Being Against LLMs is Against the Spirit of FLOSS

Earlier this year I wrote Vibe-coding Brings the Power of Emacs to Everything in a more positive manner surrounding this topic. This is the negative version. I am not a radical in either direction surrounding this debate. But the internet does not reward subtlety or nuance, as I also pointed out in Three Thoughts on Crypto and nfts. The debate surrounding llm-generated code is more intense than ever. There are some people who have recently tried to turn this debate into action as an attempt to stem the tide of llm contributions that are flooding maintainers. Most notably Vim “Classic” and my own adopted public git forge of Codeberg. This is a shame, since it flies against the spirit of Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (floss). Linus Torvalds has effectively been vibe-coding the Linux kernel for decades (his models being the world’s best kernel programmers and his agent harness email) and that has clearly turned out fine, but I still write most my code the old-fashioned way (at…