glibc AI policy

[Carlos O'Donell]

On 4/7/26 4:00 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 2026-04-07 11:01, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
>> On 4/2/26 12:05 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>>> 1) Code included in this package that comes from a single LLM prompt
>>> must be limited in size: it must be at most 5 lines long.
>>
>> You stated below that the intent of rule 1 was to ensure the
>> content was legally insignificant.
>>
>> If we rewrote rule 1 as follows:
>>
>> ~~~
>> 1) Code included in this package that comes from an LLM prompt
>> must be considered legally insignificant to be accepted [1]
>>
>> [1] https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Legally-Significant.html
>> ~~~
>>
>> Would the intent be more clear or less clear?
> 
> Less clear, because the reader needs to go off to another website
> and figure stuff out. It's better to say what we want directly.

The text says exactly what we want i.e. "legally insignificant?"

I'd probably reframe that as "intent is more clear, but less actionable"
in that a developer has clarity "It must be legally insignificant" but
what that means is not always actionable without help.

Every LLM assisted contribution turns into a review of "Is it legally
insignificant?" Which isn't a bad checkbox item for any review.
  
> It might not hurt for Gnulib's advice to also point to that URL.
> That being said, since the FSF is likely to announce its own
> thoughts on the matter, perhaps we should leave Gnulib alone for
> now, to avoid churn.

Just for clarity I'm not suggesting anything for gnulib.

You wrote "We could put something similar in a new section of the
glibc manual, or whereever else you'd prefer." and I'm following
up on that in the context of glibc which doesn't yet have any
policy.

Are you advising anything in particular for glibc?

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.