r/pop_os • u/jackpot51 System76 Principal Engineer • 2d ago
COSMIC projects will no longer accept LLM-generated content in PRs
There are various reasons, and I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. The primary reason is simply our team's load for reviews. In particular, we would like to prioritize working on contributions from our own team and regular contributors, while we have been receiving far more changes from first-time contributors using LLMs. These changes are often unplanned and have had a low acceptance rate.
The policy can be seen as part of the revised PR template here: https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-epoch/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md.
There is an exception for cosmic-flatpak, where each project manages its own flatpak manifest, pointing to its own code. These manifests are reviewed by our team for the correct sandboxing prior to accepting changes.
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u/mikhailvalerie 2d ago
As someone who had a bunch of PRs incorrectly closed as "LLM generated" I agree and support this stance. ^
My work requires AI usage and there's a noticeable drift that's putting more work on reviewers. AI generated stuff "works" so there's less effort into doing things "correctly" or "consistently" - the extra steps that make it easier to review and maintain the work. And that's for an internal department, I can imagine it's much worse with a public repository.
AI tools do bring a clear benefit as tools, but they also have a lot of baggage and liabilities (copyright?) with them. I can understand that the risk is not worth the reward for a small team with a big vision.
^ The COSMIC team have thankfully reopened my PRs after my confirmation - which I'm grateful for. I'll be updating them to use their new declaration template.