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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"

#331

Post by naasking »

icantevenhold wrote: post #317
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.

What does this responsibility mean in practice? Like what are the actual real consequences if it turns out your code is bad or whatever? I assume you get banned from contributing? I couldn’t immediately find any more information on what this all means in practice

If it's consistently bad with no signs of improving, banning makes sense. People made mistakes even before LLMs though, and you'd only ban them if they didn't improve and so were a giant waste of time. I don't see why that wouldn't translate here.

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

#332

Post by catlifeonmars »

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]

“This is just gatekeeping” is simultaneously true and ignoring the problem it’s reacting to.

Also there’s an implicit moral judgement there against gatekeeping.

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

#333

Post by TZubiri »

What are the main workloads of Debian?

It's worth noting that Debian has no code production, so the LLM debate applies differently than an open source project.

I'd assume the main workload is testing, reviewing code for maliciousness or inefficiencies, adding packages, responding to issues (90% being passing the issue downstream), perhaps setting configurations, and providing some documentation.

I don't quite see LLMs being very helpful for most of these. And for some, like generating documentation, LLMs should be strictly forbidden.

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

#334

Post by inigyou »

Supermancho wrote: post #237
qsera wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before they were not able to spam large PRs

Why not? I'm pretty sure a developer could spam large PRs before and regardless of AI involvement is allowed or not.

How would you generate enough large PRs to count as "spam"? You could add gibberish or delete random lines of code but it was obviously not plausible looking.

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

#335

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

xiphias2 wrote: post #261
gentlerain wrote: post #238

People have to realise that AI is here to stay. Being a full time AI hater is counterproductive. Commercial vendors with full time employees are leveraging for maximum benefits, why would a project depending on volunteers resist? Not forgetting it's shortcomings

While it's true, reviews got much harder as generating code got easier, understanding it hasn't.

Why do you need to understand the code? Ask the LLM, it'll already do a better job than humans can.

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

#337

Post by Zambyte »

fortzi wrote: post #294
rel2thr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just ask Claude why it did something in the code and it will tell you Programmers just moved up a level , not dumber, we are now managers of a team of 'agent' programmers. The deliverable is now a functionality instead of a specific block of code

Claude won’t tell you why it did something. Instead, it will generate a probable explanation. The two are very different

I'm not sure how context is managed between reasoning traces and actual output in Claude / claude code, but if the reasoning trace is in the context of the question for "why did you do that", it can actually answer why it did that.

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

#338

Post by daishi55 »

mckn1ght wrote: post #330
amysox wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly the sort of thing I agree with. If there's code, ultimately, some human is responsible for it, regardless of whether they produced it by hand, by AI, or by rolling dice. (Not that anyone does produce code by rolling dice, mind! Or, if they do, I really don't want to see the results...) All project contributions must be submitted by *identifiable human participants* who accept full responsibility for their con…

Using LLMs is basically rolling a huge number of weighted dice.

So is asking a human to write code, if you think about it…

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

#339

Post by inigyou »

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…

Be extremely careful with that account then, because they ban accounts for the most minor things now. Stuff like posting evidence disproving something the moderator agrees with. And they ban your account from the whole site, not just from that subreddit any more. Automated algorithms also ban accounts for reasons that don't make any sense.

So if you're using your account to advertise yourself and look for jobs, I'd use it only for that. All off-topic discussion should be on a different account with a different physical device and IP address (reddit checks these things and cross-bans) that have never interacted with your main account.

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

#340

Post by JohnHaugeland »

Supermancho wrote: post #237
qsera wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Before they were not able to spam large PRs

Why not? I'm pretty sure a developer could spam large PRs before and regardless of AI involvement is allowed or not.

this article is about the flood of junior developers who are producing enormous prs they’ve never seen full of untrustworthy code that a human hasn’t evaluated

arguing that it’s possible to make them by hand isn’t just missing the point; it’s missing the entire discussion

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