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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
61–70 of 471 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#62Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
It doesn't apply to everyone, but yes I know people who are over-reliant on LLMs and definitely getting dumber. With devs and non-devs too. I hate seeing this happen.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.
They cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#65I followed the discussion on debian-vote with interest. I'm glad that the hysterical objections lost, as they seemed quasi-religiously motivated.
> ... hysterical ... quasi-religiously ... I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case that when my fellow citizens begin to act insane - might it be the result of foreign propaganda.
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Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#66progress of a kind
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#67What does "Responsible" even mean... This will turn to shit because laziness will take over and comprehension will fall as a consequence of that. Junior will "contribute" and the seniors will eventually become too lazy to care. What's next... vibecoding airline ADA code. Save me lord jesus christ.
As an example for "responsible LLM use" (albeit not necessarily debian-related).
While doomscrolling HN right now, I have an agent crunching away at figuring out how to build a flashable TWRP ZIP file, because I could not care less about such android specifics.
Such use-cases would be blanket banned by some of the harsher options, forcing people to do stuff they have no interest in doing, for reasons that are at best well-meaning.
Which, in something volunteer-driven, is not necessarily a good idea, because if you're not allowed to do the work in the way you'd like to, you might just stop doing it altogether.
That said, if your work ends up shit, you still shall get shat on. Simple as that.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#68New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
This is why AI agent attributions in commits is silly (it’s really just a stealth ad for the tool)
Had someone at $DAYJOB just shrug and say Claude messed up when I pointed out a sql injection in the code in their PR.
It became explicit policy at the company after that moment that blaming the AI is not an excuse for shoddy work.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#69New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
This is the way it should've always been. I don't care what tool you use, but you'd better be ready to stand by and explain the results if necessary.
These are unprecedented times, I think every single company on the planet is figuring our what AI means to them.
I think the dust has kind of settled though for engineering teams on: You must use AI for your work, and you must stand by your work.
The meat between these two mandates are still being fleshed out.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.
I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadershi…
I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we have to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.