Post by @severin@hci.social

2026-07-25 14:35 UTC

But the important point is elsewhere: I did not submit this PR because I really wanted to join the community of Inkscape developers. I submitted this PR because it wanted to address a pain point in the software. I did it (with the help of an LLM) and I thought it could be useful to others, so I tried (and failed) to share it. 7/9

Replies (2)

@severin@hci.social 2026-07-25 14:36

Even though I've written code for 15+ years, with 100s of pre-LLM open-source repositories, I am not really interested in the code itself. In fact, I'm very happy for an LLM to do that for me. What I deeply care about, however, is to build excellent open-source tools, and make them available to everyone. Tools that are as good or better than proprietary ones. I want to contribute to a world where people own their tech stack, and do not depend on the whims of a few capitalist actors. 8/9

Open ##4116102
@larsmb@mastodon.online 2026-07-26 15:10

@severin@hci.social The problem is two-fold: using GenAI does not eliminate the need for a maintainable code base or code-review (you could have continued to refine and deduplicate the algorithm), and it still requires being able to assert copyright (which LLM output famously doesn't have). I've made a few drive-by contributions to FLOSS to address nits without joining their community. That's not the point.

Open ##4591399