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

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

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

Fun while it lasted, huh?

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.

> 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?

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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.

it's not surprising the whole project isn't useful for anything if they don't embrace genai for speeding up the development

> 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.

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