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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"

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

#161

Post by digitaltrees »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #57
throwaway2037 wrote: post #34

Earlier 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.

I have had the same experience and feel pressured to adopt it. I had one former colleague say “you really have to stop looking at code” almost incredulous that I was uncertain about whether we should let models write really bad code and architecture that never would have been allowed in the before times. I will say when I let the agents go autonomous I often find I spend more time refactoring than if I had moved slower and forced them to write good code and follow project architecture patterns.

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

#162

Post by vatsachak »

glhaynes wrote: post #136
jimmaswell wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah experimentation is probably the best use case of LLMs

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

#163

Post by 0xpgm »

swingandamiss wrote: post #131

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.

Experts don't want to 'gatekeep'. Experts have been producing FOSS for the benefits of everyone, and liberally answering questions on mailing lists, stack overflow etc for free.

Experts have been badly bitten by poorly written and badly architected software, lost their hairs trying to figure out bugs and poor design.

They recognize the first version of a piece of software is only a miniscule percentage of the work and majority of effort goes into maintenaning it for its lifetime.

They are viscerally horrified at a thousands of LoC codebase generated at the speed of GPU inference they are to be responsible for.

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

#164

Post by Aurornis »

dguest wrote: post #58
oooyay wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

Yes. There are pockets of hardline anti-LLM policies for various reasons.

SourceHut bans LLM generated code from their platform https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49461724

The Asahi Linux project bans LLMs. Unfortunate as LLM reverse engineering and driver writing would bring Linux to more Mac models much faster.

The Zig project rejects LLM based contributions.

Some of these policies were introduced when LLMs were really bad at writing code and haven’t been revisited. Some groups don’t care about the quality and object on moral or copyright grounds.

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

#165

Post by antirez »

frabcus wrote: post #111
edward wrote: post #33

Joey Hess is unimpressed. See https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Debian_and_the_sirens/

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…

That's perfectly wrong. Since strong coding AI, people venture into huge rewrites and other big changes that automatically make sense but otherwise would not.

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

#166

Post by ActionHank »

chuckadams wrote: post #6

New 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.

We have the same policy at work.

Problem is, that you realise very quickly the asymmetry of responsibility and effort. There is far more to review from people who do not care enough to even look at what the agent pooped out.

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

#167

Post by bodge5000 »

collingreen wrote: post #137
sisyphus15 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't want to speak for them, but perhaps this is a very real consequence of the "use ai or get left behind" talking point. Maybe they were effectively scared into it, and now are too far gone. They seem like a very reasonable person if they're admitting to being over reliant on LLMs, so I don't mean this as an insult

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

#168

Post by matheusmoreira »

dguest wrote: post #58
oooyay wrote: post #23

Earlier 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…

Many.

https://lobste.rs/s/29pm2f/llm_generated_submissions_should_...

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2026-08-27-tos-changes-and-llms/

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#strict-no-llm-no-ai-pol...

https://lwn.net/Articles/1086041/

https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/

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

#169

Post by GPerson »

ls612 wrote: post #154
jayofdoom wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 auto…

[flagged]

Good. I want open source projects which serve infrastructure to be gate kept so that only responsible people are involved. Responsible people can use AI too. Get all of those people on board, and keep out irresponsible people!

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

#170

Post by digitaltrees »

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,

Juniors are only in trouble if us seniors stop hiring, training and mentoring. Don’t.

We need to continue the tradition of elevating humans through mentoring or we won’t have a future scaffolding for work to be done.

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