The Ladybird browser isn't opposed to AI coding tools, but it's just brought a new change to their code-contributing policies.
February 23: "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI."
I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go... The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand.
June 5 (Friday):
We will no longer accept public pull requests... A pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds....
We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it. What has changed is how much faster and cheaper it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution... Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.
As part of this change, we will close all currently open public pull requests. We are grateful for the work people put into them, but keeping the existing queue open would keep that contribution path open in practice. There is no perfect time to make this change, so we are making it now. Going forward, pull requests will only be available to project maintainers. There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means. We do not want to create a shadow contribution system through issues, comments, email, or forks...
Outside involvement still matters: clear bug reports, reductions, website testing, standards discussion, design discussion, security reports, and technical feedback all help move the project forward. This is the right change for Ladybird now. We are preparing to ship a browser to real users, and our development process has to match that responsibility.
February 23: "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI."
I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go... The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand.
June 5 (Friday):
We will no longer accept public pull requests... A pull request no longer tells us as much as it used to about the person submitting it. A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds....
We have already seen patient, well-resourced campaigns in open source to earn maintainer trust and abuse it. What has changed is how much faster and cheaper it has become to produce work that looks like a serious contribution... Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.
As part of this change, we will close all currently open public pull requests. We are grateful for the work people put into them, but keeping the existing queue open would keep that contribution path open in practice. There is no perfect time to make this change, so we are making it now. Going forward, pull requests will only be available to project maintainers. There will not be a separate process for submitting patches by other means. We do not want to create a shadow contribution system through issues, comments, email, or forks...
Outside involvement still matters: clear bug reports, reductions, website testing, standards discussion, design discussion, security reports, and technical feedback all help move the project forward. This is the right change for Ladybird now. We are preparing to ship a browser to real users, and our development process has to match that responsibility.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
