Thank you for your time Tom, The disagreement (as I understand) is this: My view: Policies should define the minimum framework necessary for collaboration between people who disagree. My understanding of your view: Policies should also reflect the community’s collective values and preferences. In that case let me bring up my previous analogy one more time, and let me know if you in principle agree with the following or not, and if not, why not? Suppose that 50% of the community strongly preferred that all contributors develop on Linux, or that all documentation be written manually rather than with grammar or translation tools. Would that fact alone justify expressing those preferences in project policy? Best, Moritz On Sun, Jul 26, 2026 at 7:31 AM <amindfv@mailbox.org> wrote:
On 07/26/2026 1:57 AM CEST Moritz Angermann <moritz.angermann@gmail.com> wrote:
Tom, your latest reply helped me understand something I hadn’t appreciated before.
When I wrote “otherwise acceptable workflows,” you replied that this is exactly the point under discussion.
"Otherwise acceptable" is, of course, the point of discussion here.
Does that mean that, in your view, LLM-assisted authorship is not an otherwise acceptable workflow, even when the contributor satisfies all of the policy’s requirements around disclosure, understanding, responsibility, and quality?
If so, I think I finally understand why we have been talking past each other. In that case, the disclosure requirement is no longer merely about provenance; it identifies contributions produced by a workflow that the project itself does not regard as fully acceptable.
I'll just quote myself from a previous email:
"Currently 50% of 'voters' on the GHC GitLab feel that _any_ LLM usage is inappropriate. I think it would be valuable to consider how to make a policy that doesn't just please the people who want to use LLMs [...], but also recognizes that when a person makes an LLM contribution to the GHC GitLab, more than* half of the users there are thinking 'I wish you hadn't done that.'"
Saying "the contributor satisfies all of the policy’s requirements around disclosure, understanding, responsibility, and quality" puts the cart before the horse: policies about quality and understanding will be influenced by the community's feelings about LLMs.
Cheers, Tom