A maintainer spent 100 hours keeping AI code out of his project — and may lose modern Git to do it

The stand, and what it actually costs

Joey Hess — longtime free-software developer and author of git-annex — announced that git-annex will build with no LLM-generated code in its dependency tree. This isn't a manifesto he reasoned into from first principles; it's a conclusion he audited his way to. He says he spent roughly 100 hours going through dependencies and found the warning signs of trouble: large LLM-generated changes reverted without explanation, incoherent commit messages, questionable code-copying. Provenance, not ideology, is the stated worry.

The cost is steep and he says so plainly. Per his tracking page and the thread, holding the line drops dependencies that accepted LLM contributions — which means supporting only Git up to version 2.22 and forgoing newer GHC/Haskell releases. He concedes he may be "trying to hold back the tide," and that the non-LLM path could eventually cut git-annex off from most future Haskell improvements and become untenable. (The specific version numbers come from the thread, not the post itself.)

The thread: a hill worth dying on, or snake oil?

The pragmatic objection was blunt: users won't torch their toolchain over one disclosed commit.

"If I have to choose between this or git and the latest ghc, I think I'm going to just wait for someone to fork annex… pragmatically, I'm just not going to stop using the most widely used version controller, or Haskell, just for some guy's (forkable, AGPL licensed) hobby project." — a user weighing the dependency drop against the workflow it breaks

Then someone actually opened the flagged commit, and found the trigger was a signature, not the code:

"The diff of the linked commit in git is completely trivial, clearly it just got tagged because of the signoff in the commit message… I would be surprised if there is no LLM-assisted code in there prior to this commit, this is just the first where the author chose to disclose it." — a commenter who inspected the flagged git diff

That points at the real hole, which a founder named directly:

"any kind of AI detection is going to be inaccurate to the point of snake oil. LLM detection in writing is basically today's polygraph test pseudoscience." — the founder of ZeroTier

But the most interesting defense wasn't about detection at all — it was about what free software is:

"Behind an LLM sits a developer… For them, directions to the LLM is the preferred form of modification… The output of the LLM is not a preferred form anymore. This poses a huge problem for free software, especially when the LLM that translates preferred form into 'source code' is not FOSS." — a commenter invoking the GPL's "preferred form for modification"

That's the argument that outlives the version numbers. Hess may lose, and know it. But the question he's forcing — whether "the source" still means anything when the real source is a prompt aimed at a model you can't inspect — doesn't get easier as the tide he mentions comes in.