AI vs Human in Software Development

Background: The Problem

After the New Year, I switched from GNOME (Fedora Workstation) to KDE and discovered that maliit-keyboard (the virtual keyboard/on-screen keyboard) was crashing repeatedly. The crashes occurred even without using a touchscreen, and each crash generated a report in ABRT (Fedora's problem reporting system), flooding my notifications with crash reports.

Uninstalling wasn't an option — it would remove SDDM and other important KDE packages along with it.

Searching through Red Hat/Fedora's bugzilla, I found many existing reports linking to GitHub issue #256, #262, and #190, but no responses from the maliit-keyboard maintainers. The version used by Fedora (2.3.1) was released in 2022, and the latest GitHub commit was from 2024 (current time at writing: 2026). This classifies as abandonware.

Note: KDE plans to replace maliit-keyboard with plasma-keyboard, but the timeline is uncertain.

My AI-Assisted Bug Fix Process

I used AI to help fix the bug with the following workflow:

1. AI analyzes the existing code
2. AI summarizes its understanding
3. I verify or correct that understanding
4. I define the requirements or describe the bug
5. AI implements the solution
6. Another AI (Gemini) reviews the changes (iterated several times)
7. I make the final decision

This is not "Vibe Coding" — this is a rigorous, verified process where I remain in control at every step.

Technical Details

Root Cause: maliit-keyboard received massive amounts of surrounding_text without proper protection, causing buffer overflow and subsequently segmentation fault.

Solution: Implemented best practice by limiting data processing to 1 MB (more than sufficient for plain text).

Example of The Code Changes

Text Header Modification (src/lib/models/text.h)

diff --git a/src/lib/models/text.h b/src/lib/models/text.h
index 635c98b7..85a000c6 100644
--- a/src/lib/models/text.h
+++ b/src/lib/models/text.h
@@ -35,6 +35,8 @@
 #include <QtCore>

 namespace MaliitKeyboard {
+constexpr int MAX_SURROUNDING_TEXT_LENGTH = 1024 * 1024; // 1MB in characters
+
 namespace Model {

 class Text

InputMethod Protection (src/plugin/inputmethod.cpp)

diff --git a/src/plugin/inputmethod.cpp b/src/plugin/inputmethod.cpp
index 23cacca6..cb0ac6c6 100644
--- a/src/plugin/inputmethod.cpp
+++ b/src/plugin/inputmethod.cpp
@@ -453,6 +453,15 @@ void InputMethod::update()
     int position;
     bool ok = d->host->surroundingText(text, position);
     if (ok) {
+        // Validate the surrounding text length to prevent buffer overflows
+        if (text.length() > ::MaliitKeyboard::MAX_SURROUNDING_TEXT_LENGTH) {
+            qWarning() << "Surrounding text too long, truncating from" << text.length() << "to" << ::MaliitKeyboard::MAX_SURROUNDING_TEXT_LENGTH;
+            text = text.left(::MaliitKeyboard::MAX_SURROUNDING_TEXT_LENGTH);
+            // Adjust position if it's beyond the new text length
+            if (position > text.length()) {
+                position = text.length();
+            }
+        }
         d->editor.text()->setSurrounding(text);
         d->editor.text()->setSurroundingOffset(position);

The Pull Request Rejection

After testing the fix for several weeks with zero crashes, I submitted a PR#263 to the upstream repository. The response was:

dobey commented 3 days ago:

Co-authored-by: Qwen-Coder [email protected]

Absolutely not. LLMs have no context and do not understand how anything works and are not welcome here.

dobey closed this 3 days ago

The PR was rejected immediately upon seeing AI assistance, without any code review.

Fork Project: maliit-keyboard-robust

Since upstream rejected the contribution, I:

• Renamed the forked repo to maliit-keyboard-robust
• Fixed additional bugs reported in upstream issues
• Improved buffer overflow protection
• Added unit tests for surrounding_text exceeding 1 MB
• Created a COPR repository for Fedora users

Installation Instructions

$ sudo dnf copr enable cwt/maliit-keyboard-robust
$ sudo dnf install maliit-keyboard-robust --allowerasing

Note: The --allowerasing flag is required because this package replaces the original but provides the same package name in the SPEC file, preventing removal of SDDM and other KDE packages.

COPR Repository: cwt/maliit-keyboard-robust

Conclusion

My Observations:

1. AI-assisted coding is not "Vibe Coding" — This was a rigorous, verified process with human oversight at every step
2. Upstream maintainer bias — The rejection was based solely on AI involvement without reviewing the actual code quality
3. Open Source contribution barriers — Despite working fixes, ideological opposition blocks contributions

My Recommendation:

Fedora users experiencing maliit-keyboard crashes can use the maliit-keyboard-robust COPR repository if they're comfortable with AI-assisted code. The fix has been tested for several weeks with zero crashes.

Final Thought:

The irony here is thick: rejecting code via automatic if-then-else logic upon detecting AI involvement raises the question of who is actually acting like a bot?

Repository

GitHub: cwt/maliit-keyboard-robust