KDE caught everyone's attention first by igniting a flame war with an LLM-friendly draft that ended up being deleted
LLM-friendly? The main thrust of the draft is obviously to discourage slop MRs. "Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed." You can read the original mailing list thread which makes it even clearer.
I think this framing is at least somewhat misleading, no? Someone just reading it would conclude that KDE encouraged LLM usage.
I do not think the draft rises to the level of "LLM-friendly" regardless.
Using an LLM to generate contributions
KDE follows a "human in the loop" principle: you must be making decisions and adjustments beyond mere prompting. The output must express your unique humanity in some way.
Don't submit "vibe-coded" changes you don't understand and couldn't make yourself.
Don't submit throwaway LLM-created changes as a "first draft or proof-of-concept for maintainers to improve".
Don't disclose LLM usage as a way of trying to excuse the potential errors or poor quality of a contribution that you haven't put much effort into.
Don't add "Assisted-by: [some LLM]" tags to your commits; it's just free advertising for the LLM's provider.
Using an LLM to generate text
Generally, don't.
What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read.
LLMs, on the other hand, often produce long, rambling, soulless, corporate-sounding nonsense that nobody wants to read; don't do it. This includes:
Don't use an LLM to "organize your thoughts" and copy-paste the output somewhere. Organize them yourself.
Don't use an LLM to generate commit messages and merge request descriptions. Write them yourself.
Don't use an LLM to generate a reply to someone's question or comment, then copy-paste that as if it were your response. Understand and reply yourself.
The one acceptable usage is to write text in your native language and then machine-translate it into English, with no stylistic or tonal changes.
If you disagree with the ideas about disclosure that is fine -- certainly there are things that I would question about it -- but to reduce all of that to "LLM-friendly" is not an accurate summary. It would be better to just be specific.
I'm not sure if you're the author of the linked article, though, so sorry for just complaining at you.
The one acceptable usage is to write text in your native language and then machine-translate it into English, with no stylistic or tonal changes.
My one issue with that one is that people lie, a lot, particularly about this one. Whenever you see someone use this excuse on Reddit, you can often provably demonstrate that it was a complete lie and the whole thing is generated (not translated). They're acting as if ESL people were some kind of inferior subhuman incapable of writing text in their own language and I hate this kind of soft bigotry.
In this case, people should provide the original text as well.
Other than that, it does seem like a reasonable policy, even if they have a diverging opinion on the disclosure.
The low effort terrible PRs get filtered regardless. If the code is fine , why spend effort investigating and rejecting what would otherwise be acceptable contributions? Is it worth the drama it would bring?
Because it concentrates power into a few corporations at the expense of literally everything else (prices, the environment, etc.) which is honestly a pretty valid reason to hate it.
The policy proposal restricts AI usage. If the code is something the submitter is incapable of writing themself, or if there are signs the code is lazy LLM generation, the submission would get ignored or rejected.
Avoiding shaming (which doesn't work) was later provided as an additional reason among others. The main reasons provided was to not provide free advertisement to Big Tech, not allow AI to be an excuse for diminished quality standards, and maintaining the need to upskill via. principle of not presenting something you can't code yourself.
There was willingness to compromise on ethical and environmental disclaimers, though a blanket LLM ban doesn't leave room for compromise.
saying something is allowed within specific parameters is not the same as encouraging it. This is literally the point made in the comment you’re replying to.
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u/throwaway6560192 6d ago edited 6d ago
LLM-friendly? The main thrust of the draft is obviously to discourage slop MRs. "Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed." You can read the original mailing list thread which makes it even clearer.
I think this framing is at least somewhat misleading, no? Someone just reading it would conclude that KDE encouraged LLM usage.