Well, this seems to be the point of it? To drive away contributors that maintainers regard as more trouble than worth.
All of this will die down in a few years, I expect, but right now they're just trying to maintain their sanity.
> The free labor you provide has to be artisanal, or you're not a "real" contributor.
If I start my own project today, and set up 50 different AI agents to commit to it in a loop 24/7, should I claim my project has an active community because of it?
Pre-LLM it used to be pretty obvious to reviewers which PRs were complete garbage, and which were worth actually reading. Post-LLM the two look identical at first glance, and it only becomes clear that something is garbage after investing a nontrivial amount of time into it. And reviewing is where the real bottleneck lies - not writing.
So if your project welcomes AI use, who is going to dig the diamonds out of the endless flow of slop? It sure is a great way to lose volunteers, and if you delegate all work to LLMs you no longer have a community.
Having a "we ban obvious AI use" policy means that the human is essentially asked to provide a proof-of-work. Want us to invest time in your PR? First demonstrate that you aren't a time-waster.
It tells me which codebases are worth studying, which libraries are high quality enough to be trusted in my code and which communities could be rewarding to contribute to.
I understand that @JBits' comment might imply "repositories that accept AI-assisted PRs are untrustworthy," but that's actually the inverse of what's been said, and it is not logically equivalent.
AI does write high-quality code nowadays so most repositories here might even use AI internally themselves. They banned it because they simply don't have enough capacity to ensure that quality from others.
Imagine that earlier you can just reject bad PRs from poorly written descriptions alone. Now you have more volume that passed the first gate, and second, and third. You cannot distinguish them from contributions where the author spent time into making sure it fits into the repository and actually adds a global value.
This also makes rejection harder as explaining counter-intuitive things (why good quality is bad sometimes) is naturally difficult. The idea is coherently written. The code looks beautifully written. The tests passed. What stops you from merging?
Linux has all the resources (and stakes!) it needs to welcome those contributions.
Also agree about PRs without non-related issues because some repositories in the list also say so (please raise an issue first etc)
Unfortunately some maintainers will still be wary of it and our answers can't speak for all of them. Even pre-AI, some open-source did not mean open-contribution. They just treated it as "ok here's the source, enjoy"
I'm happy to see them use LLMs to find bugs, but I'd rather humans make the fix. And I'd certainly rather see humans add features.
I am pretty sure they can prompt LLMs on their own.
They don't need your LLM contributions. If your concern is that they lack funds, donate to the project.
It's pretty interesting that for once, people have the ability to contribute $$$ that translate directly to code for the project, and maintainers dont want it. It's their choice, so that's ok.
I guess for someone using AI , it will be easier to fork the project, apply the changes and keep rebasing updates upstream.
Projects like Servo or Redox OS are community-driven and already lack funding. Blocking AI-assisted code will only drive potential contributors away.
Some projects have built strong communities around AI-assisted development. The T3 Code community, for instance, is very active, and most PRs are created with LLM assistance.
The real issues are disclosure and taking responsibility for your submissions, including carefully reading and testing your own code. Code written by humans isn't inherently better in any sense.