Generative AI in Servo

Summary

Servo has shown that we can build a browser with a modern, parallel layout engine in a fraction of the cost of the big incumbents, thanks to our powerful tooling, our strong community, and our thorough documentation. But we can, and should, build Servo without generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot. This post is my personal opinion, not necessarily representative of Servo or my colleagues at Igalia. I hope it makes a difference. I’m the lead author of our monthly updates and the Servo book, a member of the Technical Steering Committee, and a coauthor of our current AI policy (permalink). That policy was inspired by Gentoo’s AI policy, and has in turn inspired the AI policies of Loupe and Amaranth. Recently the TSC voted in favour of two proposals that relax our ban on AI contributions. This was a mistake, and it was also a mistake to wait until after we had made our decision to seek community feedback (see § On governance). § Your feedback made it clear that those proposals are the wrong way forward for Servo. Within minutes of announcing them, someone pointed out that in the one example of an AI-assisted contribution we based them on, there appears to be a trivial logic error between the spec text and the code. If this is representative of the project’s AI-assisted future, then Servo is not fit for purpose. I call on the TSC to explicitly reaffirm that generative AI tools like Copilot are not welcome in Servo, and make it clear that we intend to keep it that way indefinitely, in both our policy and the community, so we can start rebuilding trust. It’s not enough to say oops, sorry, we will not be moving forward with these proposals. Like any logic written by humans, this policy does have some unintended consequences. Our intent was to ban AI tools that generate bullshit [a] in inscrutable ways, including GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT. But there are other tools that use similar underlying technology in more useful and less problematic ways (see § Potential exceptions)...