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Comment by xlii | Hacker News Reader

As an author, I'm sorry, but how's that similar?

You're comparing transparency of used tools versus a cheating in personal relationship. Good that I'm not being accused of grand theft auto here, since it's just as close.

LLM usage is accepted, both legally and morally. 10% of world's population is using it daily, how many "written with help of ChatGPT" disclosures you're seeing. There's absolutely no obligation to disclose and I could just as well omit that fact and that wouldn't be wrong doing.

I disclosed it to lower the trust and invite more scrutiny, what I got a blanket statement that turned 300+ hours of work into garbage.

That's more like: "my fiance after 5 years dumped me because I told her I like mayonesse with my french fries". I have no more self-reflection than that.

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I'm not comparing it with cheating. I'm comparing with doing something someone asked you not to do. Simple human decency.

Imagine your fiance of 5 years is vegan, and asks you not to put mayo in her food. You sneak it into her food anyway and write a blog post about it. You can tell her all the excuses you want:

- 90% of the world eats animal products daily

- I spent 300+ hours of work finding the best mayo

- I could have kept sneaking slop into your food and not disclosed it

But at the end of the day you're still ignoring her wishes. You can go ahead and keep building this labyrinth of reasoning for yourself, where you're right and everyone else in the world is wrong. And you'll end up dumped with nobody wanting to collaborate with you, talking to ChatGPT late at night who tells you "you're absolutely right, you're a brilliant coder, you deserve better than her!"

People are weird. People plant their gardens their own way. Some like ketchup instead of mayo. Some don't want want AI slop in their codebase. Nobody's stopping you from using your patches privately on your own computer. But if you seek the social validation of having them accepted upstream, you have to learn to respect the people around you.

> But at the end of the day you're still ignoring her wishes.

Probably important for context - there was no official announcement, so no, it's not like I ignored wishes or direction, it was presented to me after the fact.

And (as I mentioned) I'm not mad at policy. I'm mad that:

- that was after fact

- that policy itself is stupid (even if temporary), because it invites under-the-skin slop (though I doubt anyone would go to contribute to core Emacs code slop)

- that actual talks are happening behind closed doors

- and I had lost my time

That's the conclusion. Direction is fine, yet given that I cannot use the tools in my toolset I'm moving on with my work elsewhere (at least until that's settled).

It is not "after the fact".

This is a big discussion in open source over all, and checking contribution policies "before the fact" would prevent this waste of time immediately.

Hell, asking your favourite llm about this would clarify the situation in a minute.

> checking contribution policies "before the fact"

GNU has no such contribution policy. As I wrote it's currently a discussions behind the closed doors. Those who inform about usage of LLMs are notified that their contributions won't be accepted, and I think I'm second or third in the whole emacs-devel mailing list history.

Thread about LLM contributions sparked after my piece, not before it.

From my research, the only prior discussion was in March 2026 with conclusion that "lawyers are looking into it" and no followup whatsoever.

Though, if I made a mistake during my research don't hesitate to correct me, because it will prevent me from making similar mistake in future.

FSF is working on such a policy. Many other projects are announcing/discussing these.

Legal problems with LLM-written code are well-known. And copyright law is the cornerstone of open source as an idea in general.

Besides legal issues, major oss projects do not necessarily accept contributions to core subsystems by default. Maintainers can and often will decline patches.

I've lost count of my patches that were declined, or unreviewed, or unnoticed. And that's before the LLM explosion, when patches were small and expensive to write

Your frustration is understandable but could have been avoided.

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