Void Linux Maintainer Orphans 100 Packages over AI Policy Dispute

nijave

Seems fine to me. Maintainer wants to use AI and community bans many AI uses so maintainer leaves. As AI bans go, this one doesn't seem too stringent if you disclose AI and actually check what it's doing.

redleader55

Does that mean that Void will drop the Linux part? Linus very publicly announced they welcome AI submissions. Seems like a very dumb hill to die on in 2026

nicce

I feel like people are just taking the easy shortcut when making these policies and banning AI completely. With AI, it is very easy to make sloppy code where nobody didn't put much thought on it. But AI can be really useful if you have the patience to use it incrementally and not by just asking it to one shot something. Since on average the people don't have patience and don't act with responsibility, spaghetti gets everywhere. It may sound tempting to ban the AI-generated code, but the issue is not the AI, but the lack of responsibility and potentially the the lack of experience of the developers whom are contributing with this spaghetti slop. The judgment should go for the end result and the author is responsible if the code is bad. Add exponential back-off to contributions if they are bad. It is also possible to brute-force maintainers with too many things to review, but you can also limit the lines of code they can contribute, unless they have some sort of reputation. Banning the AI just means that everyone is using it, but nobody is saying it aloud. Since it saves so much time when used correctly.

jfultz

Zero-tolerance no-AI policies are tiresome. I get why people have concerns. No PR reviewer wants to review drek the submitter him/herself doesn't understand. And LLMs have been a disproportionate source for such drek. But the actual problem they're trying to solve should be low-quality submissions, rather than spending energy fulfilling some notion of AI-free purity. The linked issue raised the complaint that a bit of text as a "wall of text" (implication, I guess, too many words, too little meaning). Maybe it was or wasn't. But being generated by an LLM doesn't make it a wall of text, and being written by a human doesn't make it not a wall (speaking as somebody who has been fairly accused at times of generating 100% human-made walls of text).

ezoe

Ridiculous rule applying AI ban even on comment and other text. If text contain a language like Japanese which require Input Method? some IM starting to use AI to perform kana kanji conversion. So this rule effectively prohibit some languages.