HN Reader

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code

My friend works at a well-known tech company in San Francisco. He was reviewing his junior team member's pull request. When asked what a chunk of code did, the team member matter-of-factly replied "I don't know, chatgpt wrote that"

    > the launch of one or more foundations aimed specifically at providing support for maintainers

Doesn't Red Hat (and other similar companies) already fulfill this role?

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does.

"Oh Machine Spirit, I call to thee, let the God-Machine breathe half-life unto thy data flow and help me comprehend thy secrets."

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code

After a code review, at least the reviewer should know the feature well enough to maintain it. This is, at least in my experience, the main part of the job of the reviewer at the time of review: Understand what the code does, why it does it, how it does it, such that you agree with it as if it's code you've written.

If major projects merge code because "lgtm" is taken literally, then they have been merging bogus code before LLMs.

Love the note on rejecting ai-generated code and about the alleged authors who don't understand what the code does.

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does.

Not to detract from this point, but I don’t think I understand what half the code I have written does if it’s been more than a month since I wrote it…

> global belligerence will make itself felt in our community

Sadly this has already happened. The Israel/Palestine situation was frequently referenced during the bitterest arguments in the NixOS community governance issues last year

> Distributions for mobile devices will see a resurgence in interest in the coming year.

They must have missed the news about divestos closing shop

> There will be more cloud-based products turned to bricks by manufacturers that go bankrupt or simply stop caring.

This one feels like a gimme. The recent Garmin outage that partially bricked the Connect app was a bit of a surprise; so much of what Garmin Connect does _should be_ local to the phone. Plus it's a free service (after you've paid for the device).

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" doesn't only apply to media/digital goods, but a lot of hardware at this point. :/

On the single maintainer subject: I wonder if there has been precedent that a single maintainer of a library has been treatened or corrupted by a state level actor to incorporate certain code?

> we will see more focused efforts to create truly free generative AI systems, perhaps including the creation of one or more foundations to support the creation of the models

What are the biggest barriers to making this a reality? The training data or the processing power?

Which open-source projects, if any, are the farthest along in this effort?

Overwhelming fraction of comments focus on the "AI contributed code" while back to reality:

> Global belligerence will make itself felt in our community. The world as a whole does not appear to be headed in a peaceful direction

If the geopolitical landscape continues deteriorating the tech universe as we knew it will cease to exist. Fragmentation is already a reality in egregious cases but the dynamic could become much more prevalent.

Ignoring all the points made, this was a very pleasant reading experience.

Not ignoring the points made, I cannot put my finger on where LLMs land in 2025. I do not think any sort of AGI type of phenomenon will happen.

"The OpenWrt One, which hit the market in 2024, quickly sold out its initial production run."

But have its distributors sold out their inventory from this initial production run.

For example,

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807609464530.html?spm=526...

NB. The 2.5GbE and Wi-Fi firmware are not open source

> Meanwhile, we will see more focused efforts to create truly free generative AI systems, perhaps including the creation of one or more foundations to support the creation of the models

I understand this will be free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-freedom... but if it's also free-as-in-"we downloaded a bunch of copyrighted material without paying for it" then I have no interest in using it myself. I am not sure there even is enough free-as-in-ethical stuff to build a useful LLM. (I am aware people are trying, maybe they've had success and I missed it.)

> single-maintainer projects (or subsystems, or packages) will be seen as risky

I would actually see a single-maintainer project as less risky. Looking at the XZ backdoor issue in particular, nobody even knows who the person is that introduced it. With a single-maintainer project, you only have to trust one person, who is often a known quantity.

hey OP what were your predictions for 2024, mind sharing here?

Didn’t the leader of the kernel rust team resign in September?

sched-ext sounds interesting. Anyone doing any work with it? Wondering if it's one of those things that sounds cool but probably is only suitable in some very specific use cases.

Linux will politically continue to fail to extract needed monetary support from first world countries and mega corps principally dependant on it.

In particular, my libraries and national security concerns.

The US government has its underwear in a bunch over various Chinese sources hardware, but continues to let a bunch of hobbyists maintain the software.

I almost think it is time to hold these massive orgs accountable by merging targeted vulnerabilities and performance bombs unless they start paying up. Microsoft and other monopolized software companies have no issue using whatever tactics are necessary to shale the revenue from software dependent/ addicted orgs.

> Another XZ-like backdoor attempt will come to light.

it may not. if I discovered an operation like this, I'd probably find a way to prove it and then set up a monero wallet and say it's going to cost the creepy agency whoever they are $100k USD a month to not publish. there are others who say this has already happened.

> A major project will discover that it has merged a lot of AI-generated code, a fact that may become evident when it becomes clear that the alleged author does not actually understand what the code does. We depend on our developers to contribute their own work and to stand behind it; large language models cannot do that. A project that discovers such code in its repository may face the unpleasant prospect of reverting significant changes.

A lot of companies are going to discover in 2025. Also, a major product company is going to find LLM-generated code that might have been trained on OSS code, and their compliance team is going to throw a fit.