COSMIC (Pop!_OS) Bans AI-Generated Pull Requests

The COSMIC team at System76, the group behind the desktop environment for Pop!_OS, just added a new line to its pull request checklist. No AI-generated content is allowed, period. Not code, not comments, not even the pull request description. A contributor has to check a box confirming that none of it was written by an LLM, the kind of model that powers tools like ChatGPT or Claude. Developer Jeremy Soller said the reason is simple. Submissions written by AI dump a pile of extra work on maintainers, and almost none of them get merged.

I work in Claude Code every day, so I get where COSMIC is coming from. An agent can hand you code that looks finished in seconds, but you are still the one putting your name on it. If a contributor does not actually check and understand what they are submitting, that work does not disappear. It just lands on the reviewer's desk for free. So this is not an attack on AI tools. It is maintainers protecting their time from people who skip the step where you actually understand and test your own work.