Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Spending your tokens to support Django by having an LLM work on tickets is not helpful. You and the community are better off donating that money to the Django Software Foundation instead.

We’re in a new era where people don’t have to type out all of their code. I used an LLM to build a good part of the new functionality in the djangonaut.space site. I know I wouldn’t have shipped that much in that amount of time without using an LLM.

But Django is different. The level of quality is much, much higher. This is because it has a much larger user base, it changes slowly, and the community expects it to be in use 20 years from now. It’s partly why it’s such an honor to have your name among the list of contributors.

This isn’t about whether you use an LLM, it’s about whether you still understand what’s being contributed. What I see now is people who are using LLMs to generate the code and write the PR description and handle the feedback from the PR review. It’s to the extent where I can’t tell if there’d be a difference if the reviewer had just used the LLM themselves. And that is a big problem.

If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole.

Django contributors want to help others, they want to cultivate community, and they want to help you become a regular contributor. Before LLMs, this was easier to sense because you were limited to communicating what you understood. With LLMs, it’s much easier to communicate a sense of understanding to the reviewer, but the reviewer doesn’t know if you actually understood it.

In this way, an LLM is a facade of yourself. It helps you project understanding, contemplation, and growth, but it removes the transparency and vulnerability of being a human.

For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.

This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

So how should you use an LLM to contribute?

Use an LLM to develop your comprehension. Then communicate the best you can in your own words, then use an LLM to tweak that language. If you’re struggling to convey your ideas with someone, use an LLM more aggressively and mention that you used it. This makes it easier for others to see where your understanding is and where there are disconnects.

There needs to be understanding when contributing to Django. There’s no way around it. Django has been around for 20 years and expects to be around for another 20. Any code being added to a project with that outlook on longevity must be well understood.

There is no shortcut to understanding. If you want to contribute to Django, you will have to spend time reading, experimenting, and learning. Contributing to Django will help you grow as a developer.

While it is nice to be listed as a contributor to Django, the growth you earn from it is incredibly more valuable.

So please, stop using an LLM to the extent it hides you and your understanding. We want to know you, and we want to collaborate with you.