GNOME maintainer proposes LLM policy centered on community values
Jordan Petridis argues LLM policies should shape social norms around contributor well-being, not just police code submissions.
What to know
- GNOME maintainer Petridis frames an LLM policy as a values statement about protecting community bonds and contributor dignity, not merely a technical enforcement mechanism.
- The proposal critiques KDE's LLM policy as missing the broader goal of shaping social norms around human authorship and rejecting careless submissions.
- Petridis argues GNOME's sustainability depends on attracting new contributors by creating an inviting social space, not on leveraging corporate-sponsored engineering labor.
Jordan Petridis GNOME maintainerKDE Competing open-source project
How it unfolded 2 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump posts
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Post gains traction on Mastodon emphasizing community framing
The post was shared widely on Mastodon, with @tante@tldr.nettime.org amplifying Petridis's core framing about GNOME as a collective built on shared joy rather than corporate labor.
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It might help, if you don't compare it at all with an hypothetical situation? Maybe popular OSS projects are banning it because the culture of/around LLM-users is not aligned with what the maintainers want out of OSS? I think Godot's and this post make that pretty clear. A project born out of a sense of community, well, it'll focus on community…
2 more of the top 3 · 52 posts in this stretch
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"GNOME exists as a collective that find joy in reaching beyond our individual limitations to achieve something bigger. These people, this joy, are the whole point of the project." (Article title: Jordan Petridis: The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want) https:// blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2026/ 09/23/the-gnome-llm-policy-that-i-want/
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> It's a shame the KDE proposal is completely gone as the archive doesn't fully display it The complete text can still be extracted from the page source of the archive. Here it is: ## LLM usage The golden rule for LLM usage in KDE is **Don't be lazy:** 1. Don't try to use a tool to replace your own judgment, interpersonal communication, or…
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Jordan Petridis proposes GNOME LLM policy framework
GNOME maintainer Jordan Petridis published a blog post outlining his vision for how GNOME should approach LLM-generated code submissions. Rather than adopting a purely technical enforcement approach, Petridis proposes a policy designed to signal community values about human authorship and contributor dignity.
“GNOME exists as a collective that find joy in reaching beyond our individual limitations to achieve something bigger. These people, this joy, are the whole point of the project.”
— Jordan Petridis
What people are saying 21 voices from 2 sites · best of 52 · verbatim
- Yesterday
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> Those tools cost less to create and run than an LLM. For many kinds of simple refactors (changing a Rust error handling crate, for example), my total energy costs are often less than boiling pasta for lunch. And that's powered by solar when the sun is out. Training costs for smaller local models in the 27B range are, if I recall correctly, about…
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*This seems entirely reasonable and also totally impracticable at the same time https:// blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2026/ 09/23/the-gnome-llm-policy-that-i-want/
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> I took an of-the-shelf product, it costed me 5 days to integrate it. I beg you to consider the externalities.
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You hire construction workers, pay them by the hour usually. Open source developers work for the love of the game, and usually go completely unpaid. In such a setting, whether the development tools spark joy is the only relevant question when deciding which tools to use.
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I still think that the power-tool analogy is bad. In particular, it seems disconnected from the actual history of woodworking. Quoting my response to this analogy from last year, [On Wood Glue](https://corbinsimpson.com/words/sneers/wood-glue.html): > Slop-bots are like [wood glue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_glue): a slurry of proteins…
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But I can't just walk into the woodshop and tell the power tools there to build me a cutting board.
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I tried using one of these (ast-grep) to do a particular refactor. It was, frankly, extremely painful, because there are a lot of ways to spell the target AST that are inequivalent at an AST level (arrow function vs function() vs named local function, async or no, etc). They work well for what they do but there's a *huge* space of refactors that…
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They did. >> Those tools cost less to **create** and run than an LLM. (emphasis mine) It's so much smaller than the human time (even if you ignore all the other atrocious costs) that's been required so far just to **develop** the LLM, nevermind running it, that it rounds to zero in this comparison.
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You don't have to verify that LLMs aren't used to benefit from having a policy. Some users will be discouraged from contributing which is an immediate improvement. Obvious slop will be removed without discussion. In cases where you can't actually tell, maybe some slop slips in, but if you can't tell it's slop a lot of the costs to maintainers are…
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> What you are willing to write is generally the upper limit of what others are willing to read. I really like that formulation. It also reminds me of the quote "Pardon the length of this text, if I had more time I would have written less". Or the French proverb "What is well understood gets described clearly, and the words to say it come easily"…
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> For most projects, fewer features means less code, which means fewer bugs, which means fewer security issues and increased reliability. ...Which also means fewer users, unless you are the only game in town and users use you because they don't have a choice, not because they like it? I mean, if we are optimizing for the criteria you mentioned at…
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LLMs are like super power tools indeed. They allow to do in minutes what would otherwise take weeks, months or even years. But they do come with a big price for community based projects: The flood of PRs, the discussion forums filled with bots, the disappearing trust, the inevitable slop. It's exhausting. For us in corporate jobs there is not much…
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> There are not enough maintainers and people getting involved with these projects to keep them going. I agree! However, I also believe that someone who would just throw LLM PRs at GNOME would not make a good maintainer _for this project_, and would honestly probably not be interested either way. The whole point of vibe-coding tools is that they…
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I **love** to see this, and more projects should adopt GenAI bans. It's unethical and antisocial technology that must be resisted against.
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Because you're not asking anyone to give you anything. As someone who used to maintain a relatively popular open source project (and handed it off), and still occasionally gets occasional PRs opened to random repositories I have, receiving code contributions _takes a lot of work_. You have to review the code, you have to ensure that it will fit…
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> Those tools cost less to create and run than an LLM. Not if you assign a value to the human time required to develop such a tool.
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I understand why people are doing this, but I don't think you can both ask people to give you free labor and then put a ton of conditions on the free labor.
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IMHO it sets the tone and expectations clearly. From the included FAQ: > We have a Code of Conduct that is 80% about telling other people what our values are, and 20% about handling unwanted behavior (“enforcing”). This is similar. That's perfect!
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For obsolete code patterns there are automated code editing tools that transform the abstract syntax tree and unparse back to source code. Those tools cost less to create and run than an LLM. Perhaps those are power tools and LLMs are something else entirely?
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This trend of major open source projects banning all use of LLMs is honestly starting to feel to me like if the construction industry decided to ban power tools. The arguments that it's about "a collective that find joy in reaching beyond our individual limitations to achieve something bigger" do speak to me... but eventually someone needs to…
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> here is what I personally think a GNOME LLM policy could be: > > [no LLMs at all] Sure, that's an opinion. (One I don't disagree with, by the way.) But the introduction doesn't really match this: > I think that the point of these statements is shaping social norms and not micro-managing developer workflows. Well, maybe, but probably they're…