On 3/10/26 8:23 PM, Kai Krakow wrote: > Am Di., 10. März 2026 um 16:55 Uhr schrieb Michał Górny <[email protected]>:
>> Our "AI policy" [2] covers only direct contributions to Gentoo. At the >> time, we did not consider it appropriate to start restricting what >> packages are added to Gentoo. Still, general rules apply and some of >> the recent packages are starting to raise concerns there. Hence I'm >> looking for your feedback. > > I think we cannot avoid that AI is somehow involved in any commits > ending up in Gentoo, be it ebuilds, or be it packages. I'd argue that > it is almost unavoidable for the common developer to have at least AI > completion running in the code editor. I say "almost" and "common", > because if someone really cares, they certainly *can* avoid that. It is banned by Council voted policy. If we cannot avoid it, that means users do it and then unethically lie and testify to Gentoo, """ This contribution has not been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools, in accordance with the AI policy. """ While it is pedantically true for you to say, it is physically possible people lie to us and not get caught -- that is not an excuse for saying "there is no point having a rule when people could lie and break the rule". And it doesn't mean lack of 100% enforcement means the policy is wrong and should be abolished. We could apply that logic "don't have rules if they can be broken" to several million other parts of life. I leave it as an exercise to the reader to think of some good examples -- I recommend starting with criminal law, personally. > For me, the real question is, how is AI used. From my perspective, you > can do a lot of good, and a lot of bad, and a lot of ugly with it. If it is used at all for contributing Gentoo ebuilds to Gentoo, it is bad because it is unethical to lie to people. [various off-topic advocacy for LLMs, omitted] > LLMs are also really good at writing commit messages for code I > changed. English is not my native language, it helps a lot to get > clear and concise messages with good wording. It still needs manual > review because sometimes LLMs hallucinate the "why" of the change, but > still it's a great tool to save time. This is a MAJOR personal gripe for me as a FOSS developer outside of Gentoo. It drives me genuinely nuts. Absolutely stark raving bonkers. Non native English speakers often have better English than native speakers I know. There's nothing to be ashamed of to begin with. But even if that were not true... The point of a commit message is to put me into the thoughts of the developer who wrote the change. I DO NOT MIND NON-NATIVE WORDING. Broken english or "ungrammatical engrish" is *honest* and tells me how the author thinks. I do NOT want you to butcher and destroy your honest, well-written but grammatically awkward explanations of *communicable intent* with hallucinatory, detail-omitted LLM lies. If you do so anyway my instinct is to tell you "I wish you had the moral integrity to do what non native english speakers have been doing for 20+ years and just told it like it is -- I would have loved to merge your changes". And then ban you from future interactions. I might not act on that instinct, but it *is* my instinct. Either way I'm not merging unethical interactions. [hard to read, repetitive wall of LLM text, omitted] -- Eli Schwartz
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