The truth is, LLMs make mediocre developers feel powerful. In light of that fact, this is perfectly consistent behavior. If you prohibit LLM-generated ‘reports’, you’re not just making a technical choice, you’re threatening their sense of identity.
It’s always a red flag when someone insists on calling it AI, artificial intelligence. It shows their position on what intelligence is.
score 2 · canonical
I meant no disrespect by calling you a hobbyist, sorry about that. My point is, we are people, and they’re the GNOME project, and applying the same standards to us and to them would be unfair.
We should be able to gain power that’s otherwise inaccessible to us by LLM reviews, and they shouldn’t need it, at least, they shouldn’t need it as much as we do.
And they certainly shouldn’t throw their hands up and say “if you disagree with our perspective on LLM use, you’re insane or lying”.
score 1 · canonical
After an appeal to authority like this, I’ll surely retract all my opinions and abandon all my positions.
Obviously.
Also, if ‘nuance’ means “let’s all joyously accept our LLM overlords, because frankly, we can’t write any quality software without them”, go ahead, exclude me from all ‘nuance’, I don’t need it.
score 1 · canonical
I’m not saying Rust is an adequate solution to all problems. I’m just saying it’s dishonest to say ‘LLMs are a prerequisite of quality software’ by pointing at memory safety issues of the languages they chose for themselves.
You can write quality software without LLMs. We’ve done it for decades, and we can still do it. Rust deals with the intractable memory safety, and care deals with the logic bugs.
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The power dynamics are not the same. You are a hobbyist and it’s difficult for you to get feedback.
They, on the other hand, are the GNOME project and have much stronger backing. They don’t get to say ‘well, clanker gave the green light, must be quality software’.
The author doesn’t understand or think about what quality software is or what it takes to write some.
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There is zero hope of maintaining quality software in 2026 without AI vulnerability scanning. Any claims to the contrary are unserious and delusional.
You’re kidding me, right? What about, I dunno, not using those unsafe languages? What about just using a vector sometimes instead of utilizing pointers 24/7?
This is just a bad faith argument to lionize LLM usage.
Even if you don’t like Rust, I guarantee you that you could write a language that actually suits your needs and compile it to LLVM. It’s much easier than banging your head against the wall, i.e. keep writing C/C++/Vala and hope it doesn’t blow up.
score 1 · canonical
I guess this is where I should drop the snark and tell you that my attitude towards this discussion isn’t purely grounded in technical terms. In an idealized environment where LLMs have no adverse impact on the world they reside in, a developer can write code by hand, iterate until they can’t see an issue, and only then ask an LLM for a review. This evades a lot of the “technical” problems with LLM usage at a slight cost of development time. More importantly, it works.
I just think it’s especially ironic to make the claim “there is no way to write quality software without LLM use”.
I never for a second considered GNOME, Epiphany, GLib, WebKit, Fedora in general to be “quality software”. Quality software acknowledges that being readable is more important than having been written. Quality software is Lua, it’s TCC, it’s NetBSD, it’s Guix. And none of them required an LLM touch.
From what I’ve seen, Red Hat has never cared if people that are not their engineers can read their source code. (In fact, you may remember that they actively tried to close the sources of their operating systems.) Red Hat has no stronger incentive to create quality software than Microsoft does.
So no, I could not disagree more with the author about what “quality software” is. And hearing the author say “no quality software without stochastic parrot” is funny, because I think the author wouldn’t know quality software if it kicked down their door and announced it was suing Red Hat for impersonation.
I have no technical basis of rejecting LLMs altogether. The right open weights model may or may not be able to outperform your average developer, but there is no question if it would help when it’s used alongside a human brain (rather than as a substitute for one).
I have a cultural basis of rejecting them and objecting to them. LLMs are marketed as a way to replace developers, not make their lives easier. LLMs are not our friend, they exist so that we get paid less. In my opinion, no discussion that overlooks this or discounts this can be “nuanced”. And in my opinion, this one didn’t even get close to nuance.
Most importantly, there is absolutely no nuance in stating “you either agree with me, or you’re unserious or delusional”. Who does the author think they are? Jesus Christ? Anakin Skywalker? “Either you’re with me, or you’re my enemy”? Where’s the nuance in that?
score 2 · canonical