Hi Moritz - > On 07/26/2026 3:35 AM CEST Moritz Angermann <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Thank you for your time Tom, > > The disagreement (as I understand) is this: > > My view: Policies should define the minimum framework necessary for > collaboration between people who disagree.
This is also my view, so that's good! > My understanding of your view: Policies should also reflect the community’s > collective values and preferences. I think there may some truth in that view, but it's not the crux of my issue here. My view is that LLM use directly affects the quality and type of community interaction, and the resulting code and docs, and that a good middle ground is to not mandate hand-written code and docs, but to state a preference for them. In other words, though I and others may be concerned with the environmental and social impacts of LLMs, if those things weren't an issue we'd still be having this conversation. > In that case let me bring up my previous analogy one more time, and let me > know if you in principle agree with the following or not, and if not, why not? > > Suppose that 50% of the community strongly preferred that all contributors > develop on Linux, or that all documentation be written manually rather than > with grammar or translation tools. > > Would that fact alone justify expressing those preferences in project policy? I'm not quite sure what "justify" means here, but sure - if 50% of a community strongly opposed any particular set of community behaviors, and we considered that opposition to be worthy of consideration and respect, then I'd expect short of an outright ban, you'd see an expression of expectations in project policy. Not necessarily swinging the penduluum entirely to their view, though! (I think e.g. "develop[ed] on Linux" is a stretch because that's largely orthogonal to the visible results of a person's contribution, but I'm trying to roll with your analogy here. See if your answer changes if it's "developed with child labor" or "comments on MRs in all capital letters.") A potential point of compromise here might be to rephrase the "we" statements to be clear that the community is not monolithic. So instead of "We strongly prefer human-written code," it says "A large portion of the community prefers human-written code. Therefore, we'd prefer you (but won't compel you) to write your code by hand." (Followed by "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," etc.) Cheers, Tom _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
