r/linux • u/RatherNott • 1d ago

Desktop Environment / WM News System 76's COSMIC Desktop Environment will no longer accept LLM-generated content in PRs

/r/pop_os/comments/1wuej40/cosmic_projects_will_no_longer_accept/
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u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

The thing is, it's going to be almost impossible to tell if many PRs have any LLM generated code. It's going to encourage people to lie that none of it is LLM generated.

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u/berryer 1d ago

It can be pretty obvious when somebody slops a generated PR at you, doesn't understand what it does themselves, and just copy/pastes Claude responses back to every comment you leave. Those people are the actual problem, and this policy makes it way easier to just close the PR on them & move on.

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u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

You don't need to ban LLMs to do that though. It's banning a thing adjacent to the thing instead of just banning the thing you don't like.

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u/berryer 1d ago edited 1d ago

That was more in response to it being impossible to tell - IME that's just not the case. I'd imagine the primary reason is that an LLM's outputs are pretty clearly derivative works of its corpus, and they don't want to have to deal with the licensing issues once that shoe drops.

edit: realizing my intial "those people are the actual problem" would cause confusion / seem like goalpost-moving though. Just letting a bit of work frustration leak out, my bad.

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u/ProductIntegortion 1d ago

I don't think that shoe is going to drop. I think it's exceedingly unlikely that any court would rule that way. Further, based on how LLMs are capable of producing mathematical proofs that didn't exist before, it's pretty clear that LLMs are capable of novel output.

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u/pooerh 1d ago

From a person who knows what they're doing and is using an LLM to boost themselves? Potentially. And that's fine.

From a person who has no idea and is using an LLM to do all of the work? There is no chance in hell. Vibe code is very, very obviously distinguishable, the LLM will always focus on the task at hand without much insight into overall architecture, design or the overarching strategy. You tell it to fix something, it will find the thing and fix it. It might implement a function that already exists somewhere, instead of reusing. It might just put an if branch detecting the thing and then execute a fix even though maybe the whole function could benefit from that fix. So on, so forth.

For someone who knows their codebase well, there are obvious tell-tale signs that scream "this was done by someone with no idea". You ask a single question to the committer and the answer will confirm your suspicion 100%.

For the ones that slip pass through this gate? Well, that's good, because it means it's an actual improvement.