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points by amelius 2 days ago | 0 comments
With the advances in AI, I'd expect the Servo project to go a lot faster ...

Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?

[–] simonw 2 days ago
Currently they do not: https://book.servo.org/policy/ai-usage.html

> Contributions must not include content generated by large language models or other probabilistic tools, including but not limited to Copilot or ChatGPT. This policy covers code, documentation, pull requests, issues, comments, and any other contributions to the Servo project.

> For now, we’re taking a cautious approach to these tools due to their effects — both unknown and observed — on project health and maintenance burden. This field is evolving quickly, so we are open to revising this policy at a later date, given proposals for particular tools that mitigate these effects.

The references to ChatGPT and Copilot suggest it was authored before the Codex and Claude Code revolution. I wonder if they'll revise it at some point soon.

Update: looks like that language was originally added in July 2024: https://github.com/servo/book/commit/5afb80d5b08b259ca359cfe...

I found a discussion about changing it in April 2025, but they decided to keep it the same at that point: https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379

[–] matkoniecz 2 days ago
> Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?

are there serious projects welcoming vibe-coded PRs?

[–] kykat 2 days ago
Ladybird seems to be embracing vibe coding, so I think there's a great opportunity to compare them. After a couple of months of vibe coding what do you people here think about Ladybird's progress?
[–] fabrice_d 2 days ago
You should rather check the tech debt after a few years.
[–] wmanley 1 hour ago
My recent experience is that agents have allowed me to pay off years of tech debt in a matter of weeks.

* The migration away from mongodb: completed.

* CUDA implementations of our image processing algorithms: done.

* Removing copies from our video capture pipeline: done.

* Migrating away from AngularJS to server side templating: tractable and in progress

These are all things that I’ve known about for years, and that we’ve been paying tech interest on. I know what needs to be done, but it’s never been a high enough priority to actually invest the time. Up till now it’s been cheaper just to pay that interest than to pay off the capital. Thanks to agents it’s finally happening.

[–] tcdent 2 days ago
About ready to switch to Servo as my daily driver on desktop.

Have been using it as the render backend on an experimental tablet OS and its quite capable once you fix the font rendering.

Would gladly upstream contributions but I dont type anymore.

[–] phkahler 2 days ago
>> With the advances in AI, I'd expect the Servo project to go a lot faster ... >> Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?

With an official automated test suite that they aim to pass, someone could probably set Claude loose on closing out those bugs and feature gaps. Assuming AI can figure out why tests fail (it probably can) I'd give it about a day to finish. Actually maybe a week since it'd be compiling RUST. Would the resulting code be of the same quality? Probably not. Would it be good? Maybe.

[–] nicoburns 2 days ago
IME, agents are generally capable of passing the tests autonomously. But not with code you'd actually ever want to use. Both because of the quality, and because it will have awful performance/memory/security issues.
[–] pkulak 2 days ago
I think the sweet spot is not allowing vibe-coded contributions past a certain line count. At least, that's my policy. If you use an LLM to track down some bug that's a few lines to fix; that's fine. But if it's a new feature that needs 100s of lines; just make a feature request and if I agree, I can spin up my own clanker.
[–] tormeh 2 days ago
That was my thought as well. You'd imagine a known quantity like a browser should be easy to make now. I know it sounds ridiculous to anyone who hasn't tried the new models, but idk what to tell you. Photoshop used to be impossible to clone, too. I asked Opus 5.5 to add SSGI to an open source game and it did it in an afternoon. I don't know anything about graphics programming. This is nuts.
[–] samus 2 days ago
Photoshop was never impossible to clone, and people have written browser engines before. The issue was never implementation complexity, but rather the things that are actually hard: going past the 99% of required features, hunting down corner cases, and at the same time ensuring high test coverage and maintainability.
[–] matkoniecz 2 days ago
> You'd imagine a known quantity like a browser should be easy to make now.

feel free to make one

[–] tormeh 1 day ago
I dearly wish this was the own you think it is. You know how Wile E. Coyote doesn't notice the cliff and runs over it and hangs in the air? That's my career and yours right now.