Arias: Human proof for FOSS contributions
Rodrigo Arias Mallo has proposed a method to verify human contributions to FOSS by having contributors record their programming sessions using asciinema. He notes that while LLMs can generate patches, creating realistic asciinema recordings poses a challenge for them. The Dillo project is not currently requiring these recordings but may explore this approach further.
- ▪Rodrigo Arias Mallo is the maintainer of the Dillo web browser.
- ▪He suggests using asciinema recordings to verify human contributions in FOSS.
- ▪Arias has found it difficult for LLMs to generate realistic asciinema sessions.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 19 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Human proof for FOSS contributions — Dillo-browser
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| Original publisher | LWN.net (Linux Weekly News) |
| Canonical URL | https://lwn.net/Articles/1074534/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 17:50:35 +0000 |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Rodrigo Arias Mallo, maintainer of the Dillo web browser, has written a blog post with a proposal on one way to ensure that a contribution is written by a human and not AI; he suggests asking new contributors to record their programming session using asciinema. In the same way that LLMs generate patches, they can also generate the asciinema recordings themselves. Then, the contributors can lie to the reviewers pretending to have made the edits. Perhaps surprisingly, this is not a easy task for LLMs, at least from my observations. The corpus of recordings of developers making mistakes and thinking the whole process of editing a file is not as large as the corpus of FOSS programs and patches in which to train an LLM.
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