[GNC] Sharing Some Changes With the GnuCash Community

John Ralls jralls at ceridwen.us
Tue May 26 21:10:30 EDT 2026


Adrien,

I think you’re being a bit too absolute. While we did get a few PRs full of AI slop a couple of weeks ago (not sure what the submitter was up to, most of the time he closed the PR a few minutes after opening it) and I banned the submitter after a week, other submitters—including Chris Lam—use AI responsibly to help them code. I haven’t yet started to do that, but I probably will soon. Responsible use isn’t vibe-coding: The developer has to understand the result and review it for correctness and sound design. 

You can be sure that every major professional shop, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the rest, are already moving quickly in that direction. No doubt you’ve seen the hype about Anthropic’s Mythos finding hundreds of bugs and being “too dangerous” to release generally. It won’t take long for that level of capability to come from other frontier labs. OpenAI is already claiming that they have it and they’re not restricting release. The Firefox folks say they’ve fixed everything that Mythos found and they also used AI assistants to get the fixes done as quickly as possible.

Regards,
John Ralls


> On May 26, 2026, at 17:42, Adrien Monteleone <adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> 
> And that's why I either do not update, or only update apps that have indicated they will not use it for development or take PRs generated by such means.
> 
> I don't have time to police source code for every app I use. I don't have time to learn various languages and patterns in order to do so. If the maintainers and project leads haven't explicitly rejected so-called 'AI' for their app, I simply will freeze it at an older version, or find an alternative app.
> 
> Fancy dashboards are nice toys to me. They are not a requirement and there are other solutions.
> 
> If I have no other choices at some point, I'll use a machine with no network connection, and baring that, go back to pen and paper. (though thankfully, any old & current version of GnuCash will work just fine for me needs for as long as I have working hardware.)
> 
> I don't succumb to the 'this crappy thing is ubiquitous now, accept it into your life and embrace it' crowd. No, no I will not.
> 
> Regards,
> Adrien
> 
> On 5/21/26 11:32 PM, flywire wrote:
>>> I'm not interested in any code in any way written by a chat bot.
>> Adrien, I really understand your concern, but AI-assisted development is
>> now part of modern software, including much of what you use. Fortunately,
>> with open source everything is auditable so you and the community can
>> review and test then you can decide for yourself whether to use it.
> 
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