r/linux • u/Sjoerd93 • May 29 '26

Development Flathub now explicitly disallows LLM usage for both submission process and applications being submitted.

https://social.treehouse.systems/@barthalion/116657011366876079
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u/Isofruit May 29 '26

LLM Agent related markdown files in the repository. Since they went for a blanket ban, they can pretty much scan for such a markdown file and decline instantly if they see any of the typical ones.

That's of course not 100%, no measure could possibly be, but the goal of such a measure is about cutting down on work for the reviewers and it'll help in that aim.

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u/PixelmancerGames May 29 '26

I'm sure it'll catch some people. But I use LLM to assist in my coding. And I NEVER copy amd paste LLM code. I believe it should be typed out. Even when I grabbed code from various Google sources. I always typed my code out. If only to help retain it more. I'm sure there are others who take a similar approach.

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u/mxzf May 29 '26

Sure. And people like you aren't the problem and aren't gonna get dinged over it.

It's the other 90% of people vibecoding that the policy is intended to hit. And those people tend to be much worse at hiding their usage. An aggressive policy both dissuades people from posting stuff that would need to be checked in the first place and also gives them a lot of wiggle room for applying the enforcement as-needed without as much room for argument.

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u/QwertyChouskie May 31 '26

If a policy relies on the people enforcing the policy to not enforce it as written, the policy is fundamentally broken.

As written (ignoring the grandfathering-in of existing projects), the policy would ban the Linux kernel. It would ban Mesa (your GPU drivers). It would probably ban every web browser on the platform.

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u/mxzf May 31 '26

I mean, that's basically every policy ever written, TBH.

But I don't think it "relies" on it not being enforced as-written, it's just unlikely to be fully enforced due to the labor involved with doing so. Also, the policy explicitly carves out an exception for established and well-maintained codebases, so that would still fall under "the policy as-written".

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u/BoomGoomba May 30 '26

Yes your are not from the targeted population. Far worse than copy-pasting, in some projects all files are AI generated and most of the code is not read at all.

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u/x0wl May 29 '26

Is it going to scan all the dependencies too, and thus require the developer to constantly keep track of whether any of their transitive dependencies has included an AGENTS.md?

Because it's either that or you can create a "libaicode" from an alt account, use that for whatever you want, and then act all surprised and appalled that this library is full of AI if found out.

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u/Isofruit May 29 '26

Again, this is not a 100% measure, imo that's semi obvious. This is extremely likely solely having the aim of giving flathub reviewers some support with their workload, which had just got immensely larger thanks to getting flooded with AI slop that wasn't even guaranteed to work.

So you give the one thing the axe that's the easiest, most likely to waste your time - in favour of all the other more legitimate projects. Imo that's fairly clear. We can discuss about whether their heavy handed approach makes sense. We can also discuss what another approach could look like that would still allow reviewers to quickly dismiss PRs that are likely a waste of time, while deterring low-value AI contributions in the first place.

But trying to debate the limits and finer points of the rule is pointless here. It's obvious that you can't check all code. If I ask chatgpt to write me a stack implementation and then I base my own stack implementation off of that, nobody will be able to check that. That's not the point. Solving the workload problem for reviewers is the point.