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Why don't you share the list of very useful things you created instead, mono442?
The vibecoder paradox, everyone is 10x as productive, no one can show even a 1.2x increase in anything (besides bot generated comments, traffick and other background noise)
And I highly doubt iOS and Android are free from LLM assisted code at this point.
Why every time some person/group of people enact an anti-LLM policy in their project, other people feel the personal need to stress how useful LLMs are and how that project is bound to fail if they don't use it?
Postmarketos clearly exists and works, EVEN if LLMs were absolutely perfect for speeding up development ten folds, is there any absolute moral necessity to use them?
Also isn't this just moving the goalpost that LLM fanatics love to point out?
There's no moral necessity, but if you want to survive as a project moving forward, you'll have less and less velocity compared to projects using LLMs, so you'll eventually shrink and die as a project, because less people will contribute to a project that gets less features and bug fixes.
I don't understand why these projects have such a strong "moral" stance of "no AI ever", and instead they don't deploy LLMs to automatically review PRs based on their own guidelines, so that if the contribution is valuable, it gets through no matter if it was written by an LLM or not.
At the moment, there isn't another project (that I know of) like PostmarketOS filling the same niche. If a new project were to appear, and were using LLMs, it'd likely progress faster.
Regardless, I've had success with LLMs and while I understand the maintainers' concern, if used properly they're a powerful tool to quickly iterate on huge amounts of information. They could be used to automate reviews of the spam of low-quality PRs, for instance (if they were to materialize).
But having read their policy page, their stance is more on ethical grounds, not moral: https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop... . So while I still stand by my argument in the general case, here it's not applicable, and while I see their ethical concerns, one project boycotting a tool doesn't really fix the systemic issues they mention.
Because AI-assisted code is most probably already present in devices they use.
And I dare say that even for PostmarktOS:
1) There's no way they can prevent AI-assisted code to reach their codebase.
2) They will most probably change this policy in the future lest other forks/projects outpace them in terms of utility and they get reduced to a carriage in a car world.
The stance is to deter random vibe-coders trying to resume-max by submitting PRs to known open source projects. There are so many of them rn. Hopefully by making it clear (some of) them will realize doing that is just wasting their tokens.
But to be clear their AI instance is as clear-cut as can be. Their instance IS INDEED to "prevent AI-assisted code to reach their codebase".
> The following is not allowed in postmarketOS:
> Submitting contributions fully or in part created by generative AI tools to postmarketOS.
source: https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop...
Not even humans can do that. Documentation needs to at least be reverse-engineered and understood before implementation.
I can understand "untested AI-genned code is bad, and thus anything that reeks of AI is going to be scrutinized" - especially given that PostmarketOS deals a lot with kernel drivers for hardware. Notoriously low error margins. But they just had to go out of their way and make it ideological rather than pragmatic.
As long as they align with the correct (i.e. yours) values, of course. When they adopt the wrong values, it's not fine.
But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. Asking stackoverflow and waiting for hours to get my question closed down instead of asking LLM? No way.
And doesn't that bother you a little?
If you listen to podcasts, check out this podcast episode: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/flying-too-...
It is about Air France 447, but also draws parallels to AI and self-driving cars
However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.
That's not your only option.
What you're meant to do is understand the tools you're using well enough to not need to ask for help from anyone or anything else. Stack Overflow is useful, but it's a learning tool. If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code, it's no wonder that you have taken to AI, because it's just a slightly more convenient form of that.
Aren't we all in a sense?
Once you get good enough at a programming language, you can code a lot from memory and logic. As in, you can think of a design and how to build it without having to look up someone else's code. It's still useful to keep notes to refer back to, and look up information online to jog your memory, but it's not always a question of finding other people's code to modify.
If you use AI to make repetitive tasks less repetitive, and clean up any LLM-ness afterwards, would they notice or care?
I find blanket bans inhibitive, and reeks of fear of change, rather than a real substantive stance.
That never happens. It's actually easier to write the code from scratch and avoid LLMness altogether.
https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop...
The pollution caused by said revolution is currently putting humanity at a serious risk of world war and maybe even extinction so... maybe they had a point? I'm not taking a strong stance either way here, but worth thinking about the downsides from the industrial revolution, too.
The AI policy linked from the OP explains why. It's half not wanting to deal with slop, and half ethical concerns which still apply when it's used judiciously.
Having an LLM helps, especially when you're facing a new subsystem you're not familiar with, and trying to understand how things are done there. They still can't do the heavy duty driver work by themselves - but are good enough for basic guidance and boilerplate.
This applies to the person you're replying to too.
I think their policy is poorly thought out, and that little good will come of it. At best, it'll cause drama in the project, and discourage useful contributions. It's a shame, since we desperately need an alternative to the phone duopoly.
Do you genuinely think that people don’t know what documentation is? That’s insulting.
An LLM can help surface relevant information, taking your intent / goals into account, summarising vast quantities of code and indeed other documentation. That’s, like, their single most effective use.
But I think it’s a poor substitute for effective, well written documentation, tutorials, and examples. A lot of open source code (and commercial, too) is moving in the direction of nearly zero documentation and they just provide an LLM prompt to pipe to | claude -p.
This is not a great change. For starters, LLMs often get confused when a project is internally reorganised and mix different versions together. They will also often recommend using a module’s internal structures.
(I spent half a day fighting datamodel-code-generate with this exact problem, so it’s fresh on my mind.)
EDIT: the account I’m responding to appears to be some kind of AI and appears to be prompted with “make snarky, argumentative comments”. If you are a real human, please accept my apology for this accusation.