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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"

#211

Post by chuckadams »

static_motion wrote: post #74
LoganDark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadershi…

I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense consideri…

Raymond Chen is still there. Hell, Dave Cutler is still there.

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

#212

Post by hypfer »

lokar wrote: post #201
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.

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,…

Nah, that was already blown up way before LLMs existed.

Foss wasn't exactly not miserable before 2022. The dysfunction just got amplified so that we cannot fix it anymore by just throwing more human resources at the problem.

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

#213

Post by hypfer »

digitaltrees wrote: post #150
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…

What is a good project for a human to get human mentorship? Asking for a friend :)

Usually, mentorship is a quite well paid service.

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

#214

Post by jaggederest »

nixpulvis wrote: post #208
jaggederest wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh, fair enough, my goal was just to preserve "if Anthropic and OpenAI are having a bad day, and the local model on my laptop is too dumb to pour water out of a pot with the instructions on the bottom, how do I fix a bug", I accepted a long time ago that my productivity is going to be 0.1x if I have to go back.

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

#215

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

That's what delegation looks like, but it needs a better process.

They could be committing plan files alongside any nontrivial change to application code, and the plan file can have everything you'd care about, like the invariants it held to and why, the rejected ideas and why, the acceptable risks and why, etc.

This is solved by better usage of LLMs, not less.

The divide to me isn't engineering skill vs those who lost it, it's people who care vs. those who don't care. It's a higher level thing now that we're working at a higher level (delegation).

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

#216

Post by tremon »

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?

What part of [0] or [1] makes you think that it is easy to have multiple accounts?

[0] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMaintainer#Becoming_a_Debian_M...

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianDeveloper/JoinTheProject/NewMe...

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

#217

Post by kikoreis »

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?

Well. This is Debian, known for how strict they are about vetting developers. I just remembered Sladen refusing to key sign because my passport circa 2005 didn't have a machine readable slug in it.

https://www.debian.org/devel/join/newmaint

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

#218

Post by KennyBlanken »

Aurornis wrote: post #164
dguest wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Some groups don’t care about the quality and object on moral or copyright grounds.

Precisely why Debian Project's decision is both baffling and infuriating.

I hope Debian forks over this. They have severely lost their way.

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

#219

Post by bluefirebrand »

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]

> ngl this is just gatekeeping

Gatekeeping serves a useful purpose in any functioning organization of all scales, from a community center to a country, from an open source project to a Fortune 500.

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

#220

Post by setopt »

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]

The issue at hand isn’t people using AI to make some app that they and their mom will use. That’s awesome.

It’s people who insist that potentially millions of other people should be affected by their vibe-coded stuff too, by upstreaming it into Debian.

I vibe coded some simple things for the family myself, but I don’t expect or require anyone else to want or use it.

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