My implied argument is not so much that "because llm was used, then llm must be used."
The original argument proposed by the author is essentially distilled into, "because llm could be used, we must no longer accept public contributions."
Which is, in my opinion, a disproportional and misguided overreaction. The llm was apparently good enough to do the byte for byte replica, so we know that it can be used (within the context of ladybird) in a way that's apparently acceptable to the maintainers.
To attempt to get more precise, argument is that "closing the gates" is moving in the wrong direction against progress, and a signals a potentially net negative impact to the ladybird project.
I don't have a fully formed thesis, it's a lot of vibes. It just feels wrong. I'm willing to acknowledge that, much like the overreaction that I'm calling out, I could be experiencing a similar kind of conservative gut reaction to the changing of the open source community that unsettles me.
Well see how it all shakes out. Right now the topic is so charged and we don't have a good suite of tools and heuristics for the new world, that were bound to see the gamut of reactions.
This seems fair to me: numerous developers would love to put "contributed to the Ladybird project" on their curriculum vitaes, and AI tools can now make this within the reach of a huge number of people.
But the Ladybird project needs more than just working-code, something that AI can easily produce: they need code that is understood and maintainable by the person who submitted it.
Not only does AI-generated code guarantee this understanding and maintenance significantly less than before, but the developers increasingly need to get through an avalanche of AI-generated pull requests rather than, say, code new features.
I would prefer projects to be developed in the open: but when developing in the open makes the code checking gets exponentially harder, and the chance of the submitters sticking around becomes significantly lower, then I can at least understand.
When the dam starts to overflow, then something needs to be done.
It's not unreasonable to feel conflicted about this, but at the same time, I wonder if they're starting to burn out on code review.
Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball.