A compact for responsible use of AI tools

I think the GHC policy is reasonable for a project of that size.

For the GHCup project I have decided to not accept LLM generated code/commits. It’s not for me to decide how people work and they may very well use LLMs to navigate the codebase, experiment and do whatever else. But to me, accepting LLM generated commits means:

• I have to invest more time in reviews
  • I trust LLM generated code less than human written code and there’s increasing evidence that this is a healthy stance
• the project’s developer experience is sub-par
  • If people resort to using LLMs to contribute to such a small (well, fairly) project, then I feel I have failed somewhere and need better design, better documentation, better CI
  • e.g. I use LLMs extensively for creating example jq expressions and then “reverse engineer” them… jq’s interface/language is so awful that the english-language interface of LLM prompts and verifying output is less stressful… but when actually coding, I have the opposite experience
• as a project with a high risk of supply chain attacks (like all distros) it’s irresponsible to accept LLM generated code
  • although of course I can review everything in detail, it’s also a signal to my end users that my quality requirements are high (e.g. I found out that the mail server I’m using had claude-generated commits in the recent history… and it worries me)
• the copyright situation around LLM generated code is very nebulous. It seems most projects simply don’t care about that problem, but I do

These are all specific points. And I don’t care if anyone else adopts them. I just want to make clear this is not an emotional stance, but has very specific reasons. I still welcome contributions, I still use LLMs myself (but probably quite differently from others) and I don’t have any intention to create social witch-hunts of vibe-coded projects. Anyone is free to do whatever they want. I have my own reasons.