On 7/7/25 04:17, Akira Urushibata wrote:
Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. If anybody can point out to good
examples of AI usage in free software development, I'd like to know.
Hi, Akira,
Yes, LLM-based output has been affecting free software development for a
while. Daniel Stenberg of cURL fame has written about its impact
several times with clear examples. Here are two posts about it:
"The I in LLM stands for intelligence"
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/
"Curl takes action against time-wasting AI bug reports"
https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/07/curl_ai_bug_reports/
As result, the cURL project has taken to banning accounts which get
caught submitting AI slop in the place of bug reports:
"Contribute to the curl project!"
https://curl.se/dev/contribute.html#on-ai-use-in-curl
Now if you are looking for /positive/ examples the effects of AI slop in
free software projects, I think your hunch is correct and there may not
be any.
Going back to your question about the beast in Redmond, which although
proprietary, it shows that LLMs get in the way of development, at best.
One can conclude that because competition there between departments and
even employees is so cutthroat that if there had been even the slightest
advantage from using LLM slop oneself, then it would be found all over
the place. However, because LLM slop output does not help, you now see
the creation of mandates there for the remaining employees to force them
to try to (or pretend to) use LLM slop:
"Microsoft Makes AI Usage Mandatory for Employees as Performance Reviews
Face Overhaul"
https://medium.com/@hamza_83953/microsoft-makes-ai-usage-mandatory-for-employees-as-performance-reviews-face-overhaul-8f8cc020f637
I've only ever done limited scripting myself, albeit over a longer
period. Over that time I gather that while typing in working code is a
challenge, understanding and defining the problem(s) to be solved and
then breaking them down into small units is much harder and so is
documenting the code as you go along.
Those two aspects are nothing which plausible sentence generators and
plagiarism engines can help with, even if their attribution-stripped
output does seem to compile. Currently LLM coding is a scam which is
being perpetrated because so few understand ICT and, because of the
influence of Redmond against education, that number is declining.
Software freedom has been slowing that decline but Software Freedom
promoting groups need to team up with educational projects and eject the
productivity killing and knowledge killing microsofters or at least keep
them at bay so as to turn that around and /increase/ the numbers of
those who understand and can use ICT.
/Lars
cc: Akira Because of the infamous moderation latency on this list.
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