FreeBSD Project Isn't Ready To Let AI Commit Code Just Yet (theregister.com)
- Reference: 0178994342
- News link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/03/1649201/freebsd-project-isnt-ready-to-let-ai-commit-code-just-yet
- Source link: https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/freebsd_project_update_no_ai/
> The FreeBSD Project's Status Report for the second quarter of 2025 contains updates from various sub-teams that are working on improving the FreeBSD OS, including separate sub-projects such as enabling FreeBSD apps to run on Linux, Chinese translation efforts, support for Solaris-style Extended Attributes, and for Apple's legacy HFS+ file system.
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> The thing that stood out to us, though, was that the core team is working on what it terms a "Policy on generative AI created code and documentation." The relevant paragraph says: "Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/03/freebsd_project_update_no_ai/
Translation (Score:3)
TFS:"explaining long/obscure documents,"
How about for translating help/man/info pages?
It's cliche that programmers dislike documentation, so I guess translating documentation is even lower priority.
The licensing complaint is pretty simple to solve (Score:3)
Train a coding AI model just on BSD, MIT, ISC, APACHE, WTFPL, CC0 and compatible licensed code, and only accept code generated by that model.
Easy peasy.
Re: (Score:2)
Dunno if that's the ticket (those are different, though similar, licenses), but I love the idea of coding LLM's trained only a targeted codebase. For example, train one only on Linux Kernel source for use in working with Linux Kernel code... I imagine the code style and such would be a better fit, and that codebase is big enough to learn a lot from it.
As a counter-example, if a coding assistant was trained with a lot of obfuscated C, I wouldn't want the results going into my production codebase.
Re: (Score:2)
Those licenses still require you to produce the correct terms when you are redistributing code.
You cannot ship code and state that the terms are the BSD license when that code is under MIT license, Etc.
Also, these licenses require including the copyright statement of the author, so your redistribution can be infringing if you don't specify them.
Thus training only on that group of licenses does not give a free pass. You would have to train only on code where the author has provided a distribution license
AI code commits? (Score:2)
Big Tech may have finally found a way to destroy open source! Sounds like a great place to employ AI, Overwhelm and Destroy!
No one should let AI commit code (Score:2)
WTF? Is everyone bucking under the pressure of our AI overlords?
Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
I've tried some of the AI coding tools. It works OK for some really basic stuff. If you need a quick 10 line function that does something very specific and you can describe that fairly accurately, its good. Anything that gets remotely complex though it tends to confidently spit out code full of bugs or even code that won't even compile.
Sometimes it even makes up calls to functions in a library that don't even exist (my only guess is that somewhere it parsed in someone talking about trying to call that function when they assumed it did, and that worked its way into its data as a function call).
Overall, it can be ok for some basic stuff, but its far from ready to just turn it loose on anything of value.
LLM... (Score:2)
Please generate a text that look as close as possible as the text i actually need, at a point that if it's wrong, i won't be able to pick it off unless i manually check it with my advanced debugging skills.
They should let AI do peer review though. (Score:3)
The MerlinBot used at Microsoft to review controller firmware has actually found bugs in code I checked in. Just remember if you farm the review out to Chat GTP, your proprietary code gets sent to servers you don't control. Microsoft uses their in-house AI to review code, so presumably it can be trusted to not leak trade secrets.