Posted by todsacerdoti 6/25/2025
Why is it archaic if it works? I get there might be other ways to do patch sharing and discussion but what exactly is your problem with email as a transport?
You might as well describe voice and ears as archaic!
Very old or old fashioned
This mechanistic effort at a definition is insufficient. How on earth can whatever this is manage less than a thumb through a dictionary?
Archaic has way more meanings than just "old".
Pull your pants up.
I'm not sure that's the dunk you think it is. Good for Netflix for making money, but we're drowning in their empty slop content now and worse off for it.
Choice is good. It means more slop, but also more gold. Figure out how to find the gold.
Universities have this issue too, despite many offering students and staff Grammarly (Gen AI) while also trying to ban Gen AI.
Use AI if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell, and you can't defend the submission as your own, that's a problem.
The actual policy is "don't use AI code generators"; don't try to weasel that into "use it if you want to, but if the person on the other side can tell". That's effectively "it's only cheating if you get caught".
By way of analogy, Open Source projects also typically have policies (whether written or unwritten) that you only submit code you are legally allowed to submit. In theory, you could take a pile of proprietary reverse-engineered code that you have no license to, or a pile of code from another project that you aren't respecting the license of, and submit it anyway, and slap a `Signed-off-by` on it. Nothing will physically stop you, and people might not be able to tell. That doesn't make it OK.
Getting AI to remind you of the libraries API is a fair bit different to having it generate 1000 lines of code you have hardly read before submitting.
I'm sure that if a contributor working on a feature used cursor to initially generate the code but then goes over it to ensure it's working as expected that would be allowed, this is more for those folks that just want to jam in a quick vibe-coded PR so they can add "contributed to the QEMU project" on their resumes.
The rules regarding the origin of code contributions are rather strict, that is, you can't contribute other people code unless you can make sure that the licence is appropriate. A LLM may output a copy of someone else code, sometimes verbatim, without giving you its origin, so you can't contribute code written by a LLM.
Seeing this new phenomenon must be difficult for those people who have spent a long time perfecting their craft. Essentially, they might feel that their skillsets are being undermined. It would be especially hard for people who associate a lot of their self-identity with their job.
Being a purist is noble, but I think that this stance is foolish. Essentially, people who chose not to use AI code tools will be overtaken by the people who do. That's the unfortunate reality.
Who is going to "overtake" QEMU, what exactly does that mean, and what will it matter if they are?
If we're talking about something that neither involving QEMU nor the people behind it, where is the relevance? It's just a rant on AI at that point.
Because for projects like QEMU, current AI models can actually do mind-boggling stuff. You can give it a PDF describing an instruction set, and it will generate you wrapper classes for emulating particular instructions. Then you can give it one class like this and a few paragraphs from the datasheet, and it will spit out unit tests checking that your class works as the CPU vendor describes.
Like, you can get from 0% to 100% test coverage several orders of magnitude faster than doing it by hand. Or refactoring, where you want to add support for a particular memory virtualization trick, and you need to update 100 instruction classes based on straight-forward, but not 100% formal rule. A human developer would be pulling their hairs out, while an LLM will do it faster than you can get a coffee.
There are simple algorithms that everyone will implement the same way down to the variable names, but aside from those fairly rare exceptions, there's no "maximum number of lines" metric to describe how much code is "fair use" regardless of the licence of the code "fair use"d in your scenario.
Depending on the context, even in the US that 5-second clip would not pass fair use doctrine muster. If I made a new film cut entirely from five second clips of different movies and tried a fair use doctrine defence, I would likely never see the outside of a courtroom for the rest of my life. If I tried to do so with licensing, I would probably pay more than it cost to make all those movies.
Look up the decisions over the last two decades over sampling (there are albums from the late 80s and 90s — when sampling was relatively new — which will never see another pressing or release because of these decisions). The musicians and producers who chose the samples thought they would be covered by fair use.
It might actually be prudent for some (perhaps many foundational) OSS projects to reject AI until the full legal case law precedent has been established. If they begin taking contributions and we find out later that courts find this is in violation of some third party's copyright (as shocking as that outcome may seem), that puts these projects in jeopardy. And they certainly do not have the funding or bandwidth to avoid litigation. Or to handle a complete rollback to pre-AI background states.