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. 🙂

My favorite tabletop game of all time is Star Wars: Armada, a Star Wars themed ship combat wargame.

Armada has many deep and tactically interesting features, but one of my favorites is the unique suite of defense tokens available to each spaceship to protect itself against attacks, from among the following six options:

• Scatter – the attack is completely canceled. “I wasn’t where you were shooting”
• Evade – cancel an attack die at long range, or re-roll one at short and medium range. “I dodged your attack, so it missed or became a glancing blow”
• Brace – halve the damage. “Ouch, you hit me! But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been”
• Redirect – move some damage to an adjacent hull zone. “You hit me, but not where I was weakest”
• Contain – downgrade a critical hit to normal damage – “My damage control efforts turned the potential catastrophe into just a normal crisis”
• Salvo – return fire. “You hit me, but I hit back”

There’s way more information here for people whose military nerd curiosity has been piqued.

Anyway, this is well and good for games about spaceships, but what’s the relevance? Let’s imagine that we humans have these defense tokens, too. And today I’d like to talk about how they relate not to physical attacks, but interpersonal ones.

You negligent fool! You nit-picking jerk!

Someone has blindsided you with unexpected criticism! The monkey brain sees this as an attack:

Imperial Star Destroyer by topcat at Wallpapers.com — https://wallpapers.com/wallpapers/imperial-star-destroyer-hus8fir1xr6vldsn.html

Red alert! Shields up! All hands to battle stations! Your blood pressure rises. You see red and gear up for a fight:

Bull Image from FreePNGimg.com

And what’s the most satisfying defense token to use? Salvo, for sure. Hit back:

Oh yeah, that’s pretty rich coming from you given how you messed up that other thing last week!

The angry email. The “call-out” social media post. The sharp reply on chat. The hyper-critical blog post. They feel good, right?

But Salvo doesn’t actually avoid any damage. in Armada, if you Salvo every attack, your ship explodes, with the only other effect being that the attacking ship gets hurt too — usually a lot less.

From the perspective of minimizing interpersonal friction in a group setting, Salvo is the worst defense token. It didn’t end the conflict created by this unexpected criticism; in fact, now the conflict is bigger and louder, because the criticizer has also gotten hurt. Other people may leap to their defense, or yours, and pretty soon the battle lines are established. What started as a community soon feels like a war zone.

Redirect isn’t great, either; in a community context it’s basically blame-shifting, which similarly doesn’t prevent any damage; it just moves it around, and the community still suffers.

Neither is is not what we want for our community if the goal is to remain friendly and welcoming!

Prevent and reduce damage

If we want to keep our ship flying community alive, we need to prefer the defense tokens that prevent or reduce damage:

• Scatter: prevent conflicts in the first place by meeting expectations, being mindful of other people’s feelings, and maintaining your relationships.
• Evade: notice impending conflicts and help make them fizzle out early. Be humble.
• Brace: mend fences and fix problems so the conflicts that do erupt shrink over time.
• Contain: keep conflicts localized to the participants, and prevent them from spiraling out of control. Don’t let drama spill out into the larger team or the whole organization — or heaven forbid into the media! Accept valid criticism and let others have the last word.

These social defense tokens are harder and less satisfying to use than Salvo and Redirect. But over the long term, they do a much better job.

Which brings us to KDE

Today I think KDE is known as a pretty friendly place. And when I look around, I see a lot of examples of people ­— consciously or unconsciously — using defense tokens in their interpersonal relationships that reduce harm rather than moving it around or sending it back.

It’s not perfect, of course. We all mess up sometimes. And a culture like this takes years to develop. But I think the strong social bonds between contributors inside KDE are self-evident, and represent a significant part of the organization’s success today.

So I want to congratulate KDE and encourage us all to keep it up! I know times are tough and a lot of things in the world feel like they’re exploding, or getting ready to. Things suck more than they should, and there’s always more we can do to improve it. But as long as we maintain our relationships with one another, it becomes a lubricant that makes all those things so much more possible to survive or achieve.