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

171–180 of 476 posts

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

#171

Post by vatsachak »

Cantinflas wrote: post #126
frabcus wrote: post #111

Earlier 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…

That's a very narrow view. If anyone could vibe code their printer drivers, maybe free software wouldn't have existed, because it would not have been needed in the first place.

Yeah. We shouldn't have standardized languages either. Everyone was fine with their own regional dialect for hundreds of thousands of years.

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

#172

Post by ButlerianJihad »

rel2thr wrote: post #106
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.

You can just ask Claude why it did something in the code and it will tell you Programmers just moved up a level , not dumber, we are now managers of a team of 'agent' programmers. The deliverable is now a functionality instead of a specific block of code

> You can just ask Claude why it did something

But will Claude give you an authentic rationale and a traceable, verifiable "line of reasoning" for those things? Or will it just construct the next plausible Markov chain built on whatever Reddit thread it ingested at random?

You can ask Claude or any LLM for citations, and it will RAG them out ex post facto. Those actually aren't citations, they're just web searches for related articles, and they don't necessarily support the assertions that you're asking to cite.

I am sure that Claude and the others can produce intermediate logs of their inference and "reasoning" process while they are processing stuff, but can they really go back within the context window and construct an authentic apologia for a specific thing when you ask for it?

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

#173

Post by ebiester »

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]

This isn't talking about bespoke software, though. This is talking about upstreaming contributions to others. This puts a low barrier to create work and a lot more work for unpaid volunteers.

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

#174

Post by phyzix5761 »

sph wrote: post #132

On a similar note, is there any distro that explicitly has banned usage of generative AI for their project? Asking for a friend.

The problem is you can't prove if AI was used or not so Debian's response is actually the most logical one. If anyone uses AI they're still responsible for what they submit.

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

#175

Post by sheepscreek »

Better heads prevail - this is a good start and the right decision. The agent/bot is controlled by some entity, ergo that entity is responsible for everything it does.

I relate that to how a Physician's Assistant gets their authority to treat patients from the Doctor they work under. The Doctor's credentials are on the line if their PA screws up.

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

#176

Post by CuriouslyC »

ghostDancer wrote: post #49
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.

There are several occurrences in history that the democratic majority has chosen the "wrong" person/way/thing. Democracy is considered the best system but it's not perfect.

Democracy works great among unbiased rational actors who share information. A utilitarian quorum is roughly the loss minimizing decision. The problem is we have biased irrational actors sharing misinformation. The representative system we have is even worse, the indirection between public quorum and decision makers creates a fertile bed for corruption and negative decision bias.

Maybe someday we'll have direct democracy paired with voting certification for specific issues.

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

#177

Post by dgellow »

kfksjcjsidjd wrote: post #98
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.

Democracy is representation of the people, you can have a democratic system that uses something else than majority voting

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

#179

Post by throwaway613746 »

qsera wrote: post #79
throwatdem12311 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> programmers are suddenly expected to be perfect reviewers of code they didn't write

What? The reviewer (me) caught the injection in the code I didn't write.

Running /code-review and /security-review on your own code before submission is bare minimum, not perfection.

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

#180

Post by ChocolateGod »

olalonde wrote: post #71
baggy_trough wrote: post #27

Earlier 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

Apparently LLMs are fascist technology according to one (now former) Debian developer and using it is supporting fascism.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HQ5MeeaXUAAIMLX?format=jpg&name=...

Somewhat insulting to those that actually lived (or live) under fascism.

Post reply on HN