From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.
> Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review
That is the problem in these subreddits.
Up until 2024, if someone took the time to write and publish an open source project you could use that as a sign that they were trying to participate in the community and that it could be worthwhile to look at.
In 2026, that assumption no longer holds. You can’t tell if someone put 1000 hours into a project or 15 minutes of asking Claude Code to make a thing and then suggest copy to post to Reddit.
For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
> For a while, Claude was even telling people to go post projects to Reddit as a way to get users. They would copy and paste the suggested post into the Reddit.
I don't know which LLM's are still doing it, but the amount of Posts I remove from r/selfhosted that still have the AI's markdown formatting included is astonishing. At least a few of them per day.
Sounds like a reasonable explanation. I've never wanted to deal with running an open-source community (I'm way too introverted and focused on coding, not chatting), but now that AI is here, I will be releasing something awesome. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the community though. Possibly it will be so awesome that others create the community in my absence, and that solves the problem.
This is, to me, the key conceit when the complainers complain. Sometimes it's obvious (like not even changing the visual style). But most of the time it's just pogroms.
> So this created a backlash against all things LLM. The presence of any LLM tells in a project became a sign that it was not worth considering.
This sounds like a knee-jerk reaction and it hamstrings OSS while others gain from LLM assistance. There are better ways to deal with this issue and I predict that OSS projects which blanket-ban LLMs are going to lose out to more competent maintainers.
That phrase has as much inherent meaning as "the goal of software" or "the goal of technology." People have different goals for technology and society. This is normal.
I'm more surprised that is not more common. LLMs are pretty antithetical to copyleft as they allow anyone, including corportations, to exploit the labour people have original shared under the assumption that they are only sharing it with peers.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.