Re: Coding assistants (LLM) policy

On Mon, 17 Aug 2026, Greg Troxel <[email protected]> wrote:
> Olivier Dion <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> I have made a tentative policy regarding the usage of LLM for the Guile
>> project [0].  You can find a verbatim copy of this policy at the end of
>> this email along with the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) that
>> accompany it.
>
> The comments about honor system are strange.  While I realize that
> whenever there are rules, people might behave contrary to rules and not
> disclose it, the honor system comment says more than is typical about
> people that think LLMs are ok, or perhaps about what people who think
> LLMs aren't ok think about people that use them :-)

I think the honor system fits well here.  I trust that others will not
generated LLM outputs if this is what we agreed upon.  Of course, that
does not make me blind and I might have my suspicion if somebody drops a
1000 commits change that re-wrote Guile in Rust.

But my idea with the honor system is:

  - I want to read patches without thinking if this was LLM generated or
    not.  I trust it is not.

  - I do not want to confront peoples by asking them if their code was
    LLM generated or not (could literally be an insult for some,
    e.g. me).

And in the end, if we can not trust each other, what is the point of
continuing making collaboration?

> I would therefore sugggest amending:
>
>   Require disclosure/attribution of any text/code that came from an LLM.
>   (Implicitly, consider violating this equivalent to submitting code
>   written by others while claiming to have written it.)

If we go that route, I think this is already in contradiction with the
DCO like you mention below.

> while understanding that pro-LLM culture seems to at times lead to lying
> about it.
>
> Secondarily, the text talks about the DCO, and signing the DCO indicates
> that the signer is the sole author or that non-signer content is
> properly licensed (compatible open-source license) and that any
> license-required attribution is in place.  It's an affirmative statement
> that things are ok license wise.
>
> With LLMs, it's an unsettled legal question as to whether LLM-generated
> text is a derived work.  If it is, the contribution lacks a valid
> license and the DCO statements are untrue.

You are right.

> By saying this is even perhaps ok, the project is deciding:
>
>   Notwithstanding that whether LLM output is a derived work of training
>   data is not a settled legal question, the project chooses to behave as
>   it LLM output is *not* a derived work, and will accept that into the
>   codebase.  Further, we do not have any requirements for tracking this,
>   meaning that we will not have an obvious recovery plan if LLM output
>   is rules to be a derived work of training data.

I read it differently.  You can not sign the DCO and use LLM.  You are
violating it by using LLM, because you can not claim copyright in a
legal way.  Therefore, you can not contribute something coming from a
LLM.  So I guess this is kind of a ban but indirect.  Maybe it is better
to affirmativaly say that you can not contribute anything from LLM and
you need to sign the DCO, which implies you did not (for now, given no
jurisprudence).

> (I sort of thought guile was a "GNU project", and if so thought that
> the entire GNU project was, at least for now, declining to accept LLM
> contributions.)

I could not say.  The only project I am aware of is GCC because I
closely follow them [0].

[...]

>> Also.  Please out of respect to others and for your own, don't be a
>> human proxy.  If I want a LLM generated interaction, I too can open a
>> LLM prompt.  So please please please, don't copy/paste the interaction
>> you just had with XYZ model.  I personally found this to be an insult.
>> I am much more interested in chatting with you than reading LLM outputs.
>
> It should be policy that in all project forums, representing LLM text
> asd one's own (by declining to identify it) should be prohibited.
> I have seen this in other project environments, and I consider it a
> serious offense.

Back to the honor system I guess :-)

[0] https://forge.sourceware.org/redi/gcc-wwwdocs/commit/4d0793a6a14bf9bfe9e92ac1599840780355199d

Thanks,
Olivier
-- 
Olivier Dion