Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI" • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by lokar » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:13 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #43

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.

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.

To me, that touches on the central issue. I think most people support the “I don’t care about the tool, only the outcome “

But, we have long had a stable social system for collaboration, and in particular dealing with low quality contributions. Mostly (or at least ideally) it involves taking some time to look at the contribution and provide some feedback. The time invested is not worth it on a single exchange basis, but it’s a repeat game, so you are investing in the future.

LLMs, and people willing to just spam crap they don’t really understand blows that all up.

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

#202

Post by jaggederest » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

swingandamiss wrote: post #146

nixpulvis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.

Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc)

Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation? No shot. It's nicer for people, artisanal hand crafted, but... there's a reason I use AI.

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

#203

Post by Calazon » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:14 PM UTC

GZGavinZhao wrote: post #110

Related: 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 is great. There's a big difference between levels 2-4 (where I generally operate) and levels 7-8 (where I see a lot of others operate), and I like how this level system makes that explicit.

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

#204

Post by nixpulvis » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:15 PM UTC

timcobb wrote: post #199

nixpulvis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Big difference though, once you know how to read and write, nobody can take that away from you.

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

#205

Post by ludocode » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:16 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #80

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was an increasingly scary mass of people in the industry that viewed the coding as a sort of therapeutic exercise, and would become quite obsessive about it. For those people LLMs are anathema because they take away what was the rewarding part of the job. If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how t…

> If you care primarily about the quality of the end result, as opposed to being attached to a particular process of achieving it, then you're happy about how things have gone.

We must be living on different planets, because from everything I can see, software quality is at a historic low.

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

#206

Post by 2Gkashmiri » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

qsera wrote: post #82

hliyan wrote: post #43

Earlier 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?

In anonymous systems, where we don't use real names, your "handle" has an "age". That becomes your most prized possession.

I have a reddit account thats over 12 years old. I have left the posts/comments open. That means, my "post history" becomes a way to advertise my skills. I can reference comments from a year ago or 6 months ago about a certain topic to show how I handled something. That does have an effect on people.

As opposed to a random 1 day old account. No one takes them seriously, I guess the same is here as well

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

#207

Post by new12 » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

How rigorous is your code review process when using agentic tools? Do you mandate that folks responsible for the functionality should be fully aware of the code they are shipping or just that it must be rigorously tested?

Is there an open source, community maintained coding policy to feed to agents?

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

#208

Post by nixpulvis » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

jaggederest wrote: post #202

swingandamiss wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard agree. I've felt it already during outages or when I was traveling and didn't have internet on a flight, I couldn't function at the same level. I've been writing code for over 25 years, worked at the top big tech companies (still do) and it's remarkable how quickly I became dependent on AI.

Take a week or two off a quarter to do it manually. I did it a couple weeks ago and it took about a day or two to get back into the swing of it and knock the rust off, no pun since it was TS, YMMV, but I didn't find that it was that difficult. Even in languages I don't really write routinely, as long as you use the deterministic tools (lsp, linter, etc) Now, is my code better than the AI's equivalent implementation?…

It's not even that I'm slower at manual coding anymore, though I very well could be, it's that my expectation of my own progress has shifted. I'll be frustrated to only get a fraction of what I could have done.

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

#209

Post by aleph_minus_one » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:17 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #103

Sharlin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You find it scary that people enjoy what they do? Simply caring about the end result is often not wise, ethical, or sustainable, and the quality thereof is dubious in any case, especially when you consider that the end result of developing software is never just the artifact.

Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy. And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site. This is quite distinct from enjoyment.

> Treating coding as the therapeutic reward for other things (typically tolerating bureaucracy) and then indulging obsessions about it absolutely is unhealthy.

> And I've seen exactly this across multiple large and small organizations in multiple countries, in addition to being all over here and the red site.

I know that experience, but I do have a different opinion on this:

Many such people studied computer science (a similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines) because they love coding.

Unluckily, the job that they got does involve barely any clever coding, but rather

- tolerating and gluing together shitty code pieces that someone else wrote

- tolerating red tape

So, such people simply do in their free time what they love. And to come back to my point "similar point holds for mathematics, physics and some engineering disciplines": these people try to use their little free time to prove some novel theorems or put their shed full of machines like 3D printers, CNC mills, CNC lathes, laser cutters, self-built pick-and-place machines, ... to work on their own beloved engineering projects.

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

#210

Post by lrvick » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 4:18 PM UTC

digitaltrees wrote: post #170

vlyan wrote: post #76

Earlier 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,

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.

I spend a ton of time mentoring Jrs in FOSS communities, but I confess as a startup founder myself I could simply not justify hiring anyone but self-directed seniors until we are profitable enough to set some money on fire for what would effectively be just a long term investment in creating a few new Srs. But Jr hiring will never again be what it was unless it gets subsidized somehow as partial charity.