· ai-devtools
LibreOffice's 'no AI' stance meets LLM-assisted code
The Document Foundation (TDF) says LibreOffice has no built-in AI features and that its core developers do not use LLMs - but community contributors face different rules.
In a Fediverse post, someone who goes by the handle of argv[-1] highlights three LibreOffice commits this year that acknowledge the use of LLM coding assistants. Two of them – Inheritance when setting paragraph style font size to 100% or +0pt and Enable relative font sizes in Calc cell styles – date from April and credit Claude with helping identify the fixes. More recently, September's Add Copy Image button to screenshot dialog acknowledges using GitHub Copilot in VS Code to generate the BitmapTransferable class, while the copyButtonHandler method was written manually with LLM/code-completion assistance.
This is hardly a fatal flaw – after all, it's getting hard to find any major FOSS project with absolutely no LLM-generated code in it these days. However, The Document Foundation says that the leading FOSS office suite is AI-free. As we noted when it released version 26.8 in August, we interpret this statement as a jab at its former development partner Collabora. Back in June, we noted that increased AI integration was a headline feature in Collabora CODE 26.04.
