@jcolag@lemmy.sdf.org
John Colagioia
Hi, I work on a variety of things, most of which I talk about more on my blog than on social media. Here, you’ll probably find me talking mostly talking about Free Culture works and sometimes technology.
member since 23 Jul 2023 16:46
comments
- on FOSS and Artificial Intelligence in c/foss@beehaw.org · 14 Sep 2026
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on FOSS and Artificial Intelligence in c/foss@beehaw.org · 13 Sep 2026
Personally, I think that using LLMs is a terrible idea, especially for Free Software. It creates a reliance on proprietary software[^1]. Generated code has uncertain provenance, for the same reason that researchers can provoke LLMs to “auto-complete” famous books, undermining the license. LLMs rewrite instead of fixing, since the latter requires intelligence, so it makes less-maintainable code. And studies show that using models slows work down, rather than speeding it up.
[^1]: Yeah, some claim to have open source licenses, and the OSI is desperately trying to figure out how to approve AI-specific licenses. But since there’s no (useful) way to modify the model without the training data, it’s proprietary.
I’ve only found two arguments in favor: The technology is (allegedly) here to stay. And sure, the studies say that it slows down work, creates bugs in most of its changes, makes everything harder to maintain, alienates the team, and erodes skill, but don’t worry, because I have a system.
I wouldn’t risk it on any project of mine, and especially not for anything released under a public license where it needs to promise people that they can use the code for any purpose.
Two reasons, three if you include the footnote that already answers the reductive “substitutable service” idea. Thirty-plus years ago, Free Software developers often used proprietary compilers. That was reliance on proprietary products. This is relying on proprietary tools to generate code, unless we want to pretend that people are out there running A/B tests between hand-written and generated code. The tools also generate unmaintainable code while making the developers less capable, making the tools more necessary as teams use them, which also sounds like reliance.