Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase

Pop!_OS bans AI-generated code from much of its codebase neowin.net

86 points•bundie•about 3 hours ago•100 comments•

#ai #generated #bans #codebase #code #os #pop #os bans

100 comments

brinkabout 2 hours ago

I also have found that AI has not lived up to many of its promises and have dialed back what AI gets control of. My projects were turning into unmaintainable messes. The people who say coding is solved aren't paying attention.

lucianmarinabout 2 hours ago

Yes. I started two projects with AI from scratch. Both abandoned, complete mess. Projects without AI are so easy to manage, maintain, add/remove features, etc. I use AI as a search engine on my projects instead of Google. I ask what's wrong with my code and change or improve it myself based on my experience.

dnauticsabout 1 hour ago

I have the opposite experience. I don't have the patience sometimes to clean up my code and stick to coherent conventions and organization even though the will is there. With my AI projects I watch it and if the AI starts drifting I ask it to go through and look for convention/directory structure violations and it happily cleans everything up in about 10 or so minutes.

Are you in Python by chance? Python has a lot of crazy hidden/inexplicit/spooky action at a distance stuff (especially in the frameworks) that can make LLMs gunk up code by defensively programming or just burn context chasing data provenance

fasterikabout 1 hour ago

I've been a vibe-coding skeptic for years, but because of the math breakthroughs of the past few weeks I decided to experiment with the latest models on some test projects. They're a lot more capable than I thought they would be. I agree that it's easy to create an unrecoverable mess, especially when you're one-shotting a lot of features without detailed instructions. But I find that as long as I'm strict about the API boundaries and force the agent to work in small chunks, it's pretty effective. As one example, I got it to write an SVG renderer in a few hours (not the whole spec, but most of the path features and text rendering), which would have taken me at least a week just for the coding part, plus extra time to learn the algorithms.

fignewsabout 1 hour ago

Have you considered that maybe this is a reflection of your skills rather than that of the LLM?

Keyframeabout 1 hour ago

I'm reading y'all comments and it seems we're still finding our footing, and will for some time. I have the luck that I have access to pretty much all frontier and other models alike. I've been extremely negatively biased towards any LLM use in the start. Then the influx from juniors came, then the revolt of doing PRs on such slop came, then some structured methods how to do LLM work came, then vibe projects came, etc, etc. I literally have all the described experiences you've guys mentioned. From good, to bad, to ugly. It's like there's no one particular way about doing this, and no two projects share the same approach - just like ye olde times.

satvikpendemabout 1 hour ago

When and what model?

joshheitzmanabout 1 hour ago

People, especially those who don't do software development, often conflate coding and software development.

The models aren't good at architecture and design. But they take direction on architecture and design and design well and can refactor code quite effectively. AI agents can absolutely be used to clean up vibe coded code bases once you figure out if the investment is worth it. The mess can be avoided if you give them sufficient guidance on architecture and design upfront.

That said, doing so purely in text form doesn't feel great right now. I've been thinking about UML lately. The problem with that was the roundtrip after the code was generated and then the implenetation happened. I don't necessarily think UML is the solution, but neither is walls of dense text.

PorciiVorbesc35 minutes ago

>The models aren't good at architecture and design.

Can you elaborate to back up this claim? WHat exactly is your yardstick for "being good at SW design and architecture"?

Because I found the current SOTA AI models being great at that, much better than most average real-world devs. Is your yardstick just the John Carmack's of the world by any chance? Because most devs are not John Carmack. They are also not Linus Torvalds, they are not Stallmann.

Maybe your LLM experience is still stuck in the 2023 era of ChatGPT?

mulemisterXabout 1 hour ago

I've had the opposite experience. Spec driven development really makes things much easier to maintain. If you're just yolo'ing it and throwing prompts around things will fall apart fast.

satvikpendemabout 1 hour ago

As usual, when people post comments like this they never specify what model and when they used it. There is a huge difference between GPT 3 and 6 for example.

Late 2025 also had a step change when agents could largely code autonomously without handholding like previously, and to be honest it's not worth hearing opinions about AI from before that time, that's how significant the change was.

Dfieslabout 1 hour ago

Were you reading through the code it was generating to make sure the flow was intuitive and comprehensible for each PR? Projects only turn in to maintainable messes if you blindly merge in unmaintainable messy code.

sippingabonedryabout 1 hour ago

Completely performative.

You build your OS atop thousands of open source packages, many of which contain AI generated code. Are you going to audit them one by one and remove offending packages? What about the ones you won't remove because the OS would be irreparably broken?

driverdanabout 1 hour ago

It's not. Read the article, they have a good reason for banning it and it's not because they hate LLMs.

_heimdallabout 1 hour ago

It also doesn't answer the question of how they might even recognize LLM generated code in contributions to PopOS directly.

I have yet to understand how maintainers can't distinguish beyond (1) PRs that literally include Claude co-author notes or (2) low quality code contribution regardless of the creator.

novafunc29 minutes ago

I don't think it's performative.

They aren't saying that AI produces bad code or is terrible for the world in some way.

It's mainly just resulting in a lot of PRs that they don't have enough time to review or features they don't plan to add.

999900000999about 1 hour ago

I agree.

PopOS is Ubuntu with extra problems. Ubuntu itself is fine, but then PopOS adds weirdness.

Cosmic has been in beta for how long ?

duped39 minutes ago

It's been out of alpha/beta for almost a year

HexDecOctBinabout 1 hour ago

This is a good idea, we should start a blacklist of open-source projects that are known to have used LLMs. There should be two universes of code, one for hand-typed code used by people who care about quality and one for slop used by those making trash.

brokencodeabout 1 hour ago

There was plenty of bad code long before LLMs came around. Let’s be real.

Being hand written is no guarantee of high quality, just like using LLMs is no guarantee of low quality.

Fr0styMatt88about 1 hour ago

Yeah but that's just bad code in general, no? You can make good code with LLMs, you just have to actually engineer it and give up some of the velocity; which is just a bigger version of the same problem we've always had (yes, I get that code review can't scale).

This is just really silly.

The more I think about this the more I think it's like self-driving cars. We have this expectation that self-driving cars MUST be 101% safe and never get into any accidents, ever, before the technology is worth adopting. LLMs are the same -- it's like we think if you can't one-shot a prompt and get perfect software out of it, it's failed. You can choose to spend time getting the LLM to refine the code it's written, review the architecture, come up with an actual engineering process around the LLM. Yes that means you'll be producing less code per time spent -- which is a good thing.

lkramerabout 2 hours ago

I had a PR in flight that got closed because of this. I had an issue with passwords in the network applet for the VPN and had used Claude to help me identify and then come up with a fix. I did spend a lot time handcrafting and making sure the quality was good, but I respect their decision and no hard feelings, but as someone who have struggled to find time and opportunity to contribute to open source it was a small set back.

Cyan488about 2 hours ago

I found your commit and your usage of AI seemed reasonable. It seems to me like your PR itself and the subsequent comments and correspondence was also human written.

I think a PR "in flight" shouldn't have been closed like that.

All this will do is push out developers like you that honestly disclose, and instead people will now just lie.

sedan_baklazhanabout 2 hours ago

What is actually the meaning of “handcrafting” here?

throwaway74628about 1 hour ago

My guess: taking personal responsibility for the functionality, readability, and sanity of the change proposed, both atomically and in the context of the wider code base (adhering to existing conventions and patterns), to the best of the author’s ability.

teekert27 minutes ago

"... many of the AI contributions were not planned and showed little understanding of the software architecture. So the team wants to "prioritize working on contributions from our own team and regular contributors.""

Sounds reasonable, even to avid LLM users, I suppose. You have to draw a line. This line is too simplistic, but it'll work, for now.

yegle26 minutes ago

This would just push people to maintain their own fork. If I already have an agent to investigate and fix a bug and able to send a PR, the added cost of maintaining a local fork is minimum.

In fact I've start doing that myself. Sending PR and convincing the maintainer why the fix is necessary is just too much effort.

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