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PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI
- mono442 8mo ago[flagged]
- MonkeyClub 8mo agoWhoever needs more slop faster can easily find it elsewhere, if PostmarketOS doesn't want to follow the trend, that's well and good.
- ACCount37 8mo agoWeird stance to take. I can understand "untested AI-genned code is bad, and thus anything that reeks of AI is going to be scrutinized" - especially given that PostmarketOS deals a lot with kernel drivers for hardware. Notoriously low error margins. But they just had to go out of their way and make it ideological rather than pragmatic.
- yehoshuapw 8mo agoas a kernel developer, I use LLMs for some tasks, but can say it is not there yet to write real kernel space code
- ACCount37 8mo agoSame. Having an LLM helps, especially when you're facing a new subsystem you're not familiar with, and trying to understand how things are done there. They still can't do the heavy duty driver work by themselves - but are good enough for basic guidance and boilerplate.
- trollbridge 8mo agoGuidance and boilerplate... in other words, documentation.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo agoNo, dude. Do you genuinely think that people don’t know what documentation is? That’s insulting. An LLM can help surface relevant information, taking your intent / goals into account, summarising vast quantities of code and indeed other documentation. That’s, like, their single most effective use.
- trollbridge 8mo agoI am aware - I use the all day. But I think it’s a poor substitute for effective, well written documentation, tutorials, and examples. A lot of open source code (and commercial, too) is moving in the direction of nearly zero documentation and they just provide an LLM prompt to pipe to | claude -p. This is not a great change. For starters, LLMs often get confused when a project is internally reorganised and mix different versions together. They will also often recommend using a module’s internal structures. (I spent half a day fighting datamodel-code-generate with this exact problem, so it’s fresh on my mind.) EDIT: the account I’m responding to appears to be some kind of AI and appears to be prompted with “make snarky, argumentative comments”. If you are a real human, please accept my apology for this accusation.
- hedora 8mo agoMy reading of their AI statement says your kernel contributions are no longer welcome in PostmarketOS, and also, since you're encouraging others in their space to use such tools, you're in violation of their code of conduct. This applies to the person you're replying to too. I think their policy is poorly thought out, and that little good will come of it. At best, it'll cause drama in the project, and discourage useful contributions. It's a shame, since we desperately need an alternative to the phone duopoly.
- crimsonnoodle58 8mo agoExactly, you can use it for some tasks. But why "explicitly forbid generative AI". If you use AI to make repetitive tasks less repetitive, and clean up any LLM-ness afterwards, would they notice or care? I find blanket bans inhibitive, and reeks of fear of change, rather than a real substantive stance.
- jonathrg 8mo agoThey explain why in their AI policy. It's an ethical stance. Of course they wouldn't notice if there aren't clear signs of LLM-ness, but that's not the main reason why they forbid it. https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/development/ai-policy.html https://docs.postmarketos.org/policies-and-processes/develop...
- crimsonnoodle58 8mo agoThanks for the clarification. Not that I agree with their stance (the exact same could have been said at the start of the industrial revolution) but I respect it nonetheless.
- coldpie 8mo ago> the exact same could have been said at the start of the industrial revolution The pollution caused by said revolution is currently putting humanity at a serious risk of world war and maybe even extinction so... maybe they had a point? I'm not taking a strong stance either way here, but worth thinking about the downsides from the industrial revolution, too.
- jsheard 8mo ago> But why "explicitly forbid generative AI". The AI policy linked from the OP explains why. It's half not wanting to deal with slop, and half ethical concerns which still apply when it's used judiciously.
- zozbot234 8mo ago> and clean up any LLM-ness afterwards That never happens. It's actually easier to write the code from scratch and avoid LLMness altogether.
- egorfine 8mo agoAbsolutely. But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. Asking stackoverflow and waiting for hours to get my question closed down instead of asking LLM? No way.
- cuu508 8mo ago> But at the same time I cannot imagine reverting to code with no help of LLMs. And doesn't that bother you a little? If you listen to podcasts, check out this podcast episode: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/flying-too-high-ai-and-air-france-flight-447 https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/flying-too-... It is about Air France 447, but also draws parallels to AI and self-driving cars
- egorfine 8mo agoLook, every medicine is a poison as well. Every single byte of code I commit I fully understand. I am strongly against slop. However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers.
- ZenoArrow 8mo ago> However I'm not going back to asking stackoverflow and pretend that I have nowhere else to find answers. That's not your only option. What you're meant to do is understand the tools you're using well enough to not need to ask for help from anyone or anything else. Stack Overflow is useful, but it's a learning tool. If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code, it's no wonder that you have taken to AI, because it's just a slightly more convenient form of that.
- egorfine 8mo ago> If all you were doing before AI was copying and modifying other people's code Aren't we all in a sense?
- jonathrg 8mo agoIt's fine for a project to have moral/ideological leanings, it's only weird if you insist that project teams should be entirely amoral.
- trollbridge 8mo agoThe main reason open source projects exist at all is because of people who started them with quite often fringe ideological leanings. Just look at the GNU project.
- Joker_vD 8mo agoAnd fringe economical leanings, too. Just look at the GNU project: the firmware in printers is still of subpar quality, and GNU didn't really help to change that... and why on Earth would it, anyway?
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago[flagged]
- trollbridge 8mo agoThis doesn’t make any sense?
- Joker_vD 8mo ago> It's fine for a project to have moral/ideological leanings As long as they align with the correct (i.e. yours) values, of course. When they adopt the wrong values, it's not fine.
- xantronix 8mo agoThe licensure of the code generated by LLMs is not a settled matter in all jurisdictions; this is a very valid pragmatic concern they address.
- ForHackernews 8mo agoNo one is stopping you from vibe-coding a POSIX-compatible mobile OS.
- hu3 8mo agoNot parent commenter but this is bound to happen. And I highly doubt iOS and Android are free from LLM assisted code at this point.
- mpol 8mo agoCould AI write a highly specific camera driver or GPU driver, without any documentation at all?
- pantalaimon 8mo agoI'm sure it could generate a decent device tree
- hu3 8mo agoProbably not and why would it need such constraint? Not even humans can do that. Documentation needs to at least be reverse-engineered and understood before implementation.
- fruitworks 8mo agoBecause these are the major types of problems that pmOS solves?
- fartfeatures 8mo agoCan you?
- imadr 8mo agoYes and? Let's suppose your statement is 100% true, I genuinely don't see the point of these kinds of comments. Why every time some person/group of people enact an anti-LLM policy in their project, other people feel the personal need to stress how useful LLMs are and how that project is bound to fail if they don't use it? Postmarketos clearly exists and works, EVEN if LLMs were absolutely perfect for speeding up development ten folds, is there any absolute moral necessity to use them? Also isn't this just moving the goalpost that LLM fanatics love to point out?
- surgical_fire 8mo agoYes, the famously useless PosmarketOS. Why don't you share the list of very useful things you created instead, mono442?
- nananana9 8mo agoNever ask a woman her age or a vibe coder to show you an useful program they've written.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago[flagged]
- mono442 8mo agoI don't work on open source stuff but I work at a financial institution and genai has been a huge productivity boost. I can easily write 2x - 5x more code than before genai.
- jonathrg 8mo agoVery happy to see PostmarketOS take an uncompromising stance and also providing justification for it.
- LaSombra 8mo agoI wish more projects would take the same stance.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 8mo ago[flagged]
- GaryBluto 8mo agoYou say "uncompromising stance" with "justification", I say stubborn prejudice. They simply state the same weak, nonsensical complaints that apply to many other technologies that they undoubtedly don't have issues with and are happy with the use of.
- fartfeatures 8mo agoFeels pretty Luddite to me. I remember when people were crying about how much power a google search uses. This is the same thing all over again and it is as pointless now as it was back then. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-the-energy-cost-of-ai-queries-by-33x-in-one-year/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-th... > Google says it dropped the energy cost of AI queries by 33x in one year. The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV.
- idiotsecant 8mo agoNo, it's entirely justified when quality of code matters. They don't want a thousand gallons of unreviewable slop. They want a reasonable amount of code that can be sensibility reviewed.
- fartfeatures 8mo ago
- chasil 8mo agoI do not understand why Lineage insists on waiting for eBPF back ports when PostmarketOS has a far newer kernel running on the same hardware.
- 9cb14c1ec0 8mo agoCore Android functionality relies on eBPF in a way that PostmarketOS does not. PostmarketOS is much more of a linux distro than Android is. They are not very comparable.
- zozbot234 8mo agoAOSP patched kernels still include some features that are not in the mainline version. The LineageOS folks are working on support for mainline kernels, but AIUI it's not there yet.
- egorfine 8mo ago> Submitting contributions fully or in part created by generative AI tools to postmarketOS. So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all. How it is possible to distinguish between the two in the vast majority of cases where the hand written code and autocompleted code is byte-by-byte identical? Are we supposed to record video of us coding to show that we did type letters one by one? > 2. Recommending generative AI tools to other community members for solving problems in the postmarketOS space. Is searching for pieces of code considered parts of solving problems? Then how do we distinguish between finding a a required function by grepping code or by asking LLM to search for it? Can we ask LLM questions about postmarketOS? Like, "what is the proper way to query kernel for X given Z"? If a community members asks this question and I already know the answer via LLM, then am I now banned from giving the correct answer? -- Don't get me wrong. I am sick and tired of the vomit-inducing AI bullshit (as opposed to the tremendous help that LLMs provide to experienced devs). I fail to see how a policy like this is even enforceable let alone productive and sane. On the other hand, I absolutely see where is this policy coming from. It seems that projects are having a hard time navigating the issue and looking for ways to eliminate the insurmountable amount of incoming slop. I think we still haven't found a right way to do it.
- kunai 8mo ago> So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all. Because autocomplete still requires heavy user input and a SWE at the top of the decision making tree. You could argue that using Claude or Codex enables you to do the same thing, but there's no guarantee someone isn't vibecoding and then not testing adequately to ensure, firstly, that everything can be debugged, and secondly, that it fits in with the broader codebase before they try to merge or PR. Plenty of people use Claude like an autocomplete or to bounce ideas off of, which I think is a great use case. But besides that, using a tool like that in more extreme ways is becoming increasingly normalized and probably not something you want in your codebase if you care about code quality and avoiding pointless bugs. Every time I see a post on HN about some miracle work Claude did it's always been very underwhelming. Wow, it coded a kernel driver for out of date hardware! That doesn't do anything except turn a display on... great. Claude could probably help you write a driver in less time, but it'll only really work well, again, if you're at the top of the hierarchy of decision making and are manually reviewing code. No guarantees of that in the FOSS world because we don't have keyloggers installed on everybody's machine.
- baq 8mo ago> bans use of generative AI that ship has sailed with codex 5.3 in 90% SWE jobs, unfortunately. I expect the next 9% won't survive the following 12 months and the last 1% is done within 5 years. it isn't even about principles - projects not using gen AI will become basically irrelevant, the pace of gen AI allowed competitors will be too great.
- ZenoArrow 8mo agoAlright, let's see Codex 5.3 create a competitor to postmarketOS (without just copying the homework of other devs). If you believe in the technology so much, put it to the test, see what it can really do.
- dist-epoch 8mo agoReminds me how one year ago people were saying "sure, GPT-4o can write a function, but try to make it write a whole application"
- ZenoArrow 8mo agoSure, AI has developed quickly, but let's see it take on a real engineering challenge, rather than regurgitating boilerplate code. Writing device drivers from incomplete specs is much harder than "writing a whole application" where the specs are clearly defined and there's a lot more example code to reference. If you believe in AI so much, and believe that it's unreasonable for postmarketOS to not want to use it, put it to the test, prove the doubters wrong, what have you got to lose?
- dist-epoch 8mo agoI don't have anything to win either. What does a developer who writes a driver from incomplete specs do? Writes some values in some registers, sees how the device behaves, updates the spec. Rinse and repeat. Sounds exactly the kind of stuff coding agents thrive at - a verifiable loop. And they can do it 24x7 until done.
- erelong 8mo agoThis sounds impractical and like they will probably not keep the ban AI use should be able to accelerate the development of ports on currently unsupported or undersupported devices which would directly support the project I guess I wouldn't worry about the policy, they will probably naturally switch it if / when AI becomes more useful in practice
- flammafex 8mo agoIt's not the sky that's falling; it's the value of an SWE's labor. Fun while it lasted, huh?
- ptnpzwqd 8mo agoThere are some really baffling takes here. And it doesn't really matter how good or bad coding agents are. Coding agents greatly reduce the barrier to contributing something that at least looks okay at the surface, so reviewing contributions will quickly become even more of a bottleneck. Manual contributions used to filter away most low effort attempts, or at least they could easily be identified and rejected. That dynamic is now different and the maintainers risk being swarmed with low effort contributions, that will take a lot of time to review and respond to. Some AI contributions might be reviewed and revised and overall be of acceptable quality, but how can the maintainers know which without reviewing everything, good and bad alike. I think we will see multiple attempts like this to shift things back to the old dynamic, by rejecting things that can be identified as AI generated a glance, but I suspect over time it will be difficult to do so, so my prediction is that we will soon see more open source repos stop accepting outside contributions entirely. Even if LLMs one day will be good enough to quickly produce code that is on par with humans (which I strongly doubt), why would the contributors have any incentive to have someone else do that (the easy part), rather than just doing it themselves?