{"slug": "being-against-llms-is-against-the-spirit-of-floss", "title": "Being Against LLMs Is Against the Spirit of Floss", "summary": "Joar Värndt, a software developer and maintainer of Codeberg, argues that banning LLM-generated code contributions violates the spirit of Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS), citing Vim Classic's fork as an example. He contends that rejecting code for ideological rather than technical reasons is unreasonable, comparing it to banning compilers in favor of Assembly, and notes that open-weight models can run on consumer hardware, undermining claims of political oppression.", "body_md": "# Being Against LLMs is Against the Spirit of FLOSS\n\nEarlier this year [I wrote](https://joarvarndt.se/free-vibes) *Vibe-coding Brings the Power of Emacs to\nEverything* in a more positive manner surrounding this topic. This is\nthe negative version. I am not a radical in either direction\nsurrounding this debate. But the internet does not reward subtlety or\nnuance, as I also [pointed out](https://joarvarndt.se/crypto) in *Three Thoughts on Crypto and nfts*.\n\nThe debate surrounding llm-generated code is more intense than\never. There are some people who have recently tried to turn this\ndebate into action as an attempt to stem the tide of llm contributions\nthat are flooding maintainers. Most notably [Vim “Classic”](https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/) and my own\nadopted public git forge of Codeberg. This is a shame, since it flies\nagainst the spirit of Free (Libre) and Open Source Software (floss).\n\nLinus Torvalds has effectively been vibe-coding the Linux kernel for\ndecades (his models being the world’s best kernel programmers and his\nagent harness email) and that has clearly turned out fine, but I still\nwrite most my code the old-fashioned way (at least in a raw loc-way)\nbecause I think that the hardest parts about programming are not\nsolved by llms. I also do not like to refer to llms as “ai”.[1](#fn.1)\n\nYou are of course *free* to not accept contributions made by llms (or\nany contribution for any reason) to your own project, and you are also\nnot forced to host someone else’s vibe-coded projects on your\ninfrastructure; the beauty of floss is that they are then also free to\nfork your project. 2 But rejecting code not for technical reasons (of\nwhich there are often many for vibecoded code) but for ideological\nreasons is unfortunate.\n\nAt the same time there is of course a genuine problem for maintainers\nhappening that I do not know how to solve. One possible solution may\nbe to only accept contributions that you yourself *believe* to be\nwritten by a human, while nominally accepting llms to be used in any\ncapacity. This means that llms can be used when they are useful, but\nthat code must remain readable and succinct enough for humans to\nprocess and develop.\n\nllms are fundamentally a tool. Trying to ban llms is giving them too much credit; it is contributing to the framing made by companies like Anthropic and Openai that llms are a new class of software that is so powerful it must be banned, and entirely unlike all the other tools that make software development easier. Imagine banning the use of compilers and only accepting contributions written in Assembly as a way to reduce the number of contributions. It works, but is it in any way reasonable?\n\nSuch a policy — that contributing to a project because of the\ncircumstances of the contribution’s creation, and not due to its\nquality — is directly contradictory to the spirit of free\nsoftware. Being able to read, spread, and easily customize a program\nis just as useful as being able to merely run it. And the long-term\nstrengths of free software is that it can adapt to everyone’s\n(collective) needs instead of each person building their own custom\nsoftware.[3](#fn.3)\n\nArguments that llms fundamentally a part of a system of political oppression fall flat against the case of open-weight models that can be run at home on (high-end) consumer hardware. Are you going to be against online search in general because most people use Google as their provider?\n\nThe Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève pointed out that\n— when studying the history of Hegel’s *geist* — it is uninteresting\nto study the existence of the nihilist, because the path of nihilism\nis one of (intellectual) suicide. This is what is happening to these\nprojects ideologically opposed to llms; projects like *Vim\nClassic*. They are intellectually oriented not towards improving the\nprogram either through bug-fixes or new features, but merely towards\nmaking sure that every line of code was written by hand (wilfully\nignoring other automated tools such as lsp, the aforementioned\ncompilers, macros, automated config tools, even editors\nthemselves!). There are features that could be in the next release of\nmy beloved Emacs *right now* because they have been blocked because of\nthe initial use of an llm.[4](#fn.4)\n\nIf you actually care about the direct impacts and externalities of llms, this is not the path forward. It shutting your eyes and plugging your ears to the reality that llms are widely used to develop software, akin to what the Qing empire did during the heyday of European colonialism. Instead the solution might be to solve the underlying causes of overconsumption, fossil fuel use, and increasing inequality. ❦\n\n## Footnotes:\n\n[1](#fnr.1)\n“ai” is a very broad term, that today mostly refers to the\nspecific technology of Large language models. Other forms of\nalgorithms (both deterministic and not) perform acts of “intelligence”\n— even very simple algorithms such as a single `if`\n\n-statement. At the\nsame time it is not clear to me that llms or humans have some sort of\nmagical “true” intelligence that other systems do not.\n\n[2](#fnr.2)And naturally you do not have to subsidise strangers’ bad ideas.\n\n[3](#fnr.3)This is coming from a die-hard Emacs user, where the biggest strength comes from easily building your own tools and extending the program for yourself.\n\n[4](#fnr.4)In this case for fairly valid concerns about licensing issues, another (albeit related) problem, by the fsf. How this problem is to be solved I will leave to the lawyers.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-against-llms-is-against-the-spirit-of-floss", "canonical_source": "https://joarvarndt.se/free-vibes-2", "published_at": "2026-08-14 18:52:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-14 19:12:37.607407+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy", "ai-ethics", "generative-ai", "developer-tools"], "entities": ["Joar Värndt", "Codeberg", "Vim Classic", "Linus Torvalds", "Linux kernel", "Anthropic", "OpenAI", "Alexandre Kojève"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-against-llms-is-against-the-spirit-of-floss", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-against-llms-is-against-the-spirit-of-floss.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-against-llms-is-against-the-spirit-of-floss.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/being-against-llms-is-against-the-spirit-of-floss.jsonld"}}