It’s already tempting notably for smallish projects to resort to genAI:
https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/116132543248503962

But I think a race to the bottom has started in #FreeSoftware, with this rationale: if “we” don’t use genAI in our project, then we will lose to the competition, whether free slopware or proprietary.

Ludovic Courtès (@[email protected])

I think these two factors—lack of humanpower and a “big” vision—coupled with the passion for technicalities typical of such projects make them particularly vulnerable to genAI. Because yes, “we” want SMP support in Mach and it’s not been happening until this contributor achieved something with the help of genAI.

Aquilepouet

… which is short-sighted and loses track of the whole user empowerment goal that free software is supposedly about.

But the “economic” incentives are here.

@civodul I'm working on a glibc (and jointly a gcc) LLM policy which I'll propose for public review, and the difficulty is in threading the needle between technology that we could use ourselves, and user freedoms. My position ends up being that I want to define a policy that allow the projects the to outright reject *or* accept such changes as they see fit, within certain constraints that support user freedom e.g. either you understand the code or it is reproducible with a tool.
@codonell @civodul that speaks to the validity of the code, and maybe empowers/includes more people (maybe the opposite too, if LLM use discourages those ideologically opposed?) in the development community for the project. What does it do for the bigger software freedom picture though? What does it do for copyleft code bases? Is the move towards all FOSS code becoming public domain (given that US courts are leaning towards LLM generated code not being copyrightable) a net positive one?
@codonell @civodul I mean I know there are caveats and it's not necessary *today* that all LLM generated code is non-copyrightable (e.g. if a developer uses it for scaffolding and then injects their own creativity in there, making the code copyrightable) but it's something to think about when creating an LLM policy that doesn't just reject or quarantine legally significant contributions.
@siddhesh_p @codonell @civodul I expect that very soon AI tools will be available to rebuild sources from binaries: I don't see a particular reason why machine code would be harder to process than source code.
So, how will that change the value of proprietary software distributed as binaries?
Which hidden secrets will be revealed from closed firmwares?
I see a coming revolution in taking back control of hardware. Much earlier than AGI or quantum computing.