I’ll preface this by saying I’m not an AI buff. I use it (unpaid) mostly for a search aid or assistance with setting up services in my homeserver (new to homelabbing) when I get stuck, as I don’t have an unlimited amount of time to devote to it due to life obligations.
My question is: Do you feel it is ethical and/or moral to use AI to develop FOSS?
I’m genuinely torn on this issue. Part of me feels it’s counterintuitive, yet the another part of me knows the probability of it going away are slim to none and using it to develop FOSS is a way to “use it against itself”, for lack of a better term.
This is my first post on Lemmy. I’m asking to please keep it cordial. I’m not looking for an elitist lecture. I genuinely want to know the community’s thoughts.
P.S. I’ve toyed with local models, but I don’t have the hardware to make them remotely useful. I’m still learning and tweaking to see what can be achieved on limited hardware.


Qwen3:14B works fine on my 4060 Ti 16GB.
It’s not good at debugging and what I would consider, “figuring complicated things out” but it’s perfectly capable of working on/creating several functions at a time or generating a medium-length Python module. Which is how I prefer to write code (with AI) anyway (little bit at a time; don’t let it be your architect!).
My buddy has a 5090 and runs Qwen3:27B. With that much VRAM it can handle a LOT more context and it’s apparently all he needs now. He stopped paying Anthropic shortly after that model came out.
Still, 7500 MAD (USD 760) is not cheap at all, and you still need the rest of the computer to put it in. So maybe 1400 USD as still not able to do complicated stuff.
And the 5090? our of question: https://www.jawa.gg/product/139531/msi-geforce-rtx-5090-32g-ventus-3x-oc