Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
WC Will Cooke Will Cooke An engineer who spent years as Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, leading the team behind the Ubuntu desktop experience, and now works on...

“They don't do things like, is this a virus? Is this malware? But you do have to put a certain level of effort in. But of course, that level of effort basically goes to zero with AI anyway. But no, I don't think that there is a formal review process… I think, yeah, it is a free-for-all.”

Late Night Linux · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“They don't do things like, is this a virus? Is this malware? But you do have to put a certain level of effort in. But of course, that level of effort basically goes to zero with AI anyway. But no, I don't think that there is a formal review process… I think, yeah, it is a free-for-all.” — Will Cooke, Late Night Linux

Context

The hosts were discussing HACS, the third-party add-on store now folded into Home Assistant as an official marketplace, and asked whether anything is curated. Will says the only gate is a pull request and automated checks, and that AI has removed even the effort barrier.

Transcript

Late Night Linux Around 06:46 into the episode
Speaker 1

…time you go into this marketplace, you get this pop-up that says everything in the marketplace is made and published by the community. And then serious risks are involved. And it tells you that we're not responsible, basically. So that would put me off, I think. It feels a bit like the AUR to me.

Speaker 2

Yeah. I was literally about to ask, is it like the AUR? Or is it more curated in any sense?

Will Cooke

I don't believe there is any curation. Well, no, there is, because you have to put a pull request up and you have to run certain automation, certain actions on your repositories that do a whole bunch of tests, but they don't do things like, is this a virus? Is this malware? But you do have to put a certain level of effort in. But of course, that level of effort basically goes to zero with AI anyway. But no, I don't think that there is a formal review process. You can report things as being dodgy, so I'm sure that they can be removed if enough people report them. But I think, yeah, it is a free-for-all.

Speaker 2

Okay, but there is a system that possibly you could have trusted reviewers who could kill something if somebody reports it, maybe.

Will Cooke

I don't know if they could reach into your home assistant and remove it. I doubt that very much, but maybe. I think an upshot of moving this to an official add-on for Home Assistant is that features like this perhaps be Become feasible and even desirable in the not too distant future.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it'd be nice to have a wait, this thing we found out is dodgy, and then mark it as, you know, locked or sandboxed on your remote system if you didn't realize.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Late Night Linux