PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2026/02/26/pmOS-update-2026-02/

by pantalaimon • 5 months ago

85 45 5 months ago

postmarketos.org

jonathrg• 5 months ago

Very happy to see PostmarketOS take an uncompromising stance and also providing justification for it.

LaSombra• 5 months ago

I wish more projects would take the same stance.

GaryBluto• 5 months ago

You say "uncompromising stance" with "justification", I say stubborn prejudice. They simply state the same weak, nonsensical complaints that apply to many other technologies that they undoubtedly don't have issues with and are happy with the use of.

fartfeatures5• 5 months ago

Feels pretty Luddite to me.

I remember when people were crying about how much power a google search uses. This is the same thing all over again and it is as pointless now as it was back then.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-says-it-dropped-th...

Google says it dropped the energy cost of AI queries by 33x in one year. The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV.

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

No, it's entirely justified when quality of code matters. They don't want a thousand gallons of unreviewable slop. They want a reasonable amount of code that can be sensibility reviewed.

kruffalon• 5 months ago

The audacity to call an organisation that works on making mobile phones and other small PCs work with free software Luddite is impressive.

That's like calling a person going for seconds a conservative (in the USA political sense).

randusername• 5 months ago

Agreed. I would have chosen differently, but I appreciate the policy is unambiguous and explained succinctly with references.

Some people enjoy the outcome, others enjoy the process.

I find the criticism interesting. It's like one restaurant saying they'll use only electric stoves for the climate, then chefs all over the world calling them stupid naive for it.

It's like ethical arguments rationalizing local behavior are automatically interpreted as a global attack that has to be rejected.

chasil• 5 months ago

I do not understand why Lineage insists on waiting for eBPF back ports when PostmarketOS has a far newer kernel running on the same hardware.

9cb14c1ec0• 5 months ago

Core Android functionality relies on eBPF in a way that PostmarketOS does not. PostmarketOS is much more of a linux distro than Android is. They are not very comparable.

zozbot2342• 5 months ago

AOSP patched kernels still include some features that are not in the mainline version. The LineageOS folks are working on support for mainline kernels, but AIUI it's not there yet.

egorfine5• 5 months ago

Submitting contributions fully or in part created by generative AI tools to postmarketOS.

So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all.

How it is possible to distinguish between the two in the vast majority of cases where the hand written code and autocompleted code is byte-by-byte identical?

Are we supposed to record video of us coding to show that we did type letters one by one?

2. Recommending generative AI tools to other community members for solving problems in the postmarketOS space.

Is searching for pieces of code considered parts of solving problems?

Then how do we distinguish between finding a a required function by grepping code or by asking LLM to search for it?

Can we ask LLM questions about postmarketOS? Like, "what is the proper way to query kernel for X given Z"?

If a community members asks this question and I already know the answer via LLM, then am I now banned from giving the correct answer?

Don't get me wrong. I am sick and tired of the vomit-inducing AI bullshit (as opposed to the tremendous help that LLMs provide to experienced devs).

I fail to see how a policy like this is even enforceable let alone productive and sane.

On the other hand, I absolutely see where is this policy coming from. It seems that projects are having a hard time navigating the issue and looking for ways to eliminate the insurmountable amount of incoming slop.

I think we still haven't found a right way to do it.

kunai• 5 months ago

So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all.

Because autocomplete still requires heavy user input and a SWE at the top of the decision making tree. You could argue that using Claude or Codex enables you to do the same thing, but there's no guarantee someone isn't vibecoding and then not testing adequately to ensure, firstly, that everything can be debugged, and secondly, that it fits in with the broader codebase before they try to merge or PR.

Plenty of people use Claude like an autocomplete or to bounce ideas off of, which I think is a great use case. But besides that, using a tool like that in more extreme ways is becoming increasingly normalized and probably not something you want in your codebase if you care about code quality and avoiding pointless bugs.

Every time I see a post on HN about some miracle work Claude did it's always been very underwhelming. Wow, it coded a kernel driver for out of date hardware! That doesn't do anything except turn a display on... great. Claude could probably help you write a driver in less time, but it'll only really work well, again, if you're at the top of the hierarchy of decision making and are manually reviewing code. No guarantees of that in the FOSS world because we don't have keyloggers installed on everybody's machine.

egorfine5• 5 months ago

Fully agree with you on all points.

But again: how do we distinguish between manual code input and sophisticated autocomplete?

baq• 5 months ago

bans use of generative AI

that ship has sailed with codex 5.3 in 90% SWE jobs, unfortunately. I expect the next 9% won't survive the following 12 months and the last 1% is done within 5 years.

it isn't even about principles - projects not using gen AI will become basically irrelevant, the pace of gen AI allowed competitors will be too great.

ZenoArrow7• 5 months ago

Alright, let's see Codex 5.3 create a competitor to postmarketOS (without just copying the homework of other devs). If you believe in the technology so much, put it to the test, see what it can really do.

dist-epoch5• 5 months ago

Reminds me how one year ago people were saying "sure, GPT-4o can write a function, but try to make it write a whole application"

fartfeatures5• 5 months ago

Fun that you had to caveat it with some hand wavy homework bull. Gives you a nice get out of jail free clause when inevitably an AI writes an OS.

surajrmal• 5 months ago

This stat is grossly inflated. I don't disagree with the general point but adoption isn't that high yet and certainly not for codex specifically.

dist-epoch5• 5 months ago

sure, but how do you make irrelevant something which is already irrelevant (PostmarketOS)?

erelong• 5 months ago

This sounds impractical and like they will probably not keep the ban

AI use should be able to accelerate the development of ports on currently unsupported or undersupported devices which would directly support the project

I guess I wouldn't worry about the policy, they will probably naturally switch it if / when AI becomes more useful in practice

flammafex• 5 months ago

It's not the sky that's falling; it's the value of an SWE's labor.

Fun while it lasted, huh?

ptnpzwqd• 5 months ago

There are some really baffling takes here. And it doesn't really matter how good or bad coding agents are.

Coding agents greatly reduce the barrier to contributing something that at least looks okay at the surface, so reviewing contributions will quickly become even more of a bottleneck. Manual contributions used to filter away most low effort attempts, or at least they could easily be identified and rejected.

That dynamic is now different and the maintainers risk being swarmed with low effort contributions, that will take a lot of time to review and respond to. Some AI contributions might be reviewed and revised and overall be of acceptable quality, but how can the maintainers know which without reviewing everything, good and bad alike.

I think we will see multiple attempts like this to shift things back to the old dynamic, by rejecting things that can be identified as AI generated a glance, but I suspect over time it will be difficult to do so, so my prediction is that we will soon see more open source repos stop accepting outside contributions entirely.

Even if LLMs one day will be good enough to quickly produce code that is on par with humans (which I strongly doubt), why would the contributors have any incentive to have someone else do that (the easy part), rather than just doing it themselves?

PostmarketOS in 2026-02: generic kernels, bans use of generative AI

Related Stories