. Just letting a bit of work frustration leak out, my bad.

-3

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

I don't think that shoe is going to drop. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any court would rule that way. Further, based on how LLMs are capable of producing mathematical proofs that didn't exist before, it's pretty clear that LLMs are capable of novel output.

2

u/pooerh 1d ago

From a person who knows what they're doing and is using an LLM to boost themselves? Potentially. And that's fine.

From a person who has no idea and is using an LLM to do all of the work? There is no chance in hell. Vibe code is very, very obviously distinguishable, the LLM will always focus on the task at hand without much insight into overall architecture, design or the overarching strategy. You tell it to fix something, it will find the thing and fix it. It might implement a function that already exists somewhere, instead of reusing. It might just put an if branch detecting the thing and then execute a fix even though maybe the whole function could benefit from that fix. So on, so forth.

For someone who knows their codebase well, there are obvious tell-tale signs that scream "this was done by someone with no idea". You ask a single question to the committer and the answer will confirm your suspicion 100%.

For the ones that slip pass through this gate? Well, that's good, because it means it's an actual improvement.

-9

u/macromorgan 1d ago

There’s nothing wrong with LLM generated code, so long as 1) you understand the code that an LLM generated and 2) you take personal responsibility for it. Sadly not a lot of vibe coders can do one or both of these things…

16

u/Khardian 1d ago

There is a lot wrong with LLMs.

10

u/RatherNott 1d ago edited 1d ago

Corporate AI contributes to climate change, I'm afraid, so code generated with them is rather counter productive toward having a habitable planet. Using it, and especially paying for it, also contributes toward a 1984 type outcome for society by boosting those companies stocks

Not to mention the future copyright risk from the AI plagiarizing code, where I can imagine large corporations using AI to crawl public FLOSS repos for infringements. If the infringing FLOSS project happened to be a competitor to a corporate product, the corporation could easily use that to sue them into submission.

Allowing it within a project also seems to have pretty drastic consequences on its community.

There's a lot of solid reasons to avoid it, honestly, and it'd be nice if programmers took personal responsibly seriously for the actions they could take to reduce harm to our societies and the planet, in addition to their code.

-1

u/worldarkplace 18h ago

Ah shit here we go... Meat is murder, free Tibet.

-20

u/ABotelho23 1d ago

I'm not sure how they can claim to know what is LLM-generated code.

28

u/Jmc_da_boss 1d ago

Why does every thread about projects doing this have this same stupid comment?

The point is not find all of the LLM content, the point is easily ban and remove the blatant shit

-6

u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

They can already ban and remove bad code. That's what pull requests are for. The criticism is that they've chosen to ban based on tool instead of based on code quality.

15

u/RatherNott 1d ago

Many would argue (including myself) that it isn't just a tool.

They certainly avoid the fate of Bevy with this move.

1

u/radicalwokist 5h ago

Yes, an article whose main source is a dead Nazi. Much credible, very wow.

-17

u/strings___ 1d ago

It’s just a tool. I really don’t care what your personal opinion is about the tools I use. What next, are you going to ban my use of Emacs too? Like, seriously, if you cant stick to the technical merits of patches, you have no business being in the programming profession.

13

u/LuckyHedgehog 1d ago

I don't really care how they do it, telling people to stop submitting bad code helps everyone involved

Can people still use LLMs to generate code? Sure, they just need to put in the effort to clean it up. Unfortunately that bar is too high for most people using LLMs so that's why these rules exist 

-11

u/strings___ 1d ago

You’re arguing my point for me. The point other people are making are not based on the technical merits however.

7

u/somethingrelevant 1d ago

emacs isn't strip mining the internet

-6

u/strings___ 1d ago

This is a very low tier understanding of how LLMs work. It’s rather ironic though you’re chastising machines for learning from source code. It’s the whole point of open source. In short you’re conflating LLM encoding with verbatim code copying which is not the case.

8

u/somethingrelevant 1d ago

I'm not chastising machines for learning from source code, lol. you should go out and learn anything about what AI is doing to the internet

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u/strings___ 1d ago

Again, your knowledge is based on low-tier assumptions. I work with my three DGX Sparks on a daily basis; most of your assumptions don’t apply under that use case.

Instead of projecting your ignorance onto me, maybe you should take your own advice.

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u/somethingrelevant 20h ago

my knowledge is based on reading website owners saying "yeah ai bot scraping is getting so bad we pretty much can't run this website any more". what is a low-tier assumption about that. i'm dying to know

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u/RatherNott 1d ago

I doubt there will be quite as many programmers in the future if the planet isn't as habitable from climate change, of which corporate AI contributes to, unfortunately.

Not to mention the future copyright risk from the AI plagiarizing code, where I can imagine large corporations using AI to crawl public FLOSS repos for infringements. If the infringing FLOSS project happened to be a competitor to a corporate product, the corporation could easily use that to sue them into submission.

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u/strings___ 1d ago

Your argument is based off of huge assumptions. My total LLM usage using three DGX sparks is 30w at max output. Do you know how much the average Linux gaming GPU uses? Hint it way more than 30W. In short, it’s none of anyone’s business how I use my “hydro” .

There’s no evidence LLM encodes code verbatim and you really need to go out of your way to force it to output verbatim code. In which case, it’s no different than manually copying code. Either way because LLMs are hardware-limited, we need more open source research and work on models to be less VRAM bound. This should help democratize the whole thing.

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u/RatherNott 1d ago edited 1d ago

Individual use on a local machine isn't terribly concerning, it's the corporate AI data centers that are concerning. There are currently 5 to 6 billion AI prompts per day. All of those server racks powered by very inefficient local power generators add up.

There’s no evidence LLM encodes code verbatim

I linked to evidence of an AI doing it in my previous comment. Here's a further study: https://arxiv.org/html/2409.13831v1

Conclusion: Our experiment simulated a scenario where individuals obtain a small segment of a copyright protected work and then use current LLMs to generate the subsequent content based on this segment. The results demonstrate that LLMs are capable of generating copyright infringing materials. We identified four factors that influence LLMs’ propensity to output infringing content, with the scale of parameters and maximum output length having a significant impact. Additionally, we found that iterative prompting enables LLMs to generate more content that could potentially constitute copyright infringement. However, after a certain number of iterations (for instance, the third output in our experiment), the LLMs began to produce content entirely dissimilar to the original material.

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u/strings___ 1d ago

But your assumptions put everyone into one bucket of corporate users, which is not the case. In fact, the majority of local LLM users like myself all run Linux, and we are tired of the low tier hive mind groupthink related to LLMs. Just look at the downvotes I get for pointing out the bias.

I’ve already pointed out that given a very specific prompt you can generate verbatim code. But you would go out of your way to do it. It’s no different than making the LLM read fresh code and reusing it verbatim. Or just copying it manually. You seriously need to force it to do this.

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u/RatherNott 1d ago

Most AI use is not on local machines, they are done on corporate data centers. If you only use local LLMs on your own computer, then the issues specific to corporate LLMs do not apply to your usage.

That is not to say there is no issue with local LLMs; they currently have no ethically trained model (the ones that claim to be ethical often don't live up to said claim), and because of that, they still introduce a copyright threat to FLOSS projects, both of which are legitimate reasons to not accept PRs from them, at least for now.

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u/EmptyRedData 1d ago

"The fate of bevy" lol

https://bevy.org/news/bevys-sixth-birthday/#ai-policy

I'm sure this anti-AI schtick a subset of devs are taking will work great in the long run /s

0

u/Zaphoidx 1d ago

Because it's impossible to have a nuanced discussion about LLM usage nowadays.

Take a look at all the threads in this comments section mentioning any sort of LLM use is an instant negative and claiming it doesn't improve productivity at all.

Having an LLM churn through code that you've planned and that you review is fine imo. You're rubber stamping it before sending the PR off to others.

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u/ABotelho23 1d ago

I mean that's not what any of the post says..

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u/Jmc_da_boss 1d ago

That's fine, you can read intent past the words on the page

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u/ABotelho23 1d ago

This is not some random hobby project. This is a company. They should be as clear as possible.

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u/Jmc_da_boss 1d ago

Idk what to tell you, That is not a requirement

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u/0riginal-Syn 1d ago

They don't. It is a policy to help the load. Will it stop it all? No. But it absolutely helps.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/sheeproomer 1d ago

I happen to have a comment reviewer agent pre commit for exactly that code should be written mostly self documenting and every comment has to have a justification as well only 2 or 3 lines long tops.

The result is that these instances have learned the hard way to do that proper ly and now write according to your standard mostly.

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u/calinet6 1d ago

That’s a shame, Cosmic has so many bugs they could probably use the LLMs help more than anyone /s

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u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

Looks like the downvoters didn't notice the '/s'

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u/calinet6 17h ago

Yeah the /s was only half true. Cosmic needs a ton of QA and they’re not keeping up. The joke is that LLMs would help. I deserve the downvotes, it’s a shitty thing to say.

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u/[deleted] 15h ago

[deleted]

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u/calinet6 13h ago

My sweet summer child, I have fifteen years of Reddit karma. I will own my bad takes.

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u/BeginningEcho4983 12h ago

Good 😊👍 all the best

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u/Shad0wAVM 1d ago

Increasingly hard to detect, specially in small and directed fixes. Not sure how this will hold.

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u/adamkex 1d ago

Realistically I don't believe it's an issue if a small fix that's easy to review is AI assisted.

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u/Shad0wAVM 1d ago

Agree with that

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u/UnsafePantomime 1d ago

I don't think it's about detecting it tbh. I don't think a nice quality LLM pr is going to be rejected.

Like most rules, these are at the discretion of the people applying them.

This is a tool to avoid slop. Lots of open source projects are being hammered by it. A PR needs an owner and an LLM or vibe coder cannot be owners.

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u/worldarkplace 18h ago

It's a terminology thing you say? But why not take the pic from Debian where it is allowed as long as you know what you are doing and you take responsibility? Maybe a reputation system for contributors like the AUR?

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u/Plebbit-User 1d ago edited 1d ago

As much as I want to applaud this... I've been waiting ages for HDR support. It's the sole thing stopping me from using Cosmic.

I don't care how 'human' it is, just get it out please. I'm sick of Plasma. Between HDR support, Wayland issues and Nvidia's drivers I think people really underestimate how many people are giving Linux their first shot and going right back to Windows because of all the issues/lacking features.

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u/mmstick Desktop Engineer 1d ago edited 1d ago

Lack of HDR in a recently built-from-scratch DE that is not even a year out of its first release into an open source ecosystem that barely even supports HDR has nothing to do with banning LLM use today. HDR has been on the roadmap for after the Vulkan renderer is implemented in the compositor and that day will come soon. It takes time to do things correctly and I would argue that COSMIC is already accelerated quite massively by Rust.

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u/HearMeOut-13 1d ago

No need for LLM Slop when 90% of your DE is human slop with that horrid mouse cursor rendering 🥱

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u/RatherNott 1d ago

That seems like a very negative response. You appear to have come in here just to dunk on Cosmic.

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u/HearMeOut-13 1d ago

Maybe they should work on making their DE work better instead of trying to deflect the blame onto LLMs. But what do i know, i just happened to have used their DE for a bit over half a year now on both my home and work computer, and yet keep being forced to switch back to KDE because of how annoying the bugs they have are.

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u/somethingrelevant 1d ago

Maybe they should work on making their DE work better instead of trying to deflect the blame onto LLMs

maybe they should do the thing they're already doing instead of this thing i imagined them doing

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u/_risho_ 1d ago

no one is forcing you to do anything. no one forced you to use it and no one is forcing you to stop using it. if you don't like it, don't use it. there is no reason to shit on people who have put thousands of hours of work into something and gave it away for free.

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u/HearMeOut-13 1d ago

If everyone stopped complaining about things they arent forced to use reviews would literally disappear. Reviews only exist for things people choose to use.

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u/_risho_ 1d ago

there are ways to critique things that are productive and ways to critique things that are counter productive. you are choosing to be counter productive. this is not useful and it helps no one. all you are doing is lowering the morale of people who have spent years pouring their heart and soul into something. if you actually want to help improve things consider filing bug reports and pointing out friction points instead of insulting people and complaining.

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u/HearMeOut-13 1d ago

Do you think my first reaction was to call them 90% human slop cause i haven't tried all of the above? Or perhaps im tired of trying when they arent listening

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u/_risho_ 1d ago

if you arent happy with it then just don't use it. it's really not that hard.

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u/HearMeOut-13 1d ago

As i said, if that was how the world worked, there would be no such thing as "reviews"

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u/SomnambulicSojourner 1d ago

I've been using Cosmic for well over a year on my laptop (which I use 4-8 hours most weekdays) and I've encountered fairly few bugs, even when it was an alpha. Not saying there haven't been a few, but there haven't been any that have made me consider switching DE's. I quite enjoy Cosmic. KDE was previously my DE of choice.

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 1d ago

Even AI generated security fixes? 

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u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

As if they ever fixed actual security issues.

Yes, ai can help in diagnosing and isolating the cause, compiling better data on the issues. But not in fixing.

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 1d ago

Are you serious? If so, you obviously do not work in the field at all. 

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u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago

"it's obvious...." You're deluded.

I know what I am talking about, based on MY experience

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u/FriendlyKillerCroc 1d ago

Your experience is not lining up with the reality of the entire field. Sorry to tell you. 

-2

u/Leprecon 21h ago

It is kind of funny watching lots of people say that AI is not helpful in coding and doesn't actually produce anything of value. I feel like anyone working professionally knows that AI's are very useful.

-1

u/Top-Rub-4670 12h ago

Lol come on you're either extremely out of touch or arguing in bad faith. I don't like LLMs and I agree with cosmic to ban them, but they most definitely can fix code. Whether they make mistake or not isn't relevant, your assertion is that they can't fix issues which is demonstrably false.

Go ask even the dumbest LLM to find and fix security flaws in this C code, and it will do it.

int main() { char buffer[8]; char text = "Hello World!!!"; strcpy(buffer, text); text[99] = 'a'; return 0; }

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u/BeginningEcho4983 11h ago

They can. Should you trust blindly? No

-2

u/MojitoBurrito-AE 12h ago

Banning 100% AI generated unreviewed slop, fine. Completely banning LLM generated content is just stupid. Anyone that works in the industry knows this is the direction moving forward. Any developer who isn't reviewing their LLM output is just a bad developer.

•

u/silon 35m ago

I agree, but if the 90%+ submitters aren't reviewing the LLM output critically, this is the only short term solution.

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u/worldarkplace 1d ago

Oh well, another one bites the dust.

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u/anto77_butt_kinkier 1d ago

Lmao, you seem to think this will somehow be detrimental to them in some form. This will just cut down on the amount of low-quality slop filled PRs written by people who thinks prompting an LLM makes them a software dev.

If they were previously accepting it, and theyve decided to stop accepting it, then clearly they don't like the low-quality slop-code that LLMs shit out.

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u/just_a_random_guy733 1d ago

Asahi Linux's anti-LLM policies have been detrimental to them. They're still struggling with M3 support three years later, meanwhile Gravity Linux and Aurora Silicon have M3, M4, and M5 booting thanks to LLM-accelerated development.

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u/BeginningEcho4983 1d ago
  1. It's not LLM-accelerated development.
  2. You haven't really skillfully looked into other LLM-codes sources have you?

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u/anto77_butt_kinkier 1d ago

Cool story bro, does it potentially also have anything to do with the focus of the distros, the dev teams, the people leading it, or the skill of the devs? Or is it a binary kind of thing where a company either uses AI and get mad stonks, and another company doesn't use AI and the goes down the drain? Because honestly these anecdotes are nice and all, but two relatively small distro teams having different results proves literally nothing (aside from proving that different things are, in fact, different... Not that that needed proving)

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u/just_a_random_guy733 1d ago

Yeah, if you look into it, the Gravity devs admit the Asahi devs are more skilled individually. They've said as such multiple times. Asahi has the experience, the skills, and yet they're getting outclassed in output by vibe coders. It's a sign of the times.

-6

u/noisyboy 1d ago

Pop!_OS lost me when they just stayed stuck to an older version of Ubuntu and put in all their efforts behind Cosmic which I don't think a lot of people use (at least compared to Gnome / KDE). I have nothing against it and wish them the best with it but I would rather stay updated at an overall distro level.

Moved to Fedora + KDE and no regrets. Awesome experience.

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u/RatherNott 1d ago edited 1d ago

I'm also not a fan of what POP bases itself on. However thankfully COSMIC is now available on many other distros, including Fedora under the Cosmic fedora spin.

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u/user9ec19 1d ago

Why dont they have an LLM triaging the LLM PRs? Some of them are probably useful. You could also make a todo list for LLMs and people can then donate their tokens.

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u/unixmachine 1d ago

They'll be ostracized. Any project that jumps on this bandwagon of avoiding content generated by LLMs will end up without new contributors.

You don't see many people excited about COSMIC, it will ultimately be developed exclusively by the System76 developers.

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u/silencer_ar 1d ago

OSS lived several decades without LLMs, it'll be fine.

0

u/MojitoBurrito-AE 12h ago

And roads existed for 1000s of years before cars.

-7

u/Ghost_x_Knight 1d ago

With the current trajectory, it would be difficult for projects to find high-level maintainers who are against LLM code down the road. In the current pipeline of industry developers and computer science graduates, LLM coding is a basic skill. That being said, professionals using LLM to research and work faster is far more different than random contributors spamming vibe code they don't understand.

-1

u/unixmachine 17h ago

LLMs didn't exist, and it wasn't the industry standard. New developers will already be using these tools. Companies that contribute to Linux will use these tools, so they will look for projects that accept them.

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u/ElectronWill 20h ago

Many OSS projects dislike LLM because of slop and other issues. They're clearly NOT alone

1

u/unixmachine 17h ago

Bad code has always existed. What most of these projects aren't doing is having a decent policy for reviewing and accepting PRs, they aren't creating filters and mechanisms. They aren't making an effort to solve the problem.

I personally think this is more of a political issue than a technical one.

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u/InstanceTurbulent719 1d ago

they're basically just denying low effort PRs, which is nice but not solving anything because someday their trusted contributors will stop contributing code, and while they can forbid their own employees from using llm generated code, you're not gonna be able to do that with the broader community

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u/AcostaJA 1d ago

This it's just an advertising stunt, to "farm aura" among AI haters, as most it's user base are independent coders or enthusiast.

3

u/novafunc 1d ago

I don't think so. They've "allowed it" up until now, provided the code was of good quality.

They were actually getting a little flak on Mastodon because they said "I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings" towards those this would affect. Most people on Mastodon are all for bullying and hurting anyone who don't completely oppose AI.