Honesty gets Emacs patch rejected

jandeboevrie

Nobody want vibecode slop.

arikrahman

I think the LLM PR future could be mitigated with an invite only approach similar to Hashimoto's with Ghostty

grayhatter

I have an exceptionally strong, visceral, negative reaction to people who aren't offended by the arguments the author makes in this post. Your patch was rejected because the maintainer objects to the source and tooling used to generate the patch. If you agree with the maintainers opinions or object because you wanna do it your way, does not matter. Honesty didn't get your patch rejected, root cause analysis shows the origin of the rejection was the patch was LLM generated. If the author had decided to lie, but the maintainer still knew it was LLM generated, it would still have been rejected. Honesty isn't implicated at all, and framing it as such is also dishonest. The title of the post can only exist if the author would gladly lie to get what he wanted ignoring the others involved in the process. That behavior is extremely disgusting. > I don't care about what you want, so I'll gladly lie to you about my submission so that I get what I want... what you care about, and what you want don't matter! -- Przemysław Alexander Kamiński, presumably? I'm embarrassed by proxy that the author^ was willing to write this, and then publish it on the internet. Because this kinda behavior makes all of us working in and around software look bad. Please, adopt some personal ethics that include consideration and respect for others, and expend even a basic about of thought into if you're treating other humans with said respect. Because reading this, you're obviously not.

krackers

To play devil's advocate, how is a project supposed to distinguish between your patch and "slop" without a reviewer having to put in effort to vet it. Especially since the patch was drafted by LLM, it seems fair to be immediately skeptical. Why should they trust your word that you "reviewed the patch" when that's what every other vibecoder claims? It's true that they may not have known if the source was hidden. But on the flipside, if blanket banning any patch mentioning LLMs filters out 99% of garbage, in a maintainer's eyes that seems like a good tradeoff. There was an HN post a few days back about how LLMs are like a DDOS on OSS maintainers' time, and this just becomes collateral damage.

edg5000

By stating you used an LLM it sounds as if you haven't vetted it. By mentioning the LLM in this hyped-up time, you're distracting from the actual deep work you've (presumable) done. By ensuring the patch is truly tight, and that the correspondence it tight (not LLM slop), there is no reason to suspect slop or reject it. Assuming it's a concentrated, well motivated patch. That being said, this patch set is very large with very wordy comments. I'm not sure if he submitted all of them at once. Personally I would not accept such wordy comments in my code. A typical LLMism. These comments should be smaller and part of the email. I also suspect the code change could be smaller. Today's LLMs do have a way of slowly poisoning a codebase by not being a tight as they could be. It tends to bloat the code up. Okay for some code, especially when bounded (e.g. module X is written by LLM, API authored by human). But in massive, established codebases, you can't accept even slightly bloated code since it will drag everything down. Also, GLM is a lot weaker than GPT and Claude I think.

jeffrallen

Absolutism is absolutely terrible. Open source projects that cannot adapt to the times will be replaced by those which can.

geocar

It makes sense: if you use an LLM, you don’t have the copyright so you can’t assign it to the FSF.

collinfunk

The author states that they are not a lawyer, which is all good and okay. However, immediately afterwards they seem to claim that they know the law better than GNU, the FSF, and their lawyers. It confuses me how the author does not see that as a problem.

CGamesPlay

I'm trying to come to terms with this issue in my own interactions with open source as well. Where I'm at currently: since code is cheap and analysis is expensive, it can be more beneficial to a project's maintainer to get a precise, well-researched report of the issue than a PR. This is an inversion of most of my open source life, where opening an issue was asking for free work while giving a PR implied more reciprocal effort was given. I'll typically just end with "PR available upon request", unless the project has a no-LLM policy.

Diogenesian

"Oops, I really should have checked GNU's policy on LLM code generation before submitting an LLM-generated patch. That was a stupid mistake: not only was my patch rejected, I publicly announced myself as a thoughtless blunderer who doesn't read the rules." - from an alternate reality, where devs still have shame and humility

solid_fuel

I am somewhat sympathetic to the author's frustration, but GNU's stance on LLMs is still up in the air and given the controversy around generated code in general it shouldn't be surprising that GNU rejected this. That said, this post comes off sounding very arrogant, frankly. Especially when it comes to the legal arguments. Just to break down a few of the issues I had with this: > I don’t claim to known full context around the policy because - adding insult to the injury - this policy is discussed on the internal GNU lists. What I learned from past conversation around LLMs, however, is that the doubts about LLM contributions are around them being “open enough” and “legal to use”. I'm not sure what the insult is here. 5 minutes of research indicated that - GNU has a working group for an LLM policy, and that the policy is not fully decided. And the current state of things seems to be logged here: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/working-group-ai-policy but there's at least a dozen other articles discussing this too. > When we’re talking about open-weight models, I find the argument about being open absurd. It means that Qwen 3.6 on my local setup is fine, but if I use it from OpenRouter - then it’s not. GLM 5.2 IS Open Weights model and if I had 256 GB of RAM (which I don’t) and 24GB of VRAM (which I have), I could run it on my local machine escaping the whole “SaaS is closed” argument. By the same measure, maybe Internet access should not be available during crafting of submissions? Internet is full of non-free content, and thus patch might have been tainted? Who knows, maybe the inspiration was taken from gasp non-free book or article. I'm going to ignore the first part of this, I don't think it's surprising that the GNU is prioritizing things which can be run without dependencies on external service providers. That is completely in keeping with the GNU's philosophy. As for the second part, I hate when people play this game. "Taking Inspiration" from something is not the same thing as having an LLM generate code. Copy-pasting from an online source would also taint the patch. This gets worse as we descend into the legal opinions. > Regarding legality argument - I think it’s hubris talking. > With all the sympathy I have for GNU organization, it neither is the biggest, smartest or the most legal-wise caring organization in the world. E.g. gaming companies are way more paranoid about IP and LLMs and yet usage there is visible as well; ChatGPT has a billion of active users; hundreds of thousands, if not millions of organizations - commercial and not, are using LLMs output every day. And for them the case is clear. GNU is pretty much ENTIRELY concerned with copyright and legal issues around it. We might recognize GNU for the code they maintain, but the various versions of the GPL are by far their most impactful project. It is the fullest expression of the vision for the open source world. I would argue that GNU is one of the most experienced organizations in the US when it comes to copyright law. Secondly, gaming companies, Microsoft, EA - all of them have billions of dollars to pay lawyers if there is a major copyright issue around LLM generated code. GNU does not have that luxury and if their code base were tainted with copyrighted code, the consequences would be huge. > And as far as my, IANAL, personality understands is: the problem is with putting a copyright stamp on it and not other way around. > Yet GNU believes that THEIR lawyers and THEIR opinion has the most weight. I won’t deprive them from the right of deciding for they own, but this lack of self-awareness is almost caricatural [sic]. Yes, that may indeed be how you understand it but I am going to defer to the team of copyright lawyers who have dedicated years to this stuff instead. I'm sorry OP, your IANAL opinion is not going to bear that same weight. I also want to dig into this in particular: > First of all, I could’ve hidden the fact of LLM usage, and yet decided to declare it explicitly. By being truthful I already lost my footing. This alone makes the policy stupid. If admittance is punished it’s better to push submissions without admitting. It punishes integrity, not usage per se. Because who will find out? I don’t trust LLMs at all thus I believe LLM-assisted work require actually MORE scrutiny and eyes - not less. Being able to lie about it doesn't really matter either way. Yes, you could have hidden the LLM usage. You can also lie about stealing code from your job and hiding in GNU submissions. Being able to lie about this doesn't mean anything, and I find it concerning that "I could have just lied" was a major part of this complaint.