@amy Anthropic claims they spent $20k on the Claude C Compiler (probably underestimated, but that gives an idea).

@tusharhero Because it’s so tempting? And “everyone does it”, and “look how it could benefit our project”.

So yes, maybe we’ll have to give up on some dreams—like the year of the Hurd on the desktop.

But in exchange, we’ll get something more valuable: human beings sharing their passion, helping each other, and building things together. The real asset of free software.

I think we need solidarity. We need to recognize the harms of genAI, including from a free software standpoint.

And we need bigger projects to show the way: to clearly state their rejection, and not on the grounds of quality assurance—a concern bound to become irrelevant—but really on the grounds of ethics, refusing to be part of the harm this does to society.

It’s probably easier for a big project like Gentoo to say “no” to genAI—they have enough contributors anyway, they don’t need it.

So what do we do?

I think these two factors—lack of humanpower and a “big” vision—coupled with the passion for technicalities typical of such projects make them particularly vulnerable to genAI.

Because yes, “we” want SMP support in Mach and it’s not been happening until this contributor achieved something with the help of genAI.

Like the Emacs-in-Rust thing¹, it’s another pipe dream project with scarce humanpower.

¹ https://toot.aquilenet.fr/@civodul/116099711903317535

GenAI reaches another unexpected corner of #FreeSoftware: the #Hurd
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-02/msg00133.html