• Arias: Human proof for FOSS contributions

    From LWN.net@86:200/23 to All on Wed May 27 06:40:09 2026

    Rodrigo Arias Mallo, maintainer of the Dillo web browser, has written a
    blog post
    with a proposal on one way to ensure that a contribution is written by
    a human and not AI; he suggests asking new contributors to record
    their programming session using asciinema.

    In the same way that LLMs generate patches, they can also generate
    the asciinema recordings themselves. Then, the contributors can lie to
    the reviewers pretending to have made the edits. Perhaps surprisingly,
    this is not a easy task for LLMs, at least from my observations. The
    corpus of recordings of developers making mistakes and thinking the
    whole process of editing a file is not as large as the corpus of FOSS
    programs and patches in which to train an LLM. During my very simple
    tests I haven't been able to generate an asciinema session that
    remotely resembles what I would expect from a human, and even less so
    from a human with a nice editor theme and editing an existing Dillo
    source file.

    The Dillo project is not yet requiring asciinema recordings, but he
    said that he would like to test the theory further. LWN covered asciinema in January 2026.

    https://lwn.net/Articles/1074534/
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