AI in KDE Plasma

At the end of August, the results came out for a general resolution on the use of generative AI (LLMs) in Debian. Option 5 won: “Responsible use of generative AI.” The outcome — you can probably guess — left a lot of people unhappy.

This week, it was the KDE project’s turn to end up in the crossfire while trying to propose a policy on the use (or non-use) of AI in its code. Tempers flared when ~the internet discovered that one of the talks at Akademy, the project’s annual event, proposed “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE,” pitched by two people who had been involved in KDE development in the past, but no longer are.

Both attempts to draft the policy fell apart, and at the moment there’s no new proposal under discussion.

On his blog, Nate Graham, one of the project’s most active developers and CEO of Techpaladin Software, a company that funds several parts of KDE, gave a detailed and thoughtful rundown of the situation. The initial drafts of the AI policy were written by him.

Nate summed it up like this:

A bunch of people mostly outside of KDE who disapprove of LLM usage derailed KDE’s attempt to add restrictions to LLM usage.

Yep, that’s where we’re at in the state of online discourse around AI.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? I don’t know. I just have a few thoughts that came to mind while reading about it.

• What’s at stake is the use of AI in developing KDE applications, not in the applications themselves. Nothing like Copilot on Windows 11 or Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 was even on the table.
• KDE developers, in Nate’s words, are opposed to adopting the vibe coding “methodology.” The policy, still according to him, is meant to provide grounds for rejecting poor contributions with clear evidence of being AI-generated.
• Maybe the only point where I found myself disagreeing with his post was regarding the weight given to the opinions of non-code-contributors, which Nate suggests should be (or ought to be) smaller. The presence of generative AI — something he himself acknowledges — goes well beyond practical or code-related concerns.

Judging by the state of the commercial alternatives, I still sense there’s a fear of KDE Plasma potentially being wrecked by the possible use of code generators.

I recommend reading the post and the comments. Beyond the substance of the debate, there’s plenty of material there to reflect on how people relate to each other online.