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

221–230 of 476 posts

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

#221

Post by DaSHacka »

nixpulvis wrote: post #204
timcobb wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nobody can take local models away from you, either

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

#222

Post by teeray »

ActionHank wrote: post #166
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.

We have the same policy at work. Problem is, that you realise very quickly the asymmetry of responsibility and effort. There is far more to review from people who do not care enough to even look at what the agent pooped out.

I always find the “personal responsibility” take hilarious against at-will employment and the usual course of turnover. What is your recourse when you uncover a liar? You can page the responsible party at 3am when their vibe-coded slop breaks prod, and you can fire them when they can’t fix it. Prod is still broken. You still don’t understand the code. At the end of the day, once you hit the merge button, the team is responsible for the code no matter what. You should treat the original author’s presence as a courtesy.

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

#224

Post by kikoreis »

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 :)

Debian itself is actually great: https://mentors.debian.net/sponsors/

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

#225

Post by moring »

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,…

I'm not convinced it blows up. It might also end up placing a larger burden on contributors, and especially first-time contributors, to provide concise, high-quality documentation that justifies their contribution.

I'm thinking of something like: Explain, in at most 300 characters, why we should merge your change, or at least why we should invest the time to read a longer explanation (somethings things ARE complex). If you don't do that, or those 300 characters aren't convincing, or have nothing to do with your change or the longer explanation, then you get a canned response so the maintainers waste minimal time.

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

#226

Post by surajrmal »

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 a cultural thing. Push back on it and don't make it acceptable behavior. I would argue most people generally are terrible at code review and do this same behavior with their peers as well, but at least their peers are capable of owning some level of responsibility, whereas the LLM is not.

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

#227

Post by ChickeNES »

antirez wrote: post #165
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 perfectly wrong. Since strong coding AI, people venture into huge rewrites and other big changes that automatically make sense but otherwise would not.

Yeah it's a bizarre claim. Even better, I've literally taken some of the crappy experimental projects from the pre-Opus 4.6 era, and turned them into real software as models have become smarter.

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

#228

Post by kikoreis »

jayofdoom wrote: post #134
qsera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops them from submitting PRs from another account?

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…

"Nothing" is not accurate in the context of Debian as per comments above; it's not like Github in that sense.

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

#229

Post by lokar »

hypfer wrote: post #212
lokar wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I tried to nod a bit to the inconsistency. Some projects clearly lost patience with imperfect contributions long ago. But many were still pretty supportive.

This dynamic also plays out in many companies. I see a lot of posts from mid to sr engineers frustrated with plummeting code quality and unsure how to manage the reviews. They are increasingly pulling away from the idea that they should mentor people to do better.

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

#230

Post by smoe »

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]

I don't care if a project uses AI or not, but I absolutely do care that they are firmly gatekept in alignment with their vision and team dynamics. Then I can choose projects whose gatekeeping policies I agree with.

There is never not an alternative to something, and I can always have my AI botch together my own version if I think this is going to get me better results.

Post reply on HN