Why open source projects are banning AI contributions
The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality
A growing number of open source projects are banning AI-assisted contributions, citing quality concerns and the burden on maintainers. A review of 120 projects found 37 with total AI bans, including GCC, QEMU, and Zig, while Debian votes on a similar policy. The author argues that LLMs are deceptive, produce significant errors, and that information asymmetry leads juniors to submit flawed code, wasting senior developers' time. Despite benchmarks improving, real-world reliability remains low, with experts like Greg Kroah-Hartman noting that at least a third of AI-generated results are wrong or harmful.
Even with the best of the current and next generation tools, at least 1/3 of the results they generate are flat out wrong or harmful.
- slowin
I think this post (and the OSS projects that he mentions that ban AI) are very reactionary.
> But the idea that AI has or will surpass humans any time soon in either capabilities or efficiency is simply not true
AI is already better than most developers. I'm not sure what alternative reality people are remembering, but human coders for the most part have been really awful at writing code. I think the average PR from an LLM is head and shoulders above the average PR from a human. Does it write code in the preferred style and architecture of the project maintainer 100% of the time? No, and neither did humans.
I think there are many legitimate criticisms of AI, but "they suck at coding" isn't one of them. The progress we've seen in the last couple of years alone suggest that very soon they will be better at coding than any person. As a coder of over 30 years, I've embraced this fact and come to terms with it. Leverage your knowledge of systems, software engineering and product design and you can be living in a golden era for software development. That's how it feels to me at least.
- chermi
Exactly the post you'd expect at this stage in the technology adoption and hype cycle. People got over hyped not understanding how technology and technology adaption works. Then they get a bunch of like 6-12 month lagging indicators further convincing them of the worse. Right when they become most certain the technology is useless is precisely when the people that have adopted it and truly understand it leave them in the dust. There's gotta be a name for it?
- karmakurtisaani
Tangentially related, I'm starting to think LLM assisted coding will increase the jobs in software engineering.
Think about it: code is cheap now. You'll have accountants realizing they can create scripts to automate their work flow, so they hack together something. These scripts will become the backbone of the accounting pipeline of a company. Now someone needs to productionalize and maintain these scripts, but the accountants don't even have the vocabulary required for that, so they hire a software engineer to do so.
A simplified example, but I can see that happening. The only (personal) issue I have with this is that the LLMs get to take the fun part of the job.
- dave_sid
I wish developers could just walk out the door en masse tomorrow and let orgs replace them all with AI as has been touted for so long, then see what happens. It gets boring trying to explain that developers don’t just write code. “What do they do then?” I can almost hear a manager saying in a smug tone. If you have to ask, you’ll never knowww… ♬ ♬ ♬ ♬
- dcanelhas
On the "Stop saying please" part. I personally like to use polite language, as an exercise. According to this one paper on arxiv, toxic behavior gets better accuracy
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04950
It was published a while ago. But I wonder if it still holds true today.