On Fri, May 15, 2026 at 11:20 AM Ludovic Courtès <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hello Guix! > > I am submitting GCD 008: “Standing up for human crafting” (draft > attached).
My comments are based on reading the most recent revision, 6f3990db8e. Large Language Models are clearly more than stochastic text generators. One recent application was solving the Erdős Unit Distance Problem [0], a problem that had challenged mathematicians for 80 years. To achieve consensus a GCD motivation should either be fairly balanced or narrowly focused on the project. I would prefer the latter. One expressed concern for generative AI is over datacenter energy and water use. The Guix project currently employs multiple large compute clusters running tens of thousands of builds. If the motivation is to reduce our environmental cost then an accounting of our current situation is required before consideration of mitigating solutions. GenAI may break free software but it need not break apart the free software community. The purpose of free software was never exclusivity, which is why permissive licenses and non-copyright works are compatible with GNU. If we followed our principles this would not be in question but it is human nature to want to compel the speech and actions of others. It is “free” software, free as in speech. For Guix there is a deeper question as to the direction of the project: On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 3:33 AM Konrad Hinsen <[email protected]> wrote: [...] > My take on this is likely to be unpopular here: I think that Guix is > already too big and diverse in its current state. I'd prefer Guix to > concentrate on a minimal core with just the packages necessary for a > minimal viable system. For such a core, it would be much easier to be > strict about rejecting vibe-coded software. Everything else could be in > separate channels, and each of these channels could have its own genAI > policies. How minimal could this minimal core with just the packages necessary for a minimal viable system be? The bootstrap to Guix, Guix System, and the installer? Guix can shrink or it can continue to grow, why not both? The second gate (after licensing) for package inclusion into Guix is not quality, it’s user demand. So a single-user “vibe-coded” package likely isn’t appropriate for inclusion today irrespective of the code quality. What if we could have this single “core” channel while allowing users to select their main channel? Have one main channel dependent as today purely on manual submissions, no GenAI contributions or packages, with out-of-date and vulnerable libraries and core packages. Have another main channel using GenAI to update packages. Have another main channel that includes all of the free software in the world. > 5. We acknowledge that the project’s sustainability depends on automation for > all the mechanical, labor-intensive tasks such as package updates. We will > keep **improving hackable tools and services to automate some of the package > collection maintenance work**. Tools are important and used by agents as well as humans. This proposed automation eventually leads to development of artificial intelligence. The project should be recording the knowledge required to build and update packages, knowledge that must be collected, interpreted, and kept up-to-date. The project never found consensus in doing this the human way. The discussion over licensing is highly reminiscent of Microsoft’s FUD campaign over the “virality” of the GPL. Copyright is not required for free software. Many have claimed “uncertainty” (the ‘U’ in FUD) but we have yet to receive an explanation or description of the uncertainty regarding inclusion of LLM output in free software. [0] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/ErdosUnitDistanceProblem.html
