> But rejecting code not for technical reasons (of which there are often many for vibecoded code) but for ideological reasons is unfortunate. [...] Such a policy — that contributing to a project because of the circumstances of the contribution’s creation, and not due to its quality — is directly contradictory to the spirit of free software.
Okay, what is FLOSS? Software published under free and open-source licenses. It's literally the definition of the concept, and thus a FLOSS project cannot accept contributions for which such licensing is impossible, regardless of technical quality. For example, a FLOSS project can't accept code copied out of a nonfree project, or copied from a project with an incompatible license. The provenance of the code has always been central to the whole endeavor.
When LLMs enter the picture, there are at least two problems.
1) LLMs were trained largely on copyrighted works, and it's unclear if the models themselves or their outputs should be considered to be derivative of their training data.
2) It's possible that LLM outputs can't be copyrighted at all, not as FLOSS or under any other license.
I won't try to get into the many arguments and opinions on both sides regarding those issues, but suffice to say they're contentious enough that, regardless of where an individual maintainer's opinion may fall, IMO it's definitely not wrong to refuse to accept LLM-generated code just to avoid needing to resolve them.
The "spirit of FLOSS" was never primarily about the technical quality of code, but about the freedom to use, study, modify, and redistribute software, although technical quality also benefits in some ways from the FLOSS ethos. I actually do care deeply about technical quality as well, so I have to mention that many of us have serious doubts about the overall effects of LLMs on software quality in the long term. Even if individual maintainers can maintain high standards for their projects, IMO promoting LLMs still creates long-term downward pressure on software quality that comes back to harm everyone.