From the reaction to this post here and on Reddit, I know this is not the majority opinion in the open source community. Still, I'm confused by the thinking behind policies like this, where it's not a practical problem of AI code creating too much low-quality work to review, but the outright opposition to LLM assisted coding in general.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.
My understanding has always been that the goal of open source software is to make software more free and to be able to make higher-quality, more ambitious software. With LLMs making it easier than ever to modify, study and read software, and independent developers able to work on more ambitious projects, I would expect open source advocates to view LLMs as strongly congruent with the free software movement. Instead, this post stresses the incongruency of open source software with AI-assisted coding on grounds of human-centeredness and the "cheapness" of tokens. What does human-centeredness have to do with open source software? Isn't the cheapness of tokens directly aligned with the goals of open source software of making it easier and cheaper to create software? I just don't get it.