> On 07/24/2026 11:31 AM CEST Moritz Angermann <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> Hi Tom,
>
> This is interesting. We agree even!
Hi Moritz - glad to see many points of agreement and compatibility!
> > Even a single nonsense phrase (or a technically-correct-but-robotic one) in
> > an otherwise-fine paragraph is enough to make many of us demoralized and
> > less trusting. The human connection has been breached.
>
> And this is where the conflict arises, because I agree with you here that
> relaid communication is problematic and inauthentic, yet I think this is
> exactly where we lose good faith and where labeling starts to become an
> issue. Case in point: one word in this email was changed using assistive
> technology.
I've been using "good faith" to mean having honest intentions. Aren't we both
doing that here?
> > [...] A previous version of this policy proposal put it perfectly, I
> > thought: "writing documentation yourself forces you to articulate each
> > word, to think about what it is saying and what a future reader will
> > understand."
>
> Why is this negated by assistive technology. I do not genuinely understand
> this blanket claim.
It's quite simple: when documentation is written by a person, they choose each
word based on its imagined effect on the reader.
I imagine myself in your shoes and try to communicate abstract ideas to you.
When it's written by a machine, whether high- or low-quality, that same process
did not take place.
Maybe it's written crisply; maybe it's not. (If it were guaranteed not to be,
I'd be supporting a blanket LLM ban.)
I imagine you might feel that a person going back and forth with an LLM might
be putting just as much work into how the words will be received as someone
writing without an LLM. Having seen how things work in practice, though, I feel
that the productivity wins of LLMs are largely negated if that much care is put
into wordsmithing, and as the original proposal said, "the best way to take
responsibility for every word is to write every word."
Again, though, the proposed policy does not disallow you from submitting
anything; it just gives reviewers a heads-up that they might encounter a
different type of failure mode.
> I still don’t know where this “make things easier for an LLM-assisted
> workflow” comes from?
I was responding to the previous email in the thread, which suggested we
develop lists of "optimization criteria" for, as I understand it, human-machine
interaction.
> > > (7) "P3: Declare direct use of LLMs" and the corresponding section ->
> > > delete (declaration neither establishes compliance with P2 nor detects
> > > non-compliance)
> >
> > Detecting non-compliance is not the purpose of this document. An assumption
> > of good faith is healthy.
>
> Where is this assumption of good faith? As soon as there is even the hint of
> a llm label, it goes out the window?
Perhaps I wasn't clear; I'm saying that the issue of "detect[ing]
non-compliance" (for example, whether a person who wrote code with LLMs
truthfully declares it) is a separate issue from what our stated goals are
(please declare direct use of LLMs).
> > > (8) "R1: Recommendation: write the final version yourself" -> "R1:
> > > Recommendation: use a workflow that develops understanding" (states the
> > > intended outcome while retaining personal composition as one useful kata)
> >
> > This change actually highlights why I think the previous version of the
> > proposed LLM policy was much better than the current one: R1's
> > recommendations focus on the benefits for the author (or "author"). The
> > statements of preference ("We strongly prefer human-written code," "We
> > strongly prefer human-written documentation") emphasized the benefits for
> > everyone affected by the author's decisions.
>
> I find the current wording in the document quite good. Please help me out for
> my understanding:
> (1) what do you define as human-written?
My definition might be different from others', but to me it's fairly
straightforward: "human-written" means, well, written by a human.
That human may have had lots of long dialogues with chatbots about how systems
work, and had the chatbots point to different parts of the code and maybe even
come up with ideas about how to approach the problem, but then the human, well,
wrote the code.
> (2) why should the ghc project have a strong preference for it? To discourage
> contributors who might consider using assistive technology in any form or
> function?
It's difficult to say why any community "should" have a preference for anything!
But clearly, they do. Half of the people on GitLab want to ban it entirely, and
others would prefer it's not used.
I think we need to find an "agree to disagree" way forward, which in my mind
_at least_ involves letting people opt out of unknowingly reviewing
LLM-generated docs/code, and acknowledging that a majority prefer LLMs not to
be used.
(Also, I think you may need to be more charitable: I haven't seen a single
person argue against using LLMs "in any form or function" in this discussion.)
> > > (16) "you must not relay AI-generated text as a substitute for your own
> > > judgment" -> "Communication may be machine-assisted, but the sender must
> > > have read and understood the message, adopt it as their own position, and
> > > be prepared to discuss and defend it. Raw machine output presented for
> > > examination rather than adopted as the sender's judgement must be clearly
> > > identified." (distinguishes adopted communication from unexamined output)
> >
> > "Be prepared to discuss and defend it" doesn't seem like much of a
> > requirement if we're allowing unlabeled machine-generated text. I'm sure a
> > person willing to use an LLM can "discuss and defend" anything ad nauseum,
> > but that's not considerate of the person on the other end of the line. (Or
> > of other readers, if both "people" are mostly LLMs!)
>
> So we are assuming bad faith now? Are we also assuming that someone who
> honestly labeled their contribution as assisted will now (of course!) use
> assistive technology to discuss and defend their contributions ad nauseum?
No, that's not what I wrote, but re-reading it I understand the confusion.
What I meant to say (should have said) is that a person so inclined could
behave this way, not that anyone who uses LLMs would do so.
I don't think a policy like the above is tenable because a person _could_ do
that, certainly not that every LLM user _would_.
> I could just not care about this at all. Create MRs like I’m used to, not
> label them because I just don’t even want to engage in the distraction of
> whether or not and to which degree I have or have not used assistive
> technology while conceiving the contribution. Arguably, I would say assistive
> technology allows me to create higher quality contributions because it allows
> me to have a conversation with myself and some kind of rubber ducky while
> working on changes.
The policy said "We strongly prefer human-written code. You can use LLMs to
analyse, review, produce ideas and prototypes, but we would much prefer you to
write the code of your MR yourself."
If you're using "rubber ducky" in the traditional sense, that would very much
be in the realm of "analyse, review, produce ideas and prototypes."
I don't think it would be much of a struggle to remember if you'd written code
or documentation with LLMs.
> I can write some Haskell code and keep wondering if this couldn’t be
> expressed better. What do I do? Ask an llm to try to rewrite this function in
> a way that simpler, more natural to me, more readable, uses some other idioms
> I didn’t think of this time around? Help me write this comment more
> concisely, less roundabout because I simply can’t find the right words to use
> here myself right now.
These are good examples, thanks.
In these cases, if it's a tiny change for clarity, it might fall under the
"rubber ducky" notion.
In the case of larger changes, I'd simply say in the MR "I wrote this feature
myself but used LLMs for restructuring; here's how/where." No big deal!
I'm willing to agree that in some cases this might result in higher-quality
contributions; "I used LLMs" doesn't mean the contribution is necessarily worse.
I do think writing the entire code yourself, fully-functional, then using LLMs
for tweaks, is quite different from generating code.
> Best,
> Moritz
>
> PS: assistive technology was used when writing this email.
I'm reminded of the warning at the end of a fictional news segment on The
Simpsons: "VIEWER ADVISORY: The preceding program [...] should not have been
viewed by young children." I.e., at the end of the message it's too late to do
anything about it! :)
Cheers,
Tom
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