Arias: Human proof for FOSS contributions

Rodrigo Arias Mallo, maintainer of the Dillo web browser, has written ablog postwith a proposal on one way to ensure that a contribution is written bya human and not AI; he suggests asking new contributors to recordtheir programming session using asciinema.

In the same way that LLMs generate patches, they can also generatethe asciinema recordings themselves. Then, the contributors can lie tothe reviewers pretending to have made the edits. Perhaps surprisingly,this is not a easy task for LLMs, at least from my observations. Thecorpus of recordings of developers making mistakes and thinking thewhole process of editing a file is not as large as the corpus of FOSSprograms and patches in which to train an LLM. During my very simpletests I haven't been able to generate an asciinema session thatremotely resembles what I would expect from a human, and even less sofrom a human with a nice editor theme and editing an existing Dillosource file.

The Dillo project is not yet requiring asciinema recordings, but hesaid that he would like to test the theory further. LWN covered asciinema inJanuary 2026.