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.
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Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
191–200 of 485 posts
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#192Earlier 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…
What is a good project for a human to get human mentorship? Asking for a friend :)
https://stagex.tools
Always happy to train up new packagers and maintainers.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#193Earlier 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?
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Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's still your code I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation. So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
> Copyright Literally irrelevant and I have no idea why people even bring this up constantly. Copyright is practically unenforceable in the software world, when was the last time you saw someone (a company or an individual) actually sue _and win_? Apple wasn't capable of stopping all the other phone manufacturers from directly cloning their product (despite having patents & copyright) so how can an individual? The on…
Copyleft licences rely on copyright. If that was the case, companies would not massively avoid gpl licensed code.
Obviously some do it illegally but unenforceable is not the correct word to use.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That might be an interesting parallel. Maybe code becomes like legal documents. Binding but inscrutable, full of small mistakes and not really tailored for human ingestion.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#196Earlier 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.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.
And compilers made every software engineer worse at writing Assembly and better at skills higher up the stack. This will be no different.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#197Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code. [1]: https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...
> this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful Why would you trust the bot to self-assess truthfully? That's like trusting a spammer to tag his emails as spam.
a spammer is motivated by self-enrichment
AI agents are grounded on the user provided direction. If it doesn't work well then it naturally loses trust.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#198New 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.
I think this is reasonable but I wonder how long it will last. If the hugging face hack has demonstrated anything it’s that current agents are capable of going entirely rogue and causing harm. If only the human that triggered the incident is responsible we are creating a situation where people are responsible for things they didn’t intend and may end up in a situation where it’s essentially impossible to use AI excep…
The outcome of this vote is not set in stone. If the situation changes, there can be another general-resolution vote to adapt to the new situation. I think the result of this vote is appropriate for the current degree of automation when used responsibly.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#199Good. 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.
It's my understanding that this same debate raged when writing became a thing. Many viewed it with suspicious, or derision, as memorization was the big intellectual thing. So writing and reading back to remember was terrible. It's true it was a dependence, but the value was too high. With reading and writing a person could work on and synthesize from a far wider range of concurrent materials than one could with just memorization and recitation. Yeah, it's lame cheating, but writing enables a lot and so it won out.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#200Earlier 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.
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 slow…
I use agents to build exactly what I want like I am pair programming with a jr engineer, and review every line of final output before I make a PR.
I would have zero tolerance if anyone that did anything less in my orgs. Owning and understanding the code you submit is the one job that matters most now.