Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't like AI, but ultimately, AI will win out, it's just too good.
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
131–140 of 482 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#132On a similar note, is there any distro that explicitly has banned usage of generative AI for their project? Asking for a friend.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#133Earlier 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.
There’s certainly an analogue to package managers, which made it easy to pick a random package rather than writing the code.
We survived. Some upsides, some downsides, life continues.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#134Earlier 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?
Nothing. And that's the problem -- the issue isn't "should a contributor be able to use AI" it's quickly becoming "is this entire contributor an AI agent". Every actual-human who gets a bad first experience hurts the project. The contributors having to be suspicious of new people hurts the project. The whole thing just sucks, and I don't know how to fix it.
I use claude-code, but the AI ecosystem and some of the autonomous tooling coming out of it -- which some people "helpfully" use irresponsibly and point at OSS projects they aren't personally invested in -- enables a LARGE amount of abusive behavior towards open source projects. This is even before we get into how many infrastructural resources crawlers eat up.
Me, and most other OSS contributors, signed up to be a mentor, to create software, to work together ... not to be the equivalent of a reddit moderator banning AI agents left and right.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://bsky.app/profile/boxobark.ing/post/3mtr7j3tpok26
Some may express societal challenges in ways that inappropriately and wrongly infer intentionality. We can acknowledge their point while strongly disagreeing with their characterization.
There are significant societal impacts of this AI buildout. Some are concerned externalities weigh more heavily on the poor and marginalized. I think state wide data center holds are part of this civil discourse.
I'd prefer we have more conservative pollution standards along with a reasonable tax on AI use that helps mitigate externalities. That's hard. Reasonable people can have fierce disagreements on what market interventions are indicated, and how extensive they should be.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
His reasoning is quite fresh and interesting: > What LLMs in Debian development will do, I fear, is eliminate any incentive to scrap boilerplate or reform policies that require a lot of other senseless human effort. If I had had access to LLMs 30 years ago, I might have just had them generate the rules files, replate with complexity. So they will make Debian even more firmly what it is, and ever less likely to explor…
I use LLM's to make massive structural changes I never would have done by hand all the time. It's intractably tedious for me but easy for an LLM.
Yes, I experiment much more. It's easier to justify, and, perhaps more importantly, just WAY psychologically easier to throw away a 20 minute experiment that your robot wrote for you than the same when it took you a week of tedious manual coding.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.
Completely wrong generalization. I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition. I used to care, a lot. And I still do.
Tell us more about how you caring a lot matches up with this self diagnosis.
Are you prioritizing other things? Do you think losing your cognition and programming skills won't have a negative effect on your project?
Those seem bad but maybe they fit into a bigger picture for you?
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#138Good. AI is a game changer. It's like having an expert sitting next to you at all times. It's understandable why all these experts who want to gatekeep don't like AI, but ultimately, AI will win out, it's just too good.
The issue with AI is not its obvious value, it's our dependence on it. I worry what will happen to me when I am cut off for some reason.
Local models are going to be really important and hopefully computing costs don't make it too prohibitive.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,
With AI people aren't reading, writing, or thinking about the code. I would not say something that helps me remember a function name is comparible.
I’m genuinely curious why it matters to make abstract moral judgments about the differences between remembering function names and deep understanding of the syntax used in a function.
Why don’t we just care about results? Code quality, performance, clarity are all measurable. Why bother with philosophical positions on these?