Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

lwn.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 482 posts

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#91

Post by raverbashing »

themgt wrote: post #26

August 29th, 2026. Debian votes to allow responsible use of generative AI. Human decisions are removed from strategic apt packaging. Debian Sid is ported to GNU Hurd by a "free as in speech" swarm. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

It's ok, the most dangerous thing a Debian AI would do is want to rewrite itself in M4 and enter an infinite recursion on non-binding votes on allowing votes of whether to use long flags on aptitude

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#92

Post by Sharlin »

fidotron wrote: post #80
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

You find it scary that people enjoy what they do? Simply caring about the end result is often not wise, ethical, or sustainable, and the quality thereof is dubious in any case, especially when you consider that the end result of developing software is never just the artifact.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#93

Post by [deleted] »

winrid wrote: post #59
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #57

Earlier 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.

[deleted]

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#96

Post by NietTim »

This seems like a very sane take. At no point during my career up until now would submitting code to production that you didn't understand be acceptable. Over the past months/year, a lot of the discourse around AI-written code I've read comes down to responsibility, and IMO for that we've had a solution since way before this AI boom: as a developer, you are responsible for the code you put into production. This really isn't/shouldn't a wild concept.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#97

Post by cindyllm »

qarl2 wrote: post #20
baggy_trough wrote: post #4

I 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.

[dead]

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#98

Post by kfksjcjsidjd »

rvz wrote: post #29

Now you have seen both cases where a majority vote was involved to allow AI or not, vs a single core beloved dictator for life (BDFL) forces a ban without a vote to allow / disallow AI. This is democracy in action. A fair and square vote and look at how well it works with no core BDFL to force in their opinions.

Democracy is the dictatorship of the majority. And if you naively assume that the majority always knows best, then I suggest you pick up a few history books.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#99

Post by cdata »

qsera wrote: post #82
hliyan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.

What stops them from submitting PRs from another account?

I can't speak for all, but many mature open source communities have explicit or ad-hoc reputation schemes that are used to triage contributions. A fresh account means starting over with zero reputation, which in turn means your contributions wait at the back of the line.

Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

#100

Post by cassianoleal »

vlyan wrote: post #76
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #57

Earlier 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.

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,

It's really not.

Number and order of arguments, long names, etc. are just bureaucracy. Knowing them doesn't mean you understand the codebase any better than if you rely on the IDE for it.

It's a bit like remembering the exact date an historical event happened vs. knowing at which point in history it did, what other events relate to it, etc. Neither makes you better or worse at knowing and understanding the history of the event.

Post reply on HN