From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general.

My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.

> Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review

That is the problem in these subreddits.

Up until 2024, if someone took the time to write and publish an open source project you could use that as a sign that they were trying to participate in the community and that it could be worthwhile to look at.

In 2026, that assumption no longer holds. You can’t tell if someone put 1000 hours into a project or 15 minutes of asking Claude Code to make a thing and then suggest copy to post to Reddit.

For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.

So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.

> For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.

I don't know which LLM's are still doing it, but the amount of Posts I remove from r/selfhosted that still have the AI's markdown formatting included is astonishing. At least a few of them per day.

As an avid reader: thanks for helping with that!

Thank you for your service.

Sounds like a reasonable explanation. I've never wanted to deal with running an open-source community (I'm way too introverted and focused on coding, not chatting), but now that AI is here, I will be releasing something awesome. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the community though. Possibly it will be so awesome that others create the community in my absence, and that solves the problem.

"You can't tell [whether it's AI or not]"

This is, to me, the key conceit when the complainers complain. Sometimes it's obvious (like not even changing the visual style). But most of the time it's just pogroms.

A 1 hour old post on a Sunday morning is not conclusive for anything.

> the goal of open source software is

That phrase has as much inherent meaning as "the goal of software" or "the goal of technology." People have different goals for technology and society. This is normal.

I'm more surprised that is not more common. LLMs are pretty antithetical to copyleft as they allow anyone, including corportations, to exploit the labour people have original shared under the assumption that they are only sharing it with peers.

This article doesn’t make sense. There’s tons of lobbying in the EU. For example in the Netherlands the culture is very focused on consensus with the public including engaging with industry.

Anyone who is an expert in their field knows that the government is completely clueless and ineffective when it comes to regulating what you do. That’s normal and fine, nobody can be an expert in every situation of every field, including regulators

When experts give feedback to the government, that’s lobbying.

I pay my doctor for medical advice. If a doctor paid me to take their medical advice, I would be very concerned.

Math 2 looks a whole lot like software development.

Agents are the greatest rubber ducks ever created.

Another perspective is that this isn’t a new problem. Every dev manager or team lead with very strong direct reports has this problem. They don’t lose the ability to reason, they strengthen their ability to reason more quickly, and know when to trust the expert and when to poke holes.

I don’t see how that’s possible. When I am doing a comprehensive code review with rigorous functional testing of another developer’s work, it usually takes me around half as long to review as the developer took to write it. That includes the back and forth of MR issues and fixes. If AI writes it why would it take 100x longer to review than write it? At worst case it’s just a draft of something I can develop myself, so it shouldn’t take longer than 20 minutes. At best case it is a code review exercise so it takes me half as long.

AI can produce for you an amazing jpeg of an oil painting you’ve ideated together. You could print it out on a large format printer but you’re still only holding a printout of an AI oil painting. To actually make a piece of art that’s worth being on a wall and standing as an artwork, then you still have to paint the painting using oil paint.

Maybe robot arms can solve this last part one day.

I’m not an artist I’m a software developer, so the tools I use don’t matter, the outcomes do. If I am completing my tickets and the code is high quality and well designed then I am doing my job.

Depends on how the AI is used. If used intelligently, for short, readable code snippets, reviewing and understand is easy.

If used naively, where AI spits out 1000s of lines of code, that is far from perfect, written in a style that might not be what you are used to, it can take longer to parse, than if your colleague of 2 years wrote it.

Are you using the best models? I feel like my experience is completely different. I am an expert in a small part of a huge monolithic codebase that I’ve worked in for years. When customers report issues that would take me days or weeks to debug, AI can figure it out on the first try.

…as far as you know, at the first glance.

Could you work out that it was wrong, given weeks to go and check its work? If so, your trust is misplaced.

You ARE taking days or weeks to go and check, yes?

>You ARE taking days or weeks to go and check, yes?

I've never taken weeks to go and check bugfixes in the before times, I don't see why I'd expect it now. Once we know what the cause of the bug is, validating the fix and writing a test for it is usually trivial.

Yes, but it’s usually only hours to validate. I understand the codebase so I have the intuition to know almost immediately if the theory makes sense. Validating and reproducing the root cause is often an order of magnitude easier than identifying a production-reported issue.

If landlords can already raise the price of rent, why haven’t they?

I hate how the framing is always that “an AI agent” did something. No, an OpenAI researcher breached Medicare by using an AI agent. These tools only do what they are directed to do. The human operator is wholly responsible for what the tool does.