Re: Ballot option: Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

I know this is old, but I still think it should be corrected.

On 7/23/26 2:16 PM, Ansgar 🙀 wrote:
> There was recently an online outrage over AI use in rsync which
> included harassing the maintainer up to wishing for them to die.

This sounds to me as "anti-LLM people are bad, they do death threats". 
Of course it doesn't say that, but if people don't read carefully, that 
may be what they take away from it. I'm sending this message because I 
think that is not a valid conclusion from what happened.

> This was started because the commit messages included attribution to a
> LLM service.

No, that is not what started this. Nobody was reading commit messages 
just because they were looking for something to complain about.

What started it was that the rsync maintainer decided to use an LLM and 
they *broke* rsync. Only when people noticed their backup systems were 
no longer working, did those people start reading the changelog. There 
they found out the reason that it was broken, namely that the maintainer 
had apparently decided to start using an LLM (and they obviously weren't 
doing a careful review and/or using good tests).

> Not including those attributions would have made it less
> likely.

The story here is not "if you use an LLM, you risk being harrassed". The 
story is "if you use an LLM, you risk breaking your code". That is 
problematic in all cases, but especially for software which has been 
stable for decades.

If you break such an essential package, I think it is reasonable that 
people get angry. I do not expect that that they actually wanted the 
maintainer to die, but presumably they said that. I do not think that 
should be considered harassment, because it is not a threat. And in this 
context, I would give the victims of the breakage some space to express 
their anger in ways that may not be entirely appropriate.

The main reason I wanted to respond to this even after it was probably 
forgotten, is that I believe it may have given the impression that 
anti-LLM people are unreasonable and uncivil. I do not think this 
example makes a case for that. So I wanted to set that straight.

Thanks,
Bas