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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"

#251

Post by ipaddr »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #206
qsera wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

No one takes a 12 year old Reddit account seriously either. It's not a platform you can take anyone seriously. The biggest trolls have 12 year old accounts.

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

#253

Post by api »

jermaustin1 wrote: post #243
goda90 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My employer has this policy. We also have a strong code review process. But it all crumbles in the face of developers burning out as management thinks we can move way faster and being overloaded with code that had little thought put into it.

Opposite policy at one of my clients (kind of). I am responsible for the code that upper management's Claude produces. Some Mondays, I will start work with a half dozen emails with attachments of Claude generated code for something I don't even know what the point is, with the task of "integrate this and make sure it works." without any context to go along with it, so I have to read the code, usually hundreds of line…

That’s just stupid.

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

#254

Post by bsian »

olalonde wrote: post #71
baggy_trough wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we use this coding tool amidst the general rising tide of fascism?? /s

I've seen people claim that using Claude Code makes you racist. https://bsky.app/profile/boxobark.ing/post/3mtr7j3tpok26

It used to be the case that you would see someone posting under an avatar like that and you would dismiss their argument right away without even reading it.

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

#255

Post by Keyframe »

moring wrote: post #225
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,…

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).…

you know EXACTLY what would happen in such a system.

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

#256

Post by fantasizr »

swingandamiss wrote: post #131

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.

it's not gatekeeping when people are submitting PRs they don't understand and make it someone else's problem.

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

#258

Post by ssl-3 »

winrid wrote: post #59
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #57

Earlier 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.

They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.

I'm not dumb. I care a great deal and I always have. I've just never been good at programming.

When I recently found a small bug in how NTP is implemented in Home Assistant OS that was affecting my use of it, I thought about just reporting that bug.

But I set the bot forth to work on corrective measures, instead.

The first proposed fixes were overbearing and awful. Maybe they'd have worked but it hurt my soul to look at them. I couldn't accept them -- not for my system at home nor for anyone else's.

Through a laborious process (that many here could have skipped entirely), I eventually got what I feel is a cromulent fix down to a few lines of changes in an init script.

I didn't write it. All I did was direct (and sometimes brow-beat) the bot, rejecting things over and over while optimizing at a high level until it produced an acceptable result.

I now have a fix that is tidy-enough that it can be applied to running systems. It is easy to understand what it does, and why it does it -- even for me. Perhaps I should submit a PR...

> They just don't care. They didn't before either.

...but this kind of blanket mentality really puts a damper on my willingness to do so.

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

#259

Post by b112 »

lrvick wrote: post #196
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #57

Earlier 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.

> 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.

No. Nada. Wrong.

With compilers, you still had to think in depth about the code, write it, develop and maintain muscle memory, understand what you were doing.

Many are not doing any of that, and coding is a skill you need to constantly practice.

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

#260

Post by acheron »

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]

Gatekeeping is good, actually. Not keeping your gate is how your town gets overrun by Mongols.
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