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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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Maybe I am the weird one but I have a split view on using AI tools. Using AI to find bugs and exploits makes sense. It can attack in ways humans will rarely think about and find bugs humans may not have considered. It can use used to fuzz large attack surfaces and find patterns which we can then fix.
Using AI to do the actual coding is far less reasonable in my view. Studies do show a decline in productivity, enjoyment, and quality of code when using AI tools.
So for finding problems to address AI seems great. It is one of many tools which can help us find problems worth addressing. But for solving those problems? No, it is not fit for that purpose. It does not produce good code with maintainability and legibility for the maintainers of the code.
I think had KDE's policy proposal limited LLM use to just finding bugs, but prohibited using it for code, there would've been much less uproar. However even that would still likely encourage corporate AI use to find those bugs, which brings with it
its own ethical problems.
Simply using an AI that's run on a corporate data centers encourages the construction of yet more data centers, with all of the environmental/climate negatives they bring, as well as local harms they induce on the people living near them, such as increased electricity rates.
Using corporate AI directly helps the financial situations of those giant corporations (by boosting usage/user numbers, they are able to attract more investment capital), most of which are ran by right-wing CEOs who are more than willing to collaborate with and fund fascist governments to ensure that they are not regulated in search of both maximum profits. Some of these companies, such as Nvidia, Palantir and Oracle, genuinely appear to be seeking to use these tools for what would previously be considered crackpot conspiracy theory levels of public control and surveillance.
I agree. I have run a few models on my phone and server and they are interesting but on such weak hardware they are slow and less capable. That said, a project like KDE has a certain amount of funding which could be put to use in part finding bugs using AI tools. They could be run on reasonable hardware with all the ethical safeguards we could come up with and have it be the least awful version possible. Some would argue it would still be unethical and I can see their perspective. That said, for me this is the line we should not cross. Keep the development by humans and for humans, and if we are to use AI models then we should be doing so to find problems to work on, not to solve them.