* Prefer an issue over a PR (after iterating on the issue, either you or the maintainer can use it as a prompt)
* Only open a PR if the review effort is less than the implementation effort.
Whether the latter is feasible depends on the project, but in one of the projects I'm involved in it's fairly obvious: it's a package manager where the work is typically verifying dependencies and constraints; links to upstream commits etc are a great shortcut for reviewers.
The open source world has already been ripped off by AI the last thing they need is for AI to pollute the pedigree of the codebase.
Do you think your worldview is still a reasonable one under those conditions?
Maybe one day it will be.. And then people can reevaluate their stance then. Until that time, it's entirely reasonable to hold the position that you jhust don't
This is especially true with how LLM generated code may affect licensing and other things. There's a lot of unknowns there and it's entirely reasonable to not what to risk your projects license over some contributions.
I use them all the time at work because, rightly or wrongly, my company has decided that's the direction they want to go.
For open source, I'm not going to make that choice for them. If they explicitly allow for LLM generated code, then I'll use it, but if not I'm not going to assume that the project maintainers are willing to deal with the potential issues it creates.
For my own open source projects, I'm not interested in using LLM generated code. I mostly work on open source projects that I enjoy or in a specific area that I want to learn more about. The fact that it's functional software is great, but is only one of many goals of the project. AI generated code runs counter to all the other goals I have.
That seems like a win-win in a sense: let the agentic coders do their thing, and the artisanal coders do their thing, and we'll see who wins in the long run.
Prompts from issue text makes a lot of sense.
But the maintainers can use AI too, for their reviewing.
>No big rewrites or anything crazy
I think those are the key points why they've been welcomed.
And I would say especially for operating systems if it gets any adoption irregular contributions are pretty legit. E.g. when someone wants just one specific piece of hardware supported that no one else has or needs without being employed by the vendor.
Potential long time contributor is somebody who was already asking annoying questions in the irc channel for a few months and helped with other stuff before shooting off th e PR. If the PR is the first time you hear from a person -- that's pretty drive-by ish.
I always provided well-documented PRs with a narrow scope and an obvious purpose.
Not to mention LLMs can be annoying, too. Demand this, and you'll only be inviting bots to pester devs on IRC.
Drive-by folks tend to blindly fix the issue they care about, without regard to how/whether it fits into the overall project direction
Wouldn't an agent run by a maintainer require the same scrutiny? An agent is imo "someone else" and not a trusted maintainer.
That being said, to outright ban a technology in 2026 on pure "vibes" is not something I'd say is reasonable. Others have already commented that it's likely unenforceable, but I'd also say it's unreasonable for the sake of utility. It leaves stuff on the table in a time where they really shouldn't. Things like documentation tracking, regression tracking, security, feature parity, etc. can all be enhanced with carefully orchestrated assistance. To simply ban this is ... a choice, I guess. But it's not reasonable, in my book. It's like saying we won't use ci/cd, because it's automated stuff, we're purely manual here.
I think a lot of projects will find ways to adapt. Create good guidelines, help the community to use the best tools for the best tasks, and use automation wherever it makes sense.
At the end of the day slop is slop. You can always refuse to even look at something if you don't like the presentation. Or if the code is a mess. Or if it doesn't follow conventions. Or if a PR is +203323 lines, and so on. But attaching "LLMs aka AI" to the reasoning only invites drama, if anything it makes the effort of distinguishing good content from good looking content even harder, and so on. In the long run it won't be viable. If there's a good way to optimise a piece of code, it won't matter where that optimisation came from, as long as it can be proved it's good.
tl;dr; focus on better verification instead of better identification; prove that a change is good instead of focusing where it came from; test, learn and adapt. Dogma was never good.
But you're right it's probably unenforceable. They will probably end up accepting PRs which were written with LLM assistance, but if they do it will be because it's well-written code that the contributor can explain in a way that doesn't sound to the maintainers like an LLM is answering their questions. And maybe at that point the community as a whole would have less to worry about - if we're still assuming that we're not setting ourselves up for horrible licence violation problems in the future when it turns out an LLM spat out something verbatim from a GPLed project.
In my experience these things are very easily fixable by ai, I just ask it to follow the patterns found and conventions used in the code and it does that pretty well.
Still haven't found a good way to keep it on course other than "Hey, remember that thing that you're required to do? Still do that please."
Off the shelf agentic coding tools should be doing this for you.
Once outside contributions are rejected by default, the maintainers can of course choose whether or not to use LLMs or not.
I do think that it is a misconception that OSS software needs to "viable". OSS maintainers can have many motivations to build something, and just shipping a product might not be at the top of that list at all, and they certainly don't have that obligation. Personally, I use OSS as a way to build and design software with a level of gold plating that is not possible in most work settings, for the feeling that _I_ built something, and the pure joy of coding - using LLMs to write code would work directly against those goals. Whether LLMs are essential in more competitive environments is also something that there are mixed opinions on, but in those cases being dogmatic is certainly more risky.
To outright accept LLM contributions would be as much "pure vibes" as banning it.
The thing is, those that maintain open source projects have to make a decision where they want to spend their time. It's open source, they are not being paid for it, they should and will decide what it acceptable and what is not.
If you dislike it, you are free to fork it and make a "LLM's welcome" fork. If, as you imply, the LLM contributions are invaluable, your fork should eventually become the better choice.
Or you can complain to the void that open source maintainers don't want to deal with low effort vibe coded bullshit PRs.
Most of all, I’m sick of the patronising “don’t forget that you can fork the project!” What’s the point of saying this? We all know. Nobody needs to be reminded. Nobody isn’t aware. You aren’t being clever. You aren’t adding anything to the conversation. You’re being snarky.
Not directly, but that's the implication.
I just did not pretend that was not the implication.
> always come back to this point is so…American
I am not American.
To be frank, this was the most insulting thing someone ever told me online. Congratulations. I feel insulted. You win this one.
> If you aren’t interested in discussing the merits of the decision, don’t bother joining the conversation.
I will join whatever conversation I want, and to my desires I adressed the merits of the discussion perfectly.
You are not the judge here, your opinion is as meaningless as mine.
> Most of all, I’m sick of the patronising “don’t forget that you can fork the project!” What’s the point of saying this?
That sounds like a "you" problem. You will be sick of it until the end of time, because that's the final right answer to any complaints of open source project governance.
> You aren’t adding anything to the conversation. You’re being snarky.
I disagree. In fact, I contributed more than you. I adressed arguments. You went on a whinging session about me.
The response to a large enough amount of data is always vibes. You cannot analyze it all so you offload it to your intuition.
> It leaves stuff on the table in a time where they really shouldn't. Things like documentation tracking, regression tracking, security, feature parity, etc. can all be enhanced with carefully orchestrated assistance.
What’s stopping the maintainers themselves from doing just that? Nothing.
Producing it through their own pipeline means they don’t have to guess at the intentions of someone else.
Maintainers just doing it themselves is just the logical conclusion. Why go through the process of vetting the contribution of some random person who says that they’ve used AI “a little” to check if it was maybe really 90%, whether they have ulterior motives... just do it yourself.
Maintainers could just accept feature requests, point their own agents at them using donated compute, and skip the whole review dance. You get code that actually matches the project's style and conventions, and nobody has to spend time cleaning up after a stranger's slightly-off take on how things should work.
Secondly, it would seem that such contributions would contribute little value, if the maintainers have to write up the detailed plans by themselves, basically have to do all the work to implement the change by themselves.