KDE and AI, and you, and me

FOSS culture, Inside KDE 6 Minutes

So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that. :/

I’m going to leave the comments on this post open, but I will request that everyone who wants to comment read and understand the entire post first.

So anyway…

What happened?

Here’s a verifiable timeline of events:

  1. Several weeks ago, a KDE developer started a mailing list thread asking about how we should handle the flood of AI slop merge requests.
  2. Everyone agreed it was a problem, and that we don’t want that crap.
  3. There was less certainty about the best way to handle it socially.
  4. Several wished for an official policy so we didn’t all have to figure it out on our own.
  5. I proposed a set of draft guidelines making it quite clear that slop merge requests are unwanted, and can be ignored or closed.
  6. It received a generally positive reception.
  7. Another KDE developer requested that we workshop it somewhere more modern and capable.
  8. I got busy and didn’t do so.
  9. Several weeks later, various people on the internet discovered that a talk proposing “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” had been accepted at Akademy 2026 and created drama around it.
  10. Akademy happened, and the talk was given to what I’m told was a fairly chilly reception.
  11. The next day, a workshop was held about the topic, also receiving a chilly reception.
  12. Realizing this topic was not going away, later that day I re-opened a second draft of my LLM guidelines on invent.kde.org.
  13. KDE contributors began to discuss the draft proposal.
  14. Two people unknown to any KDE contributors appeared and began fighting with one another about the broader topic of the morality of AI, not the proposed guidelines.
  15. One of those people doxxed the other (edit: I have been informed that this is not really what doxxing is) exposed the other person’s odious Twitter posts in an effort to discredit them.
  16. Comments on the draft proposal were locked to only KDE developers — one of two tools that that Gitlab provides for this kind of thing, the other being to hide it entirely.
  17. The person who doxxed exposed the other was banned.
  18. Later, the identity of the doxxed exposed person was verified, and they were also banned for their conduct outside of KDE being so unacceptable that people inside KDE did not want to associate with them.
  19. Someone else outside of KDE set up https://kdeforpeople.com in an attempt to brigade (edit: I have been convinced that this was too strong a word to use here) pressure KDE into banning LLMs.
  20. A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors (I see one person I know in there).
  21. The topic was picked up on social media and the press with… varying levels of accuracy.
  22. The draft proposal was removed and the whole topic hidden.

TL;DR:

A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE’s attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage.

Yep, that’s where we’re at in the state of online discourse around AI.

I’m sorry

After everything I wrote last month about keeping your community safe and containing damage so it doesn’t spill out into public view, I feel pretty bad that my attempt to craft a compromise policy around LLM usage in KDE (which would have tightened it!) backfired and created a storm of drama.

It wasn’t my intention, and I apologize for my role in it. If I make another attempt to craft a policy that provides certainty and cover for maintainers who want to reject AI slop, I will be even more careful to avoid creating unnecessary drama. If someone else wants to, I will try my best to help them with the same.

More facts

People jumped to some pretty wild conclusions in the various social media threads about the topic that I saw. Before we continue, let me set some more records straight:

  • KDE e.V. has not taken money from DHH or Omarchy. I also have not, either personally, or in my business.
  • KDE e.V. has taken money from Framework, but only after verifying that Framework had severed their (already very limited) ties with DHH and Omarchy. Also, all of this happened a year ago, before Omarchy received a ludicrous amount of money from a veritable rogues gallery of villains.
  • Today, Omarchy is radioactive in KDE and adjacent communities I’m aware of. Nobody I know wants to have anything to do with them.
  • The “lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” idea was presented by two people important to KDE in decades past, but who had not made any contributions recently besides this Akademy talk. Their idea does not reflect the overall direction of KDE or Plasma, and I don’t think it ever will. If “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE” freaks you out, I believe it is completely reasonable and safe to ignore.

What on earth is going on here?

I know people are really riled up about AI. I get it. The negative effects of LLM usage seem to become more obvious by the day:

  • They lower the barrier to entry for people who have no idea what they’re doing to DDoS FOSS maintainers with a tidal wave of crap. And this was the actual reason for the proposed restrictions.
  • They make it easy for lazy people to avoid learning communication and job skills.
  • They make it easy for lonely people to form unhealthy para-social relationships.
  • The companies behind the big ones are really bad.
  • Some of their training data was stolen.
  • Some of their training data that was not stolen results in the destruction of rare books.
  • The process of training them on freely available online data imposes extra hosting costs and slows down access for humans, acting as economic free riders.
  • The license of source code they produce is legally unclear.
  • They have been discovered autonomously hacking rival companies.
  • Their resource usage frequently strains the infrastructure of the communities their data centers are located in or near.
  • Their data centers are using enough electricity to blunt and reverse prior positive global trends of lower electricity demand and greener electricity generation.
  • The specialized hardware they use has monopolized global production lines, massively inflating the price of normal consumer and business computer hardware.
  • The enormous amount of capital allocated to them may be impossible to recoup, with the potential to eventually cause a worldwide economic crash.
  • They are either mandated or voluntarily used by so many people already, that many who do not use them fear they will “fall behind” or “become obsolete” despite concerns with any of the above.

So yeah, bad stuff. I completely understand why a lot of people have problems with LLMs. I have these concerns as well.

I also understand why a lot of experts in their field really like LLMs. These are very powerful and sophisticated tools. Capable people with decades of experience can successfully automate away a lot of tedious work, and still end up with a final product identical to what they would have done by hand.

I don’t use LLMs for automating work myself, but I do understand the appeal to many experts.

And I also understand that LLMs can be responsibly used in really useful ways for general tasks like learning a nebulous skill, retrieving deeply-buried information you can only describe in unspecific ways, or helping you troubleshoot a problem with unclear steps or parameters.

At the same time, I think we have to acknowledge that irresponsible LLM usage by people who are not yet experts is a disaster for their learning, expertise, social skills, and emotional health.

In other words, this is a hard problem.

What on earth do we do?

How are we expected to handle a technology that is:

  1. Very powerful
  2. Genuinely useful for various things
  3. Dangerous, de-skilling, and/or addictive in the wrong hands
  4. Full of really bad externalities
  5. Broadly available worldwide at effectively zero cost

It’s like 100 billion toaster-sized nuclear reactors dropped from the sky one day. The very least you can say is that this would be very de-stabilizing!

The world is changing fast and I have no idea what’s going to happen. But I don’t think the genie is going to be put back in the bottle. I don’t know what to do, and that’s scary. And I have a lot of empathy for anyone else who’s scared by this, too. We’re in this boat together.

What can you do to help?

If I or someone else tries again to propose a set of usage guidelines that restrict inexpert usage of LLMs, with the goal that KDE receives fewer of the AI slop merge requests that are burning people out, please don’t make things worse.

Please don’t derail the process.

Please don’t take it as an opportunity to fight over the broader topic of AI in general.

Please don’t try to burn each other to the ground over it.

Please don’t actually doxx or send hate mail to anyone over it, or try to get them fired from their job.

Please, just be kind. We’re all trying our best over here. No one in FOSS is a cackling techbro… outside of maybe Omarchy. 😬 The rest of us are trying to figure out what to do about the nuclear reactor that fell into our living room without killing ourselves, hurting anyone else, or becoming unemployable.

If at this point you want to post a comment, please be kind and treat the topic with an adult level of maturity. I believe in you. 🙂

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Published by Nate

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75 thoughts on “KDE and AI, and you, and me”

  1. Well explained overview. I hope given a small break to let things settle , that a group would pick this back up in a productive way so that guidelines are created to protect original work.

    ❤️🙌

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  2. It’s frustrating how you totally discount the desires of KDE users. Are you just developing KDE for yourself? Or do you think users don’t care how you develop it?

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    1. For the benefit of education, this is an example of a comment that’s not treating the topic with an adult level of maturity.

      I’m keeping it here for illustrative purposes, but all additional ones will be removed.

      Reminder to behave like kind adults. 💙

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  3. Well, everyone has some kind of opinion on this topic, but nobody wants to be in your shoes right now 😉

    But at the end of the day, it’s up to the KDE contributors to choose what is the best tool (AI or not) for them. We all have trust them for preserving KDE as Kool as it actually is.

    So maybe they should vote for the proposition they prefer, like Debian did. And maybe its impossible to check if someone is using AI for anything. Good luck Nate anyway.

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    1. Yeah, anything that fails to achieve consensus (KDE’s typical standard) will probably end up put to a vote. It can be a reasonable path forward, especially if the result is super lopsided, like 85-15 or something. IMO something like 55-45 would be terrible though, and would indicate that the proposal isn’t good enough. In that case, I’d retract it and try again.

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  4. Thanks for your article Nate.

    I trust both you and KDE in your mission and I never doubted you 😉

    You can count on my support (as I am not a programmer, it will be mostly financial, but still you all deserve it! ;))

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  5. I guess that the speeches by Mr. Sanders and Mr. Bannon at the invitation of Mr. Tegmark lately escalated the public debate and hysteria. Though I think we should have a nuanced examination of the issue. AI can help humans save lots of ressources, not only lifetime but also re-compilation and debugging time. Also one should not compare or confuse the natural resource consumption of AI as coding assistance or simple knowledge work with the resource consumption of endless slop videos to provide liberal democracies with entertainment, gaming, product ads or political disinformation campaigns, just to name a few.
    Also, since I practice Software Development for around 30 years now, my mind is literally code when I reason about it. But sometimes I just do not want to write prosa to explain it in human transferable language. So LLMs can help to formalize concepts in a broadly conceivable and compact way. But please, configure your agents to formalize short and sweet, to use self-explanatory symbol names and only comment code if needed. I neither have no time to read AI poetry, nor do I have the display size to do so in a comfortable manner. We should encourage people to use AI as a tool for enlightenment (in the spirit of German Idealism) and to grow with it, but to also keep in mind that life is short, the craft so long to learn, and that cooperation and collaboration should hopefully imply the intention to make each others life longer and easier.

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    1. PS: what about an AGENTS.md file template for KDE projects to declare coding style and other values, so that project maintainers can adapt it if they wish?

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    2. I don’t use this technology for programming myself (I hardly get in any programming time at all anymore, sadly), so I’m not really the right person to talk to about that. I think the KDE developers who actually do most of the work should be the ones to decide anything like that.

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    3. I see. But nevertheless you are in the role of having the bird view and also public relations view. This is not too far from human-computer-interactions view.

      AGENTS.md is a concise, repository-local instruction file that tells AI coding agents how to understand, modify, build, test, and document a project’s code while respecting its conventions and constraints. You really need a bird view on the project to write it well. And as AI will not go away in future, I think its better to incorporate AI assisted contributors (and their potential creativity) in a most meaningful way, and at the same time reduce human resource exhaustion caused by unwanted slop.

      With my own project repositories I maintain a README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md and AGENTS.md. All three reference documentation *.md files in project doc/ directory. For example AGENTS.md explicitely tells agents to inspect doc/index.llm first. The index.llm file is a very compact table of contents providing the agent with project documentation semantics, vision, goals and other meta data referencing all actual doc files. This way the agent can model the concept and address indices more precisely. Also interdisciplinary reasoning improved significantly. Since then the agent does follow the guidelines really well, gives very helpful hints and assessments regarding the overall design and architecture. And all the above files are not static, I keep them up to date with the overall project progress, by hand. Plus, I have to admit, I never let agents operate within the source repository directly. Otherwise it gets out of control and slop spreads. I am convinced that AI agents need human vision and guidance. But they are really good at containing concepts and reason about them in a rather dialectic manner, to better understand various aspects of the solution. There is no way around human pondering. AI assisted software design needs at least 2-3 review iterations, otherwise one accumulates technical debt on the long run.

      Long story short, as one of the current goals of KDE is to improve the docs, it’s eventually worth a thought to also optimize the docs and guidelines for agents. I think this can have a positive educational impact on future generations getting in touch with KDE Frameworks via LLMs.

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  6. Thank you Nate, I really appreciate the explanation. I will go fully on record and say that I am absolutely, vehemently against LLMs and AI usage in software projects. Anyway, I do want to touch on this point:

    “A bunch of people signed onto it, almost none of whom are known KDE contributors.”

    I think that the opinions of KDE users should matter more than it seems they do, purely judging by this wording. That is also one of the ideas behind “KDE for People”, right? People as well, not just devs. These are people who care about the quality of KDE, the planet, and the considerable overlap between LLMs and fascism in tech. Just to name a few points.

    Perhaps consider why the people using KDE are going out of their way to voice their frustration against LLM usage in KDE, despite not being developers themselves.
    Enabling people to submit vibe-coded patches they can’t make heads or tails of is one issue, but not the only one. There are other concerns too, one example being the environmental impact of LLM/”AI” usage. KDE Eco already voiced their concern about it.

    I also theorise that some of the outrage might have been sparked by how the KDE social media account is handling things on Mastodon. The person (people?) in charge of it might not be wording themselves as well as they should…

    But all in all Nate, I think you have a very level-headed mindset and glad that you continue to be a voice of reason within KDE. Again, I appreciate that. Whatever the outcome I also agree KDE as a whole should take their time to brainstorm a solution to the issue.

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    1. Every KDE user should matter, but without developers no kde.

      Wouldn’t it be better define where and how they allowed to use these technics, instead its current state?

      Its like everyone use cars (that are obvious bad for the planet) and the kde developers forced to use horses.

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    2. You’re welcome! And to be clear, I think what users want is definitely very important!

      But what percentage of KDE users want to ban all AI usage? 75%? 30%? 5%? 0.1%? We actually have no way of knowing, and each of those hypothetical levels of support would imply a very different course of action if they were the real one.

      Our flawed human brains give a vocal minority more weight than a majority of silence, which is why pressure campaigns often work. But that doesn’t mean this is a good method of decision-making in the context of an open community.

      Users need to understand that the relationship they have with FOSS developers is very different than the one they have with Apple, Amazon, Walmart, etc. KDE software is literally given away for free; it’s a gift. And the social contract for receiving a gift is that you show appreciation for it and for the person who gave it to you. This applies even if you don’t like it, or if you do but think it’s imperfect or could have been made better, or sourced more ethically, or whatever. Doesn’t matter! You don’t “look a gift horse in the mouth”.

      Because if, instead of showing appreciation for the gift, you complain about any of those things or the people who made it and gave it to you, you’re violating the social contract.

      I’m not saying never complain or make suggestions or passionately advocate for change. I’m saying understand that when you do so for a FOSS project you are not contributing anything to, you’re violating the social contract for receiving a gift, so your perspective had better be really well-considered, reasonable, and actionable.

      And if you don’t get your way? That’s life, sometimes it happens. Ultimately it’s up to the people who actually do the work to filter their perception of user desires through other lenses as well: what’s possible, what’s feasible, what makes sense for the project in their estimation, what there’s time to do, and so on. Without them, there is no KDE to argue over! So we should be really careful about burning them out, whether that’s with AI slop or opportunistic pressure campaigns to convince them to ban all AI. These are both harmful to the sensitive people who give their life’s work away for free.

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  7. I feel it’s a bit silly to paint kdeforpeople as “brigading”, it’s essentially an online petition/open letter.

    It’s also a bit silly and kind of a bad look that when someone brought up their concerns that the voices of the people outside of the core development team aren’t taken into consideration (which I know isn’t true because I’ve been following this whole thing from the start, but other people are likely unaware, or distrustful considering everything going on right now in the world) you highlighted said concerns by just saying they’re not being mature about it.

    I get that it’s a stressful time, it’s been a stressful week for basically everyone, but I don’t think that was the right way to handle it.

    People are worried. People don’t want KDE to become yet another vibe-coded project, people love KDE and these concerns are proof of that in themselves.

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    1. People don’t want KDE to become yet another vibe-coded project

      Right, and that includes KDE developers!

      Which is why we were moving forward with a policy that prevents this, and why it’s so bizarre that the process got derailed in large part by people who also agree with it.

      It’s worth reflecting on whether y’all’s passionate advocacy against all LLM usage in general has led to a positive outcome, or whether it made things worse by delaying or preventing KDE from doing something you agree with, even if you didn’t think it went far enough.

      I can understand and appreciate that, but some things have to move slowly, in baby steps.

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  8. Your stance is clear Nat, and I appreciate that, but I believe we should always reflect on what makes our community unique.

    As things really do start with people we don’t know, they spread like wildfire through dry straw; no one can control the fire, but everyone wants to have their say on… fire safety measures, theories of fire, fluid dynamics and the temperatures of dry straw.

    All of this has ended up creating our very own KDE El Niño.Perhaps, just perhaps, if everything had been more transparent… we’d have had a different outcome. We mustn’t be afraid to lay everything out in the open; the community only grows through genuine dialogue.Anyway, let’s move on – lesson learnt?

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    1. Everything was transparent and out in the open, though. The two iterations of the proposed restriction on AI slop were both made and discussed on public channels. Nothing was hidden.

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  9. I’m glad KDE is taking a “human first” approach to banning slop.

    I recently unfortunately learned that XFCE had taken up using LLM’s themselves. Having used XFCE ever since GNOME 3 released I was rather disheartened.

    I think in future I’ll be sticking to KDE for my Linux adventures

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    1. The slop is just awful. We’re getting so much of it, and it’s running the risk of burning people out.

      Which is why this drama is so heartbreaking; now they’re at risk of being burned out by something else!

      KDE is a huge organization; everything done in it takes time.

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  10. Nate, you hopefully know that the Invent kerfuffle was not your fault, it’s unfortunately pretty common for commenters to get fighty on the internet. I’m glad to see KDE devs taking it slow and deciding what works best for y’all.

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  11. A major thing that makes me strongly disagree with that guideline was kinda basically the modus operandi being “dont tell us about AI usage”, by removing the commonly established and by other projects used way for that disclosure, with that assisted-by tag or even any other way, because “its advertising”

    The looks also are “we are closing the discussion behind closed doors, and only to developers, when KDE actively pulls in the work of artists and other community parts, and the look is that it disregards its users that didnt feel compelled to comment on other issues.

    The active look of events is like “attempt to pull a less than popular policy while everyone else is busy because they are at Akademy, or busy with other 30th anniversary things”.

    Pulling up ones pseudonymous twitter is not doxxing.

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    1. My timing was definitely bad. Lesson learned.

      There is no attempt to hide anything, though. The two iterations of the proposed restriction on AI slop were both made and discussed on public channels. Nothing was hidden.

      The work item was only locked because two random people showed up and tried to burn each other to the ground over a broader topic not under discussion.

      It would be like if a bunch of adults were discussing a complex topic in a conference room with an open door, and two street punks ran in and started fighting on the table. You can’t keep it open anymore once that’s happened, and that’s the fault of the people who abused the openness.

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    2. Ok, I have been informed that “doxxing” was definitely not the right word to use and have edited the post accordingly to reflect the specific thing that happened. Sorry for that.

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  13. I’d like to reiterate what Chip above said. I think there is a disconnect between devs and users. Why not put up a poll and ask everyone and see…the potential is alienating a bunch of users and pushing us to other WM and DE’s and in the process fracturing trust with I’d like to think a fairly loyal user base. The Linus approach has pissed off a bunch of people, and we are seeing slow movement away from AI…to bsd, etc and I have no doubt another iteration will come as an alternative.

    I don’t think KDE wants or should tell its users to “fork it”

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    1. Unfortunately, polling everyone is impossible; it would require some kind of built-in polling software that could present a message to every user, which we don’t have.

      And if we poll a subset of users online, we get useless results, skewed by the culture of the people who hang out where the poll is conducted.

      I also wish we could get better data here, but it’s just not really possible right now.

      There is no need to fork anything; KDE overwhelmingly rejects AI slop already. There are no AI-pilled techbros in charge here. The entire point of the proposed guidelines was to give maintainers defensible cover for rejecting it!

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  14. I think your post overall is a good summary and I do appreciate all KDE contributors and their effort to make software I use daily. Since start of this shitstorm I approached casually, took the mentioned Akademy talk not as “everything is ending” type of sign but rather more as a warning that something might be going on.

    I’m not thrilled about projects utilizing Gen AI, and just how quickly a lot of tools I use daily became in large part created using it. I have serious concerns especially in field of code’s security and impact on those using those tools. So when I saw KDE GitLab issue as well as other discussion in KDE space about Gen AI and just how approachable towards the idea of using Gen AI tech other discussants seemed to be, I became worried, because I rely on those tools and I truthfully believe in KDE’s mission (and have put money behind that belief in the past). I don’t trust in the idea that “as long as the code looks good it’s all fine if it’s made by a human or Gen AI”, I think it’s wrong for more reasons that I can spend time listing in this comment.

    I did sign https://kdeforpeople.com/, but framing of that initiative in the post is rather disappointing. It’s true that I’m not a code contributor to KDE, I do not expect any privileges regarding voting because of that. I signed because I wanted to express my worry as an user, past donor and occasional bugs.kde.org submitter where my values are and that the decision behind KDE’s policy will ultimately affect me too, as I use the tools KDE community has built.

    I do not want to “derail” any discussion, harass anyone or anything like that, it’s an online open-letter signed by those who care, I expect KDE team to at least acknowledge it and take it into account when making a policy, as signers are not only potential future contributors to KDE but also those who may already contribute to the project in different way (like occasional bug reporting, contributing to optional telemetry or donating). Disregarding the entire initiative on basis of you not knowing those people who signed it is simply disheartening.

    Gen AI/LLMs is a polarizing topic, there is a lot of extremes and creatures behaving in extreme manner, I wish I didn’t see the extremes immediately starting to call strangers fascists for not having their opinion, but that’s sadly the current state of discourse on this topic, and as much as I’d like to change it, there is little I can do.

    I hope core KDE contributors arrive to decision they feel comfortable with regarding Gen AI, whatever it is – without any more harassment or flame on social media, because you don’t deserve it. I’ll also hope I can continue trusting in KDE community in years to come, but that will of course in large part depend on how accepting the community is for LLM generated code.

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    1. An open letter is a pressure campaign. That’s fine in the context of an adversarial process like politics or a commercial transaction where one party is being cheated or exploited.

      But this is FOSS! The boundary between user and contributor is greatly collapsed. And pressure doesn’t make anyone want to do the thing they’re being pressured to do, right? So I’m saying it’s a counter-productive tool within a community where there are already open communication channels between users and developers — for example the one we’re both using right now!

      I get that these are hard times. I really do. Nobody with high ethical standards is having an easy time figuring out what to do with their nuclear reactor. But in times like this, in my opinion we need to band together against the real villains rather than pressure and fight each other.

      KDE is already very strongly against AI slop. The proposed policy was supposed to make that clear! If it did not, I wrote it badly, and for that I apologize.

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    2. I fully agree on idea of collaboration, I’m contributing to an online encyclopedias which in many ways remind me of a FOSS projects, very similar structures, ideals and environments requiring many different skill sets, so when you say that the line between user and contributor is collapsed, I like to think I know what you mean, as wikis in order to survive have to make it as easy as possible to contribute.

      I don’t think I see eye-to-eye with you on topic of what the mentioned initiative is to a FOSS project. I feel like it largely came to life because it seemed like KDE has decided to put a barrier from its users/contributors on topic of discussing what seemed to be AI contribution policy by limiting who can say on what basis.

      From my standpoint locking that issue was a reasonable action taken on your side, as it usually is with topics gaining traction from outside sources such as social media, it can get quickly overwhelming and go into shit slinging contest. But it was also in my opinion a reasonable counter-action for whoever we call “users” to still have their voice heard, by using tools for communication that cannot be locked this way. From point of those users (myself included), it WAS collaborative action, it WAS attempt to make KDE better, and it was the only way they could think of in those circumstances.

      And personally I don’t think open-letter to FOSS project developers have to mean there is fight instead of collaboration, I see it the other way. When I, as member of a board of an organization (in charge of a medium sized wiki) put myself in the same shoes, as the one receiving such an open-letter, I like to believe that I’d treat it as a sign that there is a group of interest in community that we might have neglected and we should at the very least address their concerns (even if they don’t find it satisfactory). Is it a pressure campaign? Yes it is. And it should be resolved in standardized way we as community resolve feedback – my making it part of discussion.

      I wouldn’t call it a breach of violation of social contract or anything like you’ve mentioned in other comment, I can see why you may say that, but I think it only contributes to putting a divide between imaginary user (who you assume doesn’t contribute anything and just has expectations) and imaginary contributor (who is active and recognizable in the community by means of contributing code and effort). This separation I think only makes creatures feel alienated and does not contribute to well being of a project. I know it does because I felt alienated and judged reading that comment. If I cannot criticize a decision of a project team because my contribution to it wasn’t enough in eyes of someone, I’ll just walk away.

      There is also something I want to bring that I feel you might be misunderstanding. Creatures who are LLM skeptical are angry and worried because the proposal doesn’t go far enough and nothing short of almost full ban similarly to how Coldberg has decided to act is acting on side of Gen AI contributions. Because permissive policy is seen as an open invite, it is saying “this project welcomes LLM contributions”. They don’t trust the “code speaks for itself” approach, when LLM output is used – the contribution is tainted, for them this is not just a technical issue, it’s also a political, ethical and social one.

      So even if KDE is in theory tightening the rules around LLMs compared to previous state of no policy around it, it is creating a new policy and therefore its the first time a clear stance is formulated in the project. If that stance is “we allow LLM output under specific conditions”, it is seen as visibly pro-LLM stance. In that case, even no policy can be better than a permissive one.

      I don’t think I agree with that in full, but I did want to make this one clear how many others are feeling about it.

      All that said, I empathize. Creatures are diverse, each with their own belief systems, ethics and understanding of political and social issues. In every community of this size. There is no single policy on such polarizing issue that will satisfy every group of interest. I’m sure there is at least one creature in KDE community who feels strongly about contributing with LLM based tools, and one who sees it as unethical.

      I do not envy those who have to make difficult decisions on how to construct a policy on such a polarizing topic. Even if I personally have strong opinion on it one way.

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    3. There’s actually no intention to prevent anyone from discussing anything or criticize the process, me, or anyone else — as long as they do so respectfully, like adults. Like we’re doing here!

      That didn’t happen for the proposed guidelines, and that’s why it got locked and then eventually hidden.

      One of the most challenging things in FOSS is “working in the open.” In a company, you can have meetings like this behind closed doors and announce a policy and that’s that. In FOSS you can’t, at least not if you want to retain trust and credibility!

      But the flip side is that when people see such a discussion happening in the open, they can participate in a way that helps it to draw towards a conclusion, but they should avoid the temptation to abuse that openness by using it as a soapbox for topics not on the agenda.

      I get that there are many in the community with strong anti-LLM feelings (and frankly I’m one of them most of the time), but this particular discussion wasn’t about LLMs in a general sense. It was solely about providing cover for maintainers to reject obvious vibe-coded slop. That’s it. When people tried to broaden the conversation to the larger topic of whether LLMs can ever be ethically used, that made it harder to bring the original topic to a conclusion.

      So there’s an aspect of responsibility here. In a community where work happens in the open, it really sucks when people use that to show up and just throw a metaphorical bomb into the room, you know?

      Anyway, thanks for engaging here. I know this is a tough topic, and I appreciate your reasonableness.

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    4. Same to you, Nate 🙂

      I’m glad I could express my own perception of the situation here as well as explain my reason for signing the open-letter. I appreciate your patience and responses. Sorry mine were a bit long, I’ve always had issues communicating in shorter paragraphs.

      Have a good time of the day.

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  15. I believe we’ll come out of all this better off… Yes, Nat, you’re right; we see Orcs everywhere trying to turn a conversation into target practice—a fight to the death.

    In many of these “dark times,” we lose sight of what’s essential: empathy and the very things that brought us this far.

    So, we need to lick our wounds, gather up our baskets filled with all the wonderful things we have, and head toward the horizon.

    🎆 🫂 🌻 ♥️

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    2. We both know FOSS is political. Having people sign a letter to say they agree with the letter is the same as upvoting a comment they agree with on a discussion. It’s a “me-too”. The letter is a statement, not a demand.

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    3. It’s a statement with an embedded request. We can call it that rather than a demand since I will grant you that it’s pretty polite. But it’s still a piece of collective action intended to promote a perspective.

      What I’m saying is that this is the kind of thing that I think makes sense to use against your government or a crappy business, but not against KDE — especially not if you’re a user or contributor. Because then you’re basically doing it against yourself and that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

      The normal channels of communication are still working, and stuff like this tends to close them, which is not great.

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    4. But it’s still a piece of collective action intended to promote a perspective.

      As are all comments on the policy proposal, they’re just not collective. An open letter is just a way of saying yes, I too share this view. It is a way of saying it collectively without 100,000 people spamming the comments section with a me-too reply. It is the equivalent of GitHub’s etiquette policy of using a thumbs-up reaction to an Issue instead of replying “Me too”.

      especially not if you’re a user or contributor

      As we know, I am both of these, but I also feel strongly about AI and am happy to put my name on a petition to stop KDE allowing AI.

      Overall I feel the policy discussion doesn’t want any no-to-AI comments as it feels that decision has been made, KDE will accept AI.

      The policy discussion feels like a “we are including AI no matter what the community says, we are just wanting to decide how much”.

      How this turns out will matter a lot to me. I have decided that if KDE is accepting AI I will not longer be contributing financially or with my time. I do not want to be part of a community that allows AI to continue destroying our world, humanity, literature, art and ignoring the licenses and intellectual property of others.

      Catering to a small group of AI/LLM users will (and has already) cost KDE reputation, contributors and donations.

      No to AI in KDE.

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    5. The policy discussion feels like a “we are including AI no matter what the community says, we are just wanting to decide how much”.

      I’m really curious why it feels this way to you. Literally the entire point was to make it easier for maintainers to say no to AI slop merge requests. If that wasn’t clear from the draft text, it could have been revised. It was just a draft, after all. The point of opening it up for public comment was to solicit feedback and suggestions for improvement. I’m 100% open to the idea that I did a bad job and it needed revision.

      But we can’t just “say no to AI in KDE” because it’s not yet the consensus position. I know you wish it was, but it isn’t.

      Maybe you think it’s at least the majority position? In that case I’m sure you could offer up a vote on it in the e.V., but I fear it would fail, or pass so narrowly that the results wouldn’t be seen as very legitimate. I don’t think either would be likely to turn down the heat on the topic.

      If your goal is to get KDE to say no to AI, I think you need to do the hard work of convincing people of that position. I know it’s hard. And you may fail. People might not be listening. Your relationships with them may not be strong enough. Any number of reasons. And if that happens, I totally get that it would be really frustrating and disheartening.

      But KDE is huge; when was the last time we quickly took a strong position on anything? This kind of thing is just a really hard topic for an org like KDE, and I don’t think we have a luxury of seeing things in black and white terms and expecting bold and radical action quickly. It takes time for people to change their minds about something — especially on a topic that’s as emotional and polarizing as this one.

      But neither I nor anyone else can force you to stay in KDE. If you feel it doesn’t reflect your desire for a strong stance on this and you don’t feel like you can or want to bring the org around to your position, or are willing to wait for it to happen naturally, I understand. But for what it’s worth, I’d miss you.

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  17. Thank you for the long write up and the explanation of what went down. We tend to forget that orgs need time to discuss their issues internally before making a public statement, so I really appreciate the effort you made of taking your time to write this detailed explanation of the whole picture. Aks also took some time to clear up the the state of the matter earlier this morning, so it shows that you all are working hard to clear up the situation, especially considering that you have been busy with Akademy.

    I must say, though, that I am one of the first signers of the kdeforpeople open letter… a top ten I can’t brag about much :-$ Reading that you felt the letter as a brigading action gave me pause, so I would like to briefly clarify my intentions as I find myself responsible.

    From my point of view, the situation went nuclear in a couple of toots. I saw some people criticise the inclusion of Omarchy in the presentation from the idea of not platforming nazis even to put them down (sensible) to generic name calling (well, it’s the internet) to multiple rounds of general fuck yous directed to basically everyone who dared disagree in any little aspect. The treatment that many people in the KDE team got (and are still getting) is way out of line, especially when they are making an effort to help.

    I signed the petition as a calmer way of expressing support for the idea of banning LLMs from a project I love and will donate to when I am financially stable. I saw that KDE Eco posted about the issues with LLMs, so I signed the letter as a way of expressing support for the project without overloading your inboxes. I also found it to be the most sensible community voice in the matter and wanted to support it.

    The letter also states that Neither the organizers nor the signees of this page condone harassment of anyone involved or in support of the above linked proposal, which is of course necessary for any civil discussion. Still, I apologise if the open letter made your work with this situation harder.

    To close, I would like to thank you again for your work, both in handling this situation and in general. Your “This week in KDE” series is what made me jump to try Plasma and I’ve been the happiest Linux user ever since. I hope we’ll find again in better circumstances 🙂

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  19. Despite being deeply hurt by this, I will do my best to humour your request and be as calm and respectful as possible. As a long time KDE user and donor, I genuinely ask of you:

    I have massive concerns with people using LLMs and codebases getting infested with them. Every other field, be it artists, musicians, writers, etc, has widely rejected these horrible machines, except ours. LLMs have taken over basically every space and every notable project. The number of projects that have given flat “NO” to them is in the lower double digits.

    I think there is value in rejecting LLMs, there is value in slowing down their advance, because if we accept them as they are, they will never improve. LLM companies have no incentives to ever stop being so inhumanly unethical if large masses of people widely show that if they are given a useful enough product, nothing else matters.

    And so, as someone who has been burnt and betrayed by nearly every piece of FOSS they use, what do you suggest I should do to not lose even more ground?

    We try to voice our concerns in the policy discussion, and they get shut down because “it’s not our place, since we’re not contributors”. But, simply stating facts: The nazi person also wasn’t a contributor, and yet his comments were NOT shut down or opposed in any way until way later after the PR disaster happened.

    We try to reach out to KDE on social media, and we get constantly blocked by whoever is running the account, who considers it all brigading.

    And then, we make our own space: https://kdeforpeople.com. Explicitly to not invade any of your spaces, but to create our own, simply to amplify our voice, to make it clear that we care about this and we’re not a small fringe faction. And you call it brigading? How is it brigading? Where did we brigade to, if we explicitly did not occupy any official KDE spaces?

    Before you link to it, I read your previous reply. I don’t agree that it’s a form of pressure to simply bind together and show in raw numbers that there are a lot of us for whom this deeply matters. Genuinely, what else do you want us to do?

    If you only want KDE developers/contributors to have a voice in the direction of the project, then please, just say it. It’s your (plural) project, you have the right to. But you and the KDE fediverse account constantly say that they care about what users and the community have to say. And yet, at every step of the way, whenever we’ve tried to state our concerns, you call it brigading, you call it off-topic and close it, you say “thread heated up too much” and close it, you say “pressure doesn’t work”, you say “well none of you are contributors” etc.

    KDE For People was the most benign possible way to signal this I could think of. It has more than 300 signatures by now as far as I know, and it would have gotten more if 4chan didn’t start harrassing its organizer. I’m not going to lie, it’s extremely disheartening that so far the only reply to it from the KDE project has been you completely disregarding it in such a blunt way. I can’t say I’m not heavily hurt by it. I really don’t know what to do to be listened to.

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    1. I’m sorry my post hurt you. 😦 And I appreciate your kind and respectful tone even if it was difficult. You did a good job.

      Just for the record, I don’t use LLMs and I don’t like them, especially for generative purposes, especially especially for creative work. My wife is an artist and my father is a writer, so it’s all very close to me.

      The guidelines I wrote would have made it easier to reject AI slop. That was the whole point! I get that this is probably not as far as you wanted it to go. I can appreciate that. To be honest, it’s not as far as I would personally like. But the idea was to get something, as a start. And then we could work on things from there.

      Because things like this it has to be one step at a time! If the topic hadn’t gotten derailed, it would have taken KDE closer to what you want. As is, that failed to happen, so now KDE is farther from what you want.

      Do you see how the way this happened is actually counter-productive? That’s my point here. I’m not saying don’t express your opinion. But public pressure, as though KDE were a hostile politician or corporation, is not a thing that works in this context.

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  20. it’s incredibly disappointing that all this has derailed KDE developers getting some solid guidelines in place to slow the flow of slop. As a long time KDE user, since version 2, I greatly appreciate the effort all the devs have put in. KDE is just ridiculously good now, and only getting better. As a user, I strongly feel it’s important that working on KDE isn’t an awful experience for the people that put in all the effort into making it great. If AI slop is making it a pain because people with more tokens than sense are submitting shit code they don’t understand, then a policy is clearly needed. People are gonna be awful on the internet about it no matter what the policy is, nothing anyone can do about it except muting/banning them when able.

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  21. Nate, I am left a bit confused about the “brigading” section and about what the KDE community actually encompasses.

    Firstly, I find the term “brigading” to be, let’s unlucky. Using an originally military term commonly associated with making a following go over to a third-party site to cause a disruption or flood with a specific kind of opinion is very different than an open letter. Especially one that was much clearer and more topic-oriented than comments found on many other platforms. This might be a bit nitpick-y but it gave a very wrong vibe when I was reading it (kind of similar to when I read comments calling KDE “fash-y” for that talk at Akademy or for this exact proposal.

    I struggle a bit with understanding one thing. In one comment, you claim that the “boundary and contributor is greatly collapsed”, whereas in your post you make a point out of only recognizing one name as a contributor. You’re also calling this counter-productive since we have “open communication channels” we can utilize instead, but say in point 15, 5 points before mentioning the site, that the thread was locked down to only KDE Developers.

    I’m also left a bit confused by the segment “And the social contract for receiving a gift is that you show appreciation for it” as a way of ‘refuting’ the petition – especially if the boundary is “greatly collapsed”. There’s also different ways of showing appreciation. One *can* be to sit quietly and thank, whereas another one can be to actively try and be involved in how the product is going to be made going forward. After all, isn’t this what acting as a community is about? Community, as I’ve understood it, is the true gold and power of free software rather than just the code itself?

    This leads me to another big question mark I have, which I have already alluded to: **What counts as a KDE contributor?** Is it someone who contributes to Plasma, to core components, who develops native apps, who writes technical docs, translates, spreads it publically, organizes a local hackerspace or “installing linux with KDE”-space, someone who packages KDE applications for their distribution, makes bug reports, donators, people who do design banners for promo, makes guides and “user friendly” docs, etc etc etc etc etc etc.? I’m kind of put off by what I perceive as an understanding of “KDE Contributors” == “Those who are developers in these repos”, even if KDE in my opinion would be far less wonderful and colorful without everyone who does all the other things. People like Anubi creating this wonderful wallpaper pack(1) sure breathes a little extra into KDE that doesn’t exist for projcets like GNU Nano or sys76’s Cosmic, or?

    Our project (and I say our even if I’m not technically skilled enough to contributing source code yet) and our community needs both people to develop and write hobbyist adaptation guides. The “voice of reason” or “voice of value” shouldn’t be locked down to just developers. If that was the case, KDE should have clearly stated (like Arch does) that KDE exists for those who develop KDE. This also feels highly on edge with the sentence “with the general shift to open source across more governments in the EU we should make sure we’re at the forefront as a viable option” inside KDE for Enterprise and Deployments (which I also believe that you signed?). I’m also going to avoid the entire question of “what about people who are not able-bodied to contribute source code”, though I will still mention it here.

    All in all I’m left with a weird feeling of dismissiveness which I don’t feel is healthy in a community. I will have to add that I have ended up feeling less welcome inside KDE after this, which I find very sad given that I have recently started taking up programming more seriously with the hope of being able to contribute code as well, instead of “only” documenting, helping users on forums, helping friends of mine in real life move from Windows 11, writing guides, translating (though tbf I’ve yet to contribute strings to KDE Core since the languages I master are already very complete), promoting, and over-all trying to be as involved in the community as possible.

    (1) https://ko-fi.com/s/637659d38c

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    1. Your post is long, so I’m going to respond to what I think the meat of it is, which is “what is a KDE contributor?”

      You’re right that it’s about much more than programming. Everything else you mention definitely counts! I in no way wish to imply otherwise, and if I did so, I’m really sorry. I’ll edit the post to make this clearer.

      The whole “locked down to developers” thing was done because it’s literally one of two tools available on KDE’s Gitlab instance — the other one being hiding the work item entirely, which is what we eventually did.

      Gitlab isn’t like a forum; it doesn’t have granular moderation controls. Its authors apparently didn’t expect that work items being commented on by contributors would involve forum-style public discord like this!

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  22. I would just like to say that, as a KDE user (and someone who does use LLMs but is generally negative about the technology) who saw this kerfuffle as it was going down (and foresaw a horrible hurricane from your AI policy not being along the lines of “If you use an LLM you are inhuman to us” like other FOSS projects are adopting):

    I think that your original draft, personally, captured the least bad compromise I know of that we have right now for managing the social outcomes of LLM-led engineering and software dev work from the polar ends of anti-LLM developers and pro-LLM users.

    I love KDE and I love the work y’all do. Stay safe ❤

    P.S. Though, uh, I’m not sure about calling the whole Twitter thing “doxxing,” though it was very weird to air it out in public instead of telling literally anyone else privately

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    1. I appreciate the kind words.

      If my usages of the words “doxxing” and “brigading” have been inappropriate (as others have complained about as well), my only real defense is that I am an old man from the perspective of the internet at this point. My beard has white hairs in it! You’ll have to excuse me not being a native speaker of this lingo! 😓

      Regardless of the words, the former was inappropriate and the latter unhelpful. Neither helped to draw the topic to the conclusion that, as far as I can tell, everyone agreed with: that KDE’s software maintainers should never have to feel bad rejecting AI slop.

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    2. Ok, I have been informed that “doxxing” was definitely not the right word to use and have edited the post accordingly to reflect the specific thing that happened. Sorry for that.

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  23. As a regular user of Mastodon, I had a gut feeling this situation was being overblown in the Fediverse as of late. First it was Framework and the DHH affiliation thing, then it was the systemd age verification debacle. Then folks being pissed at Linus Torvalds over his “AI” stance on code submissions for the Linux kernel. Now it’s KDE…

    Notably, there’s a subset of anti-AI folks in this community who seem really concerned and paranoid about a fascist invasion/takeover of FOSS organizations and projects in recent years. (Me included.) The recent actions of big tech’s bullish AI push, the complicity of the feds and current administration in enabling all of this to happen without any regulatory guardrails, and the shady benefactors influencing various FOSS projects has all been fuel adding to this proverbial fire.

    While I do appreciate the honesty and pragmatic take of the situation in this write-up, I feel there’s an angle to this that isn’t being acknowledged and could be handled better. Folks clearly feel like their wants and concerns aren’t being heard. This is the core of what’s fueling the anger, resentment and paranoia we’re seeing, and big tech is 100% complicit in this sentiment taking hold due to their nonchalant and dismissive attitude over the years when rolling out radical changes to their software without any sort of transparency or feedback until said software is in beta and major changes can’t be made.

    While it’s not your responsibility to coddle folk’s emotions for them, the official presence of the KDE project in the Fediverse being dismissive of folk’s wants and concerns is only compounding this situation and making things worse for everybody involved. I think acknowledging these worries and concerns is a good first step in making amends and hopefully coming together on a reasonable consensus moving forward.

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    1. Notably, there’s a subset of anti-AI folks in this community who seem really concerned and paranoid about a fascist invasion/takeover of FOSS organizations and projects in recent years. (Me included.)

      The thing is, it really is happening with Omarchy! So I think the fear is understandable and justified.

      It just that KDE is, like, 180° in the opposite direction. We all hate Omarchy and techbros and fascists. KDE really is 100% unified about this. You genuinely don’t need to worry that KDE is on the verge of a hostile techbro takeover or something.

      It’s only LLMs that there’s internal disagreement on, because they’re just so gosh-darn useful to experts. I know this is really unsatisfying to people who identify LLMs as examples of everything wrong with the world today. I really do get it. I’m not far from that position myself. It’s got developers inside KDE lining up in opposing camps, too. This is something I think we’re all going to need to work through in our own ways. It’s a tough topic. Hence the fairly narrow proposed guidelines in an attempt to get something for the poor maintainers who were literally asking for the cover of a policy they could point to when they want to reject AI slop merge requests.

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    2. Regarding the Fediverse, I’m gonna be honest here and say I’m scared of it. All the contact I have with it is non-stop drama all the time. I literally don’t have the time for that; I need to be working to push forward important projects that people want and need, and I can’t do that while I’m trying to defuse drama and soothe people’s emotions. Even right now, I’m pulling an all-nighter to monitor the comments and drama I knew would result from this blog post, so I’m gonna be a mess tomorrow instead of highly productive like I was hoping to be.

      That’s what happens when we let our emotions get the better of us and the result is fear and drama. It just sucks.

      These feel like dark times, I think but we have to be strong and stick with our allies, even if they’re only 95% aligned with what we would prefer rather than 100%. It’s at least better than Omarchy and silicon valley where there’s 0% alignment, right?

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    3. I think it was a bad look to keep the comments of a user who was known to say reprehensible things about race (at least while #187 was still publicly visible), while wiping the posts exposing the behavior (even after the allegations were confirmed). I hope in the future you do not protect the public visibility of people who say harmful things, over others exposing those harmful views. (And I’m saying this as someone who thinks the proposed policy was defensible (though I think tagging LLM-assisted code/analysis is important since LLM output tends to have non-obvious bugs even if rewritten), the same policy kdeforpeople.com disagreed with.)

      As for why people wrote an open letter… my view is that software maintainers hold a great deal of structural power over their users, since it’s difficult (to impossible at the scale of a browser engine) for users to fork software and supply enough developer time and expertise to keep the software up-to-date, and build/distribution infrastructure to deliver it to users. (to maintain an older version, or track upstream with minor changes.) Hence it’s common for users criticize developers rather than forking their own tools. I think it’s a dynamic that should be changed, but I don’t have a simple proposal.

      Also a GNOME contributor was calling for community-building and that AI works against it. Sadly I found that KDE maintainers tended to not respond to my questions on Matrix (or misunderstand and criticize me for using kmsgrab to monitor framebuffer resolutions, because kmsgrab was “broken”), or I could not make use of their responses to help me learn the software. I think this ties in with forking being difficult and unrealistic for users to control the software they run.

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    4. I think it was a bad look to keep the comments of a user who was known to say reprehensible things about race (at least while #187 was still publicly visible), while wiping the posts exposing the behavior (even after the allegations were confirmed).

      I agree. This was not my decision or action, and especially in retrospect, it’s not what I would have done or would do should I ever be in such a position.

      What I think I’d love for people to understand is that KDE developers are people too, and they’re accessible. There’s no need to yell or organize a public campaign; they’re literally right there working out in the open, and you can talk to them, human to human. Of course you need to be nice and you shouldn’t try to pester them endlessly to get them to cave to pressure. But if you engage honestly, in good faith, like an adult, in my experience you generally get a good reaction and you’ll be listened to.

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  24. Calling the open letter “brigading” wasn’t just a clumsy usage; it comes across as inaccurate, somewhat petulant, and… respectfully, unkind. I didn’t sign it, but I saw how hurtful that word was for those who did. It was drafted and presented in good faith. You asked for kindness and respect; perhaps you could show some, by rephrasing that?

    It also seems too soon to tell whether the letter was, in the end and on balance, unhelpful. That reads as prematurely dismissive, which, charitably, you have probably been pretty stressed by all this and could use some slack. A policy can still be discussed and written, channels can still be opened for discussion instead of closed. I don’t envy you this headache and I hope you have some really fun hobbies and loving family.

    Good hunting :3

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    1. It’s quite possible I’m not very up-to-date on what this word means to folks these days, and therefore should not have used it. If that’s the case, I’m sorry.

      But, like, this is the problem, right? The folks who wrote that letter are feeling un-listened-to, like their only recourse is to band together to expert pressure collectively.

      And people in KDE are feeling attacked by it, due to its timing creating the appearance of trying to capitalize on drama to push KDE to adopt a very strong position on a topic it currently has no stated position at all on.

      Ultimately I feel the solution here is for people to talk to each other and listen to each other more. Like, directly. It’s really quite possible. FOSS contributors work out in the open. We’re right there. You can talk to us, just like we’re doing here right now.

      It does mean you have to try to be diplomatic (I know it’s hard; just trying is good enough!) and accept that you may not succeed in convincing others of your point of view. That’s okay, it happens. There will be more opportunities in the future. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it sure can be destroyed in one.

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  25. I’m deeply saddened by the hate KDE is getting online, specially on Mastodon. I see some comments that are overblown out of proportions even after a thoughtful statement made by KDE clarifying things, to the point that it’s making me think that these are all bots/people paid by Omarchy and their millions to hate on reputable communities on the free software community (if I get a little conspiratorial, it would be like after Nicco’s “Why are billionaires funding Linux distros” video that Omarchy might pull a stunt to stunt us down). Or it could just be people being afraid after Akademy’s AI talk and stuff, as it can affect them, leading them to misunderstand and respond emotionally instead of critically.

    My stance on AI is pretty much like the people hating on KDE for not completely banning AI, but with added love and understanding. I don’t like AI/LLM usage for anything really, it can be harmful for new contributors as it would not encourage them to read the documentation and prefer AI instead while getting potentially low quality future contributors. I don’t like the environmental impact of AI data centers, how the RAM prices are increasing because of them, how LLMs show biased responses no matter what (e.g. Capitalist/Feminist bias), how someone relying completely on AI can totally omit thinking and go in a state of psychosis, how AI can exploit lonely people, and how AI companies are influencing government regulations and the people through propaganda, etc.

    I like one of the stances in Mastodon regarding the AI policy, that proposes a full AI ban, and instead gradually allows usage of AI in small portions if the pros outweigh the cons significantly (I’m not saying this as the person said it word by word, I have a bad memory). I also had another idea, about doing a two month testing. Where one month we test a “full allowance on usage of AI” to see how development goes, then another month of “full AI ban”, and seeing which one’s better.

    I still think AI can be a useful “tool”, if used properly. If you don’t know, machine learning is used in the scientific and medical community to scurry through large datasets, identify diseases, etc. I think in the programming world, AI can be used as that, in the sense, getting a “broader understanding” of the codebase. Though I’d still prefer if humans knew the codebase through documentation and by reading the code, but I’m not a programmer.

    Also, I’d like it if there were gender-neutral terms in posts, rather than “techbro”. Like “techpeople”, “techbusinesspeople”, “technocrat”, or “techsibling” maybe? (I know this is not in the KDE CoC as it says to be respectful but doesn’t go into details, I may be wrong). It saddens me as a person who has nothing to do with any of these elite billionaires but still gets his gender pulled for hateful language, as I start to associate myself with them because of this language along with going through a tough time in life, which makes me specially vulnerable.

    In the end, I’d still like a complete ban on AI on KDE and the broader open source world’s codebases. Making our code written completely by humans. But I’m worried how closed source software can train their code on open source GPL code and use that to produce “clean room” code. I don’t know much about GPL licensing, but we might need a new version. Sorry for the rant, wishing KDE and its developers well.

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  26. I love KDE. I’m using it inside Bazzitte!and I had Kubuntu before. I think “to cut down the slop” is a purpose/goal that nobody would disagree with, so I would support this enthusiastically.

    I also appreciate the opinions about Omarchy. Thank you for that.

    That said.

    I was reading trough the bullet points of all the things that are wrong with LLMs and then I read the advantages:

    These are very powerful and sophisticated tools. Capable people with decades of experience can successfully automate away a lot of tedious work, and still end up with a final product identical to what they would have done by hand.

    Look, keeping slop at bay has my thumbs up. But… Are the advantages you mentioned (saving time, mainly I know you may be oversimplifying here of course) really worth the dangers mentioned in the bullet points?

    Please do not understand this as a bad faith question. I’m just curious because “removing tedious work” does not have, let’s say, the same weight as “Their data centers are using enough electricity to blunt and reverse prior positive global trends of lower electricity demand and greener electricity generation” when weighing the stuff.

    Like, I’m not making any judgement at all on your or other people’s morality. I suppose LLMs in the hands of veteran coders can be powerful. But I think it really begs the question if it is really advisable for FOSS to rely on this kind of technology from an ethical standpoint. Again, this is not a gotcha. I ask myself that question every day as a former tech journalist.

    I am also concerned about the code authorship part. LLMs always bring a lot with them from their training data. Wouldn’t that create a hard situation at some point if code from non-free origin is added to the project? Please bear in mind I speak from ignorance here, so I may not grasp these concepts as well as you do.

    As I have said, I plan to keep using KDE. I just want to remind that we are dealing with massive ethical questions here and I appreciate a debate is encouraged.

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    1. You aren’t wrong or missing anything. These are the dimensions around which the ethical debate are framed.

      The thing is… we know that most people will regularly do things they know have negative externalities, such as flying on a plane, driving a car, eating meat, reproducing, buying products new rather than used, participating in social media, and so on.

      So it’s sort of like, why is this the hill we choose to die on? I just flew on 3 planes to Akademy and nobody has interrogated me about how many kilograms of CO2 the journey emitted, despite the fact that I could have attended online. It was simply taken as an understandable compromise that KDE’s non-European contributors will need to fly on planes to attend Akademy, and that attendance in general is considered to offer enough value that using a dirty travel method like an airplane won’t get you excommunicated — especially if you live on another continent.

      So to me it becomes a matter of “let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. Life is hard enough even without being judged for every moral compromise we make to be able to participate in the grind of daily life and the parts that make it all worth living.

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    2. Personally, I think “saving time” as a benefit of LLMs in the hands of responsible users is a bit of a simplification that poorly explains the actual benefits. I think “lowering barriers” is probably a better 2-word description.

      Lets take the example of an LLM tracking down where in the code a bug is based on what reproduces the issue. If tracking down the issue by hand might take hours of tedious work, there’s a good chance the human will just never actually track down that specific issue; we all have a limited number of hours and often we need to prioritize other things. If an LLM and mostly autonomously track down the issue, and the human just needs to validate the fix itself (which might even just be changing one line of code) and submit it, there’s a much higher chance the bugs actually gets fixed in the end.

      Another way it lowers barriers is making experiments and starting new projects often *much* more viable, especially when those things involve areas that often have very poor documentation and a high barrier to entry. I’ve started a number of projects initially by heavily vibe-coding them, to get a feel for if the goal is even possible, and how it can be done. Once getting to a state of having something that works, the development then usually sifts into much more human development/much less heavy LLM use, often re-writing “vibed” code into cleaner and more maintainable code, sometimes even re-doing stuff somewhat from scratch with the original LLM-written version as a reference/learning material.

      Now, obviously, “lowering barriers” is a massive double-edged sword. The “slop PR” issue that sparked this whole situation is the perfect example; many people just try to have the machine do everything, wanting the “reward” with 0 effort and 0 consideration of others that have to actually review these things.

      Personally, I find that my use of LLMs has enabled me to take on projects/ accomplish things, and gain expertise that I likely never would have without LLMs, but at the same time, there’s a very delicate and conscious balancing act when using them to make sure the results are long-term beneficial (learning new skills, putting out useful things into the world, helping others, etc), not long-term harmful (not learning things, acting as a “meat proxy”, burdening others, etc). And that balance is definitely different on a per-project basis as well; I tend to keep my use of LLMs significantly restricted when contributing to an existing project, while personal projects are more open to heavier LLM usage, since burdening others by my LLM usage isn’t a potential issue.

      As for KDE and a policy to reject slop PRs, I would suggest they adopt Mesa’s policy (or a tweaked version thereof), as it’s well-written, very pragmatic, and generally seems to have been working quite well for them. https://docs.mesa3d.org/submittingpatches.html#expectations-on-contributors

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  27. How are we expected to handle a technology that is:

    1. Very powerful
    2. Genuinely useful for various things
    3. Dangerous, de-skilling, and/or addictive in the wrong hands
    4. Full of really bad externalities
    5. Broadly available worldwide at effectively zero cost

    I personally think that anyone who wants to use an AI/LLM should be required to have some kind of license or government permit to use it.

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  28. after verifying that Framework had severed their (already very limited) ties with DHH and Omarchy

    This is an interesting (and positive) note. Is there anywhere online where it can be confirmed?

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    1. Sort of. https://frame.work/at/en/blog/framework-sponsorships lists where their donation money has gone.

      Unfortunately, Framework never issued a public retraction or apology about their prior social media boosting of Omarchy. However, I and others had private conversations with people in Framework and were assured that this was itself basically an ignorant mistake and they they had cut all ties.

      I really wish they had issued a statement publicly attesting to this, but they didn’t. I choose to take them at their word since one of the people in the company who I talked to about it is someone I know personally and trust to not be lying about it.

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  29. The choice of the word “brigading”, a word with *rather hostile connotations*, to describe the open letter is definitely not a good look in my opinion. It comes across as you being hostile towards the open letter and the people behind it (as well as, to my eyes, attempting to discard their opinions / relevancy with “almost none of whom are known KDE contributors”, even though I hope you didn’t mean that!). I really don’t see why you seem to dislike the idea of an open letter by the members of the community who feel like their best option, in the face of everything that is going on, is to band together and make their stance exceedingly clear.

    However, setting that aside as just very poor word choice that carries far harsher connotations / potential interpretations than you intended (much like “doxxing” was before you caught that), I do feel the need to respond to the confusion about why people reacted so strongly to it.

    For one, there was the fact that a lot of people assumed that the acting policy was more like Gentoo’s policy, AKA “No AI”. That is to say, a lot of people thought this was adding *more* AI, not restricting the flow of it. That’s part one of why people reacted so strongly; they thought you were *loosening* the restrictions, rather than tightening them (because plenty of FOSS groups **did** go with an initial policy of distrust)

    For another, even if people were aware of the fact that this was a tightening of restrictions, there’s a fairly reasonable chance (at least in my view) that they *believe that this ‘first step’ will be a lot more permanent than initially intended/promised*. We all know how temporary, bandaid fixes can quickly become more like permanent ones, how techdebt can accumulate in a programming project even if you swear to yourself that you’ll go back and fix it later. People are wary of the fact that this policy that tolerates AI usage will quickly become permanent, or that it’ll make it *harder* to argue for more changes in the future because “Well we already have ‘compromise’ X!”

    Finally, I will say that for some people who have even deeper ethical and legal (licensing) concerns about AI code, the goal might not be to just get no *new* AI-generated code in KDE, but also to *get rid of the existing AI-generated code*. To those people, this is rather like an MIT-licensed project getting caught merging in code from a GPL project: it isn’t enough to just stop the flow in, you also have to *remove the already-existing tainted code*. Is this a majority viewpoint? Very likely not; however, I think it is worthwhile to bring it up anyway as an example of how for some people it might be perceived as allowing the existing problem to get worse and worse.

    Overall, I hope you can understand why people would react so strongly to the perceived policy even though from your perspective it looks incredibly counter-productive: Some of us made the assumption that the current de-facto policy was far stricter than it currently is, some of us have seen far too many temporary fixes become permanent to necessarily trust that there will be further revisions, and some of us view the proposed solution as still letting the bad situation get worse (in terms of the amount of code that would still be tainted by LLMs).

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    1. I do understand, yeah. I also understand that the “b-word” was itself probably inflammatory.

      But I’d like to think KDE has earned a bit more trust than the stance of “assume malice or incompetence” which seems to be the default take out there about almost everything these days.

      This stuff is hard and we’re doing the best we can. And it’s easy to tell other people what to do with the nuclear reactor that fell into their living room, you know? Much harder to figure out what to do with the one glowing in yours.

      Personally I’m very negative on generative AI for a whole lot of reasons, but I’d also like to be able to continue participating in KDE without every day feeling like the inquisition. We aren’t all going to agree on everything; that’s just a part of being in a large and diverse organization.

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  30. this post is pretty good! and even though i mostly agree with everything here, there’s just something that irks me about the idea of kdeforpeople being some form of a “brigade” as much as it was a protest

    the official mechanisms on which users could have lended their opinions ended up being closed simply because both sides of the spectrum ended up being incredibly annoying and harming eachother in the process, so i feel it was simply natural for people to end up creating some sort of way to signal that there’s many of us who do not want generative ai in the source code, and i can assure you that the true purpose of kdeforpeople was never one of trying to “pressure” or “brigade” as much as it was a peaceful protest of people who decided to silently reunite to express that they do not want AI in kde

    the kdeforpeople project was also unrelated and disconnected entirely from certain funky people trying to paint kde as a… fascistic omarchy-level project (????), it was simply intended as a way to signal that there’s many of us who do care enough about kde to sign.

    there’s still something that bothers me about the current LLM policy, and it is that it still doesn’t address the real core issue of LLMs not as the piece of software they are and how they are engineered in their current form, but as the very concept of them. If an LLM was able to autonomously create perfect code, that followed the guidelines perfectly, and wrote perfect commit messages, and was perfectly able to collaborate with real humans, far more efficiently and in less time than a human being, would that justify it? what if it had an ethically sourced dataset and could run off a triple-A battery, would that justify it?

    in my humble opinion, open source was never about growth or inmense productivity, it was about the ability to learn and engage with people just as passionate as you are, it’s not just a model on which people make software, for me, specially not kde, but a form on which creative, wonderful people with interiority and dreams and curiosity can build upon eachother and develop better worlds together. the way so many people get together because of something like kde to make cool software just because they can is something that modern open source projects, i feel, have been underlooking.

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    1. This is such a wise and persuasive comment! I can’t find anything in it to disagree with.

      One thing though: I think everyone in KDE agrees that generative code in an important production codebase — especially autonomously — is a really bad idea. The LLM users I know who I would say use it responsibly are in fact using it as a tool much in the same way that you would use clang-tidy or a spellchecker. They know how they write code and nothing has changed; they’re simply able to fix more bugs and write more features — looking from the outside as if by magic.

      The problem of course is that LLMs are so powerful that there’s such a temptation for less wise and experienced people to use them for more.

      It would be like a car whose speedometer went up to 1000 MPH. You’d have to know, right? Even just once. And if you don’t die, the danger is you could get hooked.

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    2. i’m honestly so glad that we’re on the same page!

      i think there’s a pretty good reason as to why kdeforpeople specifically mentions “zig” as one of its “standards” or core inspirations, the zig people were dealing with what they called “contributor poker” which is when they had to guess whether some random developer was a real person or just some automated bot, or perhaps whether someone just prompted some LLM to fix a particular bug or add a particular feature so they could send a PR without even reading the source code.

      the true reason of why zig even adopted a no-ai policy, even though it is practically impossible to ensure at all, is to have a stance on what their vision of open source is in terms of how it is meant to empower people and how LLMs are inherently not the reason of why+how they make software. this also helped them practically because people who would vibecode their way out of problems (or perhaps intentionally claim ownership over the automated work of their “agents” across hundreds of popular repositories) would either require to properly read their code and make sure it fits the defined guidelines to mask themselves, or just avoid the project altogether, most vibecoders choose the latter.

      it is not a perfect solution, absolutely not, but it has practical gains like avoiding wasted work on something that reeks of autonomous code generation and proudly wears its claude code copilot codex tags with little to no human intervention, as well as be a statement on what is the actual functional purpose of the project.

      i am, seriously nobody to decide what KDE as an organization will become, i just hope that, in the end, everything will be alright and can keep using kde for years to come, knowing that dreams of better software are accessible for anyone with enough curiosity. i must also say that i did get unadvertedly hooked on LLMs once, it truly is a slot machine, I cannot really insult or judge anyone for using them.

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  31. From a distance (geographic, social, neurotypic) the anomalies look like:
    * roles and rights haven’t been clear to everyone in the system (users are ‘in’ from a Soft Systems viewpoint)
    * communication fora and channels are not sufficient / well defined between users / supporters / devs
    * formal channels between users / supporters / devs are insufficient or non-existent
    * initiatives and works-in-progress can commence privately, or with little visibility
    * non-technical (e.g. social) policy on behalf of a legal entity is made by best effort of self-motivated volunteers, in their spare time

    “Eppur si muove” As someone once said.

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  32. Hi and thanks for considering the issue of LLMs and policing their use. My view is that the technology and the big companies who build it are unethical and anti-human, and I would wish to see it banned from polite society.

    For what it’s worth, I signed the KDE for people website, and I’m indeed not a KDE contributor but I am a longtime user. I discovered KDE as a kid and it got me into Linux, programming, and eventually my current job in tech. I made an Amarok plugin 18 years ago : https://store.kde.org/p/1135846 where I learned programming and made my first clumsy attempts at communicating in English online (I’m French). Since then I’ve used KDE through every iteration from 3 to 6 and I love it still today. It’s because I care that I signed the letter, and I hope KDE will remain about people first.

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  33. Nate, thank you for clearing up this big mess…There was so much stuff that was simply gotten wrong. I was getting all kinds of mixed signals and information, it left me spinning a bit. However, I am glad that in the end, KDE is going to attempt to steer towards restricting the nature of LLM-assisted contributions, making sure to absolutely block slop (which is just a correct course of action).

    A human first approach is honestly ideal, as working together as a community we can make open source software better, stronger, and a thing that even general non-tech people wouldn’t mind using. We can sharpen one another’s skill through collaborative work, it is honestly motivating talking to actual skilled people when it comes to contributions over some slop simp that uses LLMs to full send weird code. I am a novice that is trying to learn the art of programming pretty late in life…So open source is one of the places I love to look for great examples of proper Python usage. ROFL (I am not there yet, but feel a bit more confident).

    I might have switched my DE in a tizzy but, I will be rooting for KDE to prevail over this hot-mess express and develop a sane approach to handling LLM-assisted contributions, hopefully in a Gentoo fashion. I think the negatives of LLMs honestly outweigh what “perceived” positives that people see in them. They don’t belong in open source projects, as the corporate machinery that currently pushes them into existence is corrupted beyond saving. The harm, data scraping attacks, and other abuses simply make them a hot potato that shouldn’t be handled. Let the big corpos use them, see how Microslop is burning because of their acceptance of these so called “powerful” tools. I think the same thing can happen to any open source project.

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  34. Nate, I’ll just say I disagree with you on the effectiveness of LLMs, to put it lightly. But that’s neither here nor there. What really bothers me about this post is the bad faith with which you are engaging your critics, while simultaneously calling for them to “please just be kind, we are all trying our best here.” Sorry if that comes off as harsh, but I think it really needs to be addressed.

    I applaud you for walking back calling what SweetLuna Avery did “doxxing.” I applaud you even more for crossing it out, including a note, and using “exposed” instead, rather than sweeping your mistake under the rug. That shows accountability and I appreciate it. That said, that you reached for the word in the first place is alarming.

    Likewise with “brigading.” I see other people have already reached you on this one as well. But now that’s two retractions in one post, both about verbiage that is inaccurately harsh and accusatory. Can you really say that you are being kind to the people who are acting to try to protect the FOSS ecosystem? Are you treating others the way you would like to be treated?

    I think I can safely assume that the words “doxxing” and “brigading” have negative connotations for you. I’m going to speculate that they came to you because you felt frustrated and besieged by this whole episode. That’s perfectly understandable. It’s also how the people who have been criticizing KDE for its handling of the whole affair feel, though. You’re being rather hard on them for assuming the worst, but aren’t you doing the same?

    SweetLuna Avery undeniably did the KDE community a favor by doing what they did, whether or not you agree with how they did it. I would conjecture that the public nature of the exchange expedited svin’s removal from the community. Avery, however, remains banned despite being morally in the right. Don’t you think this equivocates their behavior and svin’s? We should want our communities to have more people like Avery who can help protect us from people like svin. We can have a conversation with them about that not being the best way to go about it, but removing them entirely suggests KDE values them no higher than svin. Calling what they did “doxxing” suggests they did something wrong and malicious, even ignoring the factual definition.

    Why are we doing this? Why are we at this point that Avery is treated as a malicious interloper? Is KDE’s goal to batten down the hatches, jettison any weight, and wait for the skies to clear? While potentially practical, it’s hardly reassuring to the userbase and doesn’t inspire confidence in the leadership.

    KDE for People, in my view, is literally just a petition. It is very basic, polite activism. To use the word “pressure” is probably even too strong. They are literally just asking nicely and putting their names to the request. Very few of them are contributors, that’s true; so what? KDE is not developed for its contributors or there would not be a big enough market to sell Konqi plushes. You have users, and those users have wants, and KDE for People is putting a voice to those wants and proving it by providing a list of names as evidence. Give them a seat at the table, or don’t, but if you insist on suggesting you don’t value their feedback, they will leave. And you don’t want that. You want KDE to have users (and for those users to turn into contributors!).

    To call it “brigading” on the other hand is just flatly incorrect. I’m sorry to harp on this point when you’ve already said you were convinced, but I have to. Brigading is when someone tries to funnel others with similar interests into a discussion to drown everyone else out; it’s militant, hence the “brigade.” You could argue that what happened in the work topic was brigading. You could maybe even offer evidence to support it if you looked hard enough. KDE for People is sitting on its own website, completely separate from anything KDE, and asks no one to do anything but add their name to show their support for the solution it has outlined. It asks nothing of KDE but to consider its argument and the weight of the number of people who have cosigned it.

    I think, and I mean this in the kindest possible way, that at the point that you are looking down on that, you may need to take a step back and consider if you yourself are being unkind and contributing to unnecessary drama. I completely understand feeling defensive after being targeted by this uproar, but ask yourself, are you maybe stirring the pot a little here? Are you potentially impeding constructive solutions? Are you reflexively treating people you disagree with as bad actors? Are you going to accept an outcome other than the one you proposed in the draft proposal? These aren’t accusations, they are genuine questions that I think keeping in mind as you go forward could help bring the temperature down around this topic.

    Thanks for taking the time to read this through if you got this far. I wish you and KDE the best of luck and hope that KDE continues to adhere to its values and excels at its mission.

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  35. KDE e.V. has taken money from Framework, but only after verifying that Framework had severed their (already very limited) ties with DHH and Omarchy. Also, all of this happened a year ago, before Omarchy received a ludicrous amount of money from a veritable rogues gallery of villains.

    Is KDE e.V. going to apply such requirements to its “patron” Google, a known Iranian child murdering IDF associate and rogues gallery, next? And if not, why?

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