Earlier quoted context omitted.
But it's an """ethical""" argument against it.
How can we use this coding tool amidst the general rising tide of fascism?? /s
I've seen people claim that using Claude Code makes you racist.
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
71–80 of 468 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#72Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#73Earlier 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.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.
Make that some/a lot, but not all.
There is a clear bifurcation. A lot of those that never cared really don't care now, but then you get others that can use it to crank that much harder than ever before.
If you put the same brain effort in but leverage LLMs you really can be dramatically more productive.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#74Earlier 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 don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions? We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion. [EDIT: I was referring specifically to the idea that you have to stand by the code that you write. Is anyone deciding on a policy that says "the AI did it" is a valid…
> Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?
Yes. Very notably: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#76Earlier 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.
IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some of the very limited space in our memory for more important things.
sure, students and juniors shoot themselves in the dick if they let LLMs do everything, but they're fucked anyway so it doesn't matter,
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#77New 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.
> it's still your code I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation. So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
Not a lawyer, but to some degree I think policies like the one Debian came up with can help the argument. You’re not submitting a stream of commits that all have an Authored-By: Claude Code footer and massive yappy commits and comments. The policy essentially forces there to be a degree of human authorship to each commit even if some of the bits came from LLM assistance.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#78What other sensible option was there? This would be the reality either way.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#79New 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.
> blaming the AI is not an excuse..
It kind of is if the company mandates LLM use.
It is sort of sad that now programmers are suddenly expected to be perfect reviewers of code they didn't write.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There was an increasingly scary mass of people in the industry that viewed the coding as a sort of therapeutic exercise, and would become quite obsessive about it. For those people LLMs are anathema because they take away what was the rewarding part of the job.
If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.