Hi all, On 10/28/26 01:07, Denis 'GNUtoo' Carikli wrote:
the question is also if it's possible to contribute without having to personally run an LLM (which often comes with terms and conditions) because the code is such a mess than doing large scale modifications does in practice requires an LLM.
Note that the opposite is true as well: LLMs making code more maintainable.
Programmers can be pretty bad at what they do. And that is fine, because we all need to start somewhere, and we learn best by working at a level that is just beyond our current capabilities.
As a result, most code gets better with an LLM/agent involved. Especially with respect to maintainability.
In reality, it seems that both extremes (no LLM and all LLM) lead to difficult to maintain code.
I prefer to spend my limited free time more meaningfully than working around problems in other people's code that an LLM would have trivially prevented. (That's already my day job.)
So I would personally not hold it against people if they use an LLM to make their code maintainable. Especially if they learn from it.
Teaching is fine though, and it is always enjoyable if upstream accepts a pull request. There are just so many badly written packages.
Hugo
