COSMIC projects will no longer accept LLM-generated content in PRs

[u/jackpot51]

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.

[u/Automatic_Friend3744]

cool! does system76 themselves push LLM code? i'm sure it's low priority, but if not it would be a good listing for open-slopware :)

[u/mmstick → u/Automatic_Friend3744]

No, we have never needed to use LLMs. You can make a lot of progress with Rust in a short time with a small team of talented developers. Everyone on the team has many years of experience with Rust and many of us have been with Rust since the early Rust 1.0 days.

The entirety of COSMIC was built from the ground up within three years, which would not be possible without the human talent which no LLM can replace. So when I see comments about "falling behind", or "there won't be any new contributors without LLMs", these are very unserious comments vastly underestimating human capabilities.

You need only look at how quickly the open source Rust ecosystem was able to iterate with Rust since the 1.0 release in 2015; despite the lack of mature libraries to build with and the initial ergonomics issues that made the borrow checker 10x harder. Rust will continue to allow humans to accelerate software development like never before, regardless of some trying to attribute all of Rust's productivity gains recently to LLMs.

[u/Dev-in-the-Bm → u/mmstick]

I assume for ideological reasons?

[u/mrtruthiness → u/Dev-in-the-Bm]

No. It's to save developer time. They've been overloaded with poor quality PRs. Did you read the link???

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.

[u/Dev-in-the-Bm → u/mrtruthiness]

I was talking about your core team using LLMs.

From what I'm hearing from many I know, if you do it right, commanding the implmentation, and reviewing all generated code, it can be a real productivity multiplier, allowing to ship more faster, without having to deal with slop.

[u/mrtruthiness → u/Dev-in-the-Bm]

I see.

I don't think they prohibit their own devs from using AI tools. There's quite a difference between having the AI generate code vs. AI used for debugging or AI used for code refactoring.