Human proof for FOSS contributions
The article discusses the challenges of verifying whether code contributions to FOSS projects are made by humans or generated by LLMs. It proposes using asciinema recordings of programming sessions as a potential proof of human contribution, capturing the nuances of human coding behavior. While this method has its limitations, it may help reduce reliance on trust in contributors.
- ▪Asciinema recordings can capture the human essence of programming, including mistakes and thought processes.
- ▪The method is simple for users, requiring minimal effort to start and stop recordings.
- ▪There are concerns that LLMs could eventually mimic human-like asciinema recordings, but current attempts have not succeeded.
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.
- ▪ Arias: Human proof for FOSS contributions — LWN.net (Linux Weekly News)
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Record
| Original publisher | Dillo-browser |
| Canonical URL | https://dillo-browser.org/lab/human-proof/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 17:44:37 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T23:07:40.573Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T23:07:40.573Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | o93y7rReluxM · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Human proof for FOSS contributions Written on 2026-05-25 by Rodrigo Arias Mallo When receiving patches from first-time contributors it is sometimes hard to determine if the person has used an LLM to write the patch, looking at the code alone. We usually rely on the person's good behavior to tell the truth, as the patch mimics the same style as a person would have written, including comments and variable names. In Dillo we only want to accept fully human created contributions, but relying on unknown people to tell the truth doesn't seem to be very conforting. So I would like to find a better mechanism to distinguish LLM patches from human-made. I've been playing around with asciinema to record and replay some programming sessions in vim.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Dillo-browser.
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