On Tuesday, October 13th, 2026 at 09:15, Hugo Buddelmeijer via "Development of
GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <[email protected]> wrote:
> I feel like we are starting to chase people away, and I'm getting a
> bit frustrated with that.
cooperation is only possible when some people are "chased
away". attention is a scarce resource that can easily be wasted in a
noisy environment.
and if i give you my attention, then i'm not giving that attention to
anybody else, ever -- it's spent forever. therefore, competition and
cooperation are two sides of the same coin. but i digress...
read: projects of this size must have a filter that is intentionally
set up to embrace only those contributors who serve the project's
goals and share its values.
having said that, i share your concerns regarding the filter function
of guix. i myself used to be a contributor, but after some frustration
and disappointment i've downgraded myself to be a mere user, and
learned to accept the bugs and deficiencies that i otherwise would
have the ability to fix.
> And please ask why people feel the need to use an LLM, so we know what
> we need to improve. Like the other week when someone used an LLM to
> help with understanding the Guile peg-parser. That means we could
> document it better.
i don't know how up-to-date you are on models and coding agents, but
as of the last couple of months, when it comes to understanding a new
codebase, then no amount of documentation can come close to the
effectiveness of even small and cheap models.
on a recent *laptop* even local models are getting there now. and this
includes machine code: binaries are now readily reverse engineered
into C code, or bugs identified and fixed in them.
so, even if you write a nice doc, it only makes the agent-based
approach that much more effective.
i understand, and share too many of the concerns with LLMs... but the
reality is that short of a major civilizational regression, or a
despotic global government, a fork that allows agentic coding will
soon outcompete any project policy that tries to restricts the use of
LLMs.
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