Changing how we develop Ladybird

jsmailes

It saddens me to see the communities surrounding free software projects going dark because of the threat posed by AI tools, but I don't know what other solutions there are that would mitigate the threat, particularly when browsers are such a compelling target. Perhaps some kind of trust system a la arxiv.org, where existing users have to vouch for new submissions before a user is themselves trusted? Definitely still vulnerable to abuse, but perhaps less so.

fguerraz

I feel like the project just died.

troupo

"Gain trust through plausible contributions" is a new angle on AI-produced PRs I haven't seen yet. Though in retrospect we should have seen it. It's been an angle of attack since forever, it only took a lot of effort.

sppfly

Zig is moving to this direction is well.

bigupthewhole

We need stricter verifications / credentials behind GitHub accounts and PRs. And this we should have had already before AI.

armchairhacker

Why don’t they take the Linux approach? A browser is like an OS. Linux continues to accept public contributions, through an esoteric process that discourages lazy contributors: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/submitting-pa...

koteelok

Stuff like this makes me wish AI had never happened. An open-source projects losing the ability to find and mentor new maintainers is so disappointing.

tetris11

For every person wanting to do good in the world there are ten windup merchants of which at least one has darker motives

throwaway423454

"A browser runs untrusted input from the entire internet on the user’s machine, and one well-disguised vulnerability is all an attacker needs. We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it." Then the linux kernel is doomed. /s

shevy-java

Cool - how about fewer perma-bans on github for participating in discussions? Also, as I have pointed out before, they seem to develop too slowly for a solid beta this year. You only have to look at the issue tracker and check for URLs not working or even crashing the browser. Ladybird may have gotten better in the last months, but imagine if 50.000 people are using it, you will see more bugs. How do they then handle bug reports?

Deukhoofd

This rather feels like it's completely stepping away from the thing that made the community around Serenity and Ladybird so good.

pulsartwin

This seems quite misguided and is sad to see. They have every right to do this, but I was looking forward to continuing testing Ladybird as it improves and contributing in the future. I hope servo stays open to contributions, as it seems like it's all we have left.

nnevatie

This is one way to rephrase "we don't want your AI slop, thanks.".

nathell

LLMs might be part of why Ladybird is making this decision, but they aren’t the only possible one: SQLite, for example, has been developed this way pretty much forever. To each their own, I guess.

splittydev

Wasn't the entire goal of Ladybird to have an open and independent browser engine? Making it effectively closed to contributions makes it.. Not independent anymore. It's now dependent, on few people who work on it, just like any other closed-source or corporate-controlled browser.

scotty79

I think we are going to see a lot opensource project switching to Humans Need Not Apply Mode.

vrganj

LLMs are killing open source just like they're killing online discussion forums. It's heartbreaking, my two favorite things about the internet are dying off because human interaction can't outscale AI slop.

mabedan

I can understand where they come from. If most of the pull-requests were AI-coded, well, the maintainers are equally capable of prompting Claude Code themselves. I think the whole game of software engineering, open source or not, has completely changed. A lump of code doesn't mean or imply the same thing as it did 2 years ago.

xyzsparetimexyz

Surely you can just autoclose any PRs from 1. People you don't know and 2. That are over 100 or even 50 lines? That way new contributors are forced to start small.