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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"

#181
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the opposite side or the noteable spectrum, look up "Steve Yegge wants you to stop looking at your code." He said it in a video interview, though plenty of summaries online of exact wording and ideas. Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?

Extremes on both sides. I'd wager were moving in Yegge's direction though, like it or not. > Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it? If you have a much test coverage as SQLite, I'd be tempted to trust it, and I think that's where we are headed. Someone still needs to define these guardrails though, so IMO the developers job is just mutating into something else, but i…

For me, it’s not a question of whether I like it, nor where we might move in the future, but purely what is proven currently. In my experience, as in my evals, any model, including notably Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol can and indeed do produce code that does not consider many edge cases, can be hard to maintain (especially Sol though it’s output has become markedly better with recent changes to Codex) and sometimes introduce bugs with visibly apparent issues. Existing test coverage doesn’t necessarily prevent such issues when changes or additions are made. The idea that models tend to gravitate towards the house style without major CI based restrictions also has not born fruit in my book. More, I have found even the frontier models amazing at utterly deviating from established standards and tests, what lint, tc and co don’t catch the model will take to introduce code that feels and reads like it does not fits with the rest.

Models also still can have major task adherence issues, so even a perfectly well scoped, well considered prompt that covers all situations and coverage can, in many scenarios lead to output users may not expect or notice without reading code. Seen it a lot, just lost some blood and tears to a very straight front end implementation task that I ended up applying manually cause both Sol and Fable struggle to copy a few dozen HTML/JS/CSS snippets properly into a slightly obscure codebase, despite the reference being fully featured and even using the same token scheme, etc…

We also see such issues in what labs deliver in their own software products. We are not at the stage where a human shouldn’t sign off on code that they have tested and understood. A hypothetical future, I don’t really care for, we’d notice when labs stop shipping easily apparent bugs, though even then, I’d still feel there is a while in between that and not needing to assess the output anymore.

There is, in my mind, no need for this “narrative shifting”, overtone window (don’t get me started on the idea of applying that to what should be a purely technical discussion), convince the unbelievers nonesense that some spend their time on. If models could provide code that didn’t necessitate review, there’d be no one needing to argue that case. If and when they can, we’ll know it, but not because of those espousing this currently.

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

#182
post #59

Earlier 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.

A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who don't care about the field itself. For those people, they care as little as they can get away with and still be paid big money, and if LLM's allow them to do that at the cost of quality, they absolutely will.

I do think LLM's are making some genuine programmers less intelligent, but I think this type of person makes up a decent portion of its users too

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

#183

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.

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.

[dead]

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

#184
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

    skynet -v moo

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my layman understanding, the ownership of LLM generated code isn’t yet clarified. It could be that the person who prompted owns it, but it could also be nobody owns it, and we don’t yet have a legal ruling to rely upon, no?

To a company ownership is irrelevant. What is relevant is whether it contains trade secrets and that is often only proven if an employee worked at their company before

We are talking about Debian, a free software that cares a lot about the licensing of its packages. The licensing and authorship is an essential element of the project

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

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the opposite side or the noteable spectrum, look up "Steve Yegge wants you to stop looking at your code." He said it in a video interview, though plenty of summaries online of exact wording and ideas. Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it?

> Though it's being argued that you could still be responsible for it without looking at it? Works for ToS and software and media licenses. Allegedly.

HA! Touché.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's because you are used to it. I am old enough to have been there during the rise of things like intellisense and language servers, people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. I'm sure for IDEs themselves there were similar arguments and it goes all the way back to Socrates' warning against writing. These arguments always end with "but…

Go back to 2007 on this blog archive. It's incredible to read

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/cppblog/author/vcblog/

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

#190
post #154

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]

Most people who wrote software before AI didn’t contribute to projects like Debian because it takes a certain passion and commitment. Just being able to write code is not the bar for entrance here.
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