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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"

#391

Post by sunshowers »

newswasboring wrote: post #361
megatoaster wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dice don’t have lived experience

How does that matter for a coding task?

Well, one example is that patterns in code now can make you recall bugs you've seen in the past. I had this realization where I used an LLM to do a big refactor, and it fixed a bug along the way that I should have realized was much more urgent than the refactor, having seen an identical bug in the past (it was related to prefix-checking in a set that wasn't constructed to do that kind of prefix-checking). Had I done the refactor by hand I'd likely have realized it much quicker.

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

#392

Post by Dylan16807 »

inigyou wrote: post #355
Zambyte wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reasoning traces are also probable explanations.

Yeah but at that point it's probably close enough. Humans can get their own reasoning wrong too so some inaccuracy is acceptable.

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

#393

Post by Palomides »

dooglius wrote: post #300

The voting seems to have been pretty much linear to how pro-LLM they were. So it's interesting that all of the proposals were essentially anti-LLM and the chosen one was the mostly neutral, only slightly anti-LLM one. The absence of any pro-LLM proposal indicated that proposal writers are not in sync with the voters

the way you phrase this implies some sort of suppression of LLM interest, but anyone eligible to vote on these could have made their own. The absence of pro-LLM proposals shows nobody wanted one enough to send an email or two about it.

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

#394

Post by shevy-java »

A strange result. It's like "pick no option".

Personally I would have voted "nuke all AI", even though AI has some beneficial use. I simply feel AI is too dangerous in projects. Ruby has been mostly slurped up by AI - almost all code contributions are now run by master claude. A few months ago this german dev on the ffmpeg mailing list spam-slopped his fellow guys with an AI-generated proposal. He did not have time to write a real proposal - but he had enough time to have AI slop pester spam other humans. I am sorry but AI really should not be leaked onto other human beings. It's not nice to do so. And the "AI is there to stay" does not seem like a valid excuse to me to spam-slop other humans. Skynet is winning here - it is recruiting humans to love AI.

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

#395

Post by kurthr »

How much does open source rely on copyright for enforcement?

Do court decisions that limit copyright protection of AI generated content cause problems for open source? Isn't there a requirement for a "Mental Conception" of the code output when using such a tool? Even copypasta requires you to somewhat know what you need to do, where "automated bug finding", does not seem to.

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

#396

Post by skydhash »

insanitybit wrote: post #385
skydhash wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seriously, this was a huge thing in C and C++, where you had to know/remember/know to look up very specific error codes and conditions in an API and if you didn't then it was very much considered to be a skill issue. It was not unless you were part of some very weird circle. There was always manuals and other references that listed everything about a platform or library. Then we got ‘man’ and ‘info’. And I remember…

I'm not sure what you're saying, or how it is not what I'm saying? You're giving examples of places to read documentation, and I'm saying that the expectation was that behaviors caused by not checking documentation would be your fault. If that isn't your experience, cool, it was definitely mine when posting on forums online 15-16 years ago.

Why wouldn’t it be? If you were in charge of writing a letter and use words that hinders the purpose of the letter, thus resulting in a flawed communication, wouldn’t it be your fault? Especially when dictionaries are easily available?

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

#397

Post by stillpointlab »

kccqzy wrote: post #353
stillpointlab wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think 10 levels here is too much and hints that someone anchored on 10 as a round number and then forced the levels to fit after the fact. I don't really see much value beyond the 3 levels of AI disclosure that have been floating around: - fully human - ai assisted - ai generated

There’s a big difference between AI generated code that the human understands completely, the human understands mostly, or the human understands not at all.

"Human understanding" is not yet an objectively quantifiable metric that can be applied to code change sets. As it would only ever be self-reported (a claim made by a user submitting to a repo), I see little to no value in it.

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

#398

Post by tiahura »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #306
moring wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't, please enlighten me.

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) would simply become a prompt. The solution, of course, is to use the best available LLMs as the first line of defense against slop contributions. But if the project maintainers have issued a sweeping fatwa prohibiting an entire class of useful tool…

I wonder if some of these projects with ayatollah maintainers are looking at forks sooner rather than later?

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

#400

Post by eterm »

dooglius wrote: post #358
eterm wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would "pro-LLM" look like to you?

Ex: Security-critical code contributions should be scrutinized via state of the art tooling, including but not limited to fuzzers, linters, and adversarial LLM review. For non-security-critical code, use of LLMs is encouraged but not required. The bar for code quality should be raised as the skills of coding agents increase; a developer's choice not to use LLMs is no excuse for miskates that an LLM would catch.

That's an interesting opinion, and I certainly won't downvote you for sharing it, although it's not a position I would ever support. You are right though, that it would strengthen the voted-on position if there were more options either side of the position.

I have Things To Say about LLM reviews.

They are an endless grind. My biggest source of burnout right now is never being able to finish anything, because the LLM always finds, "Just one more thing" every time I send it back.

It's pure polish. The major issues were dealt with long ago. But there's always one more thing that could be done a little better, there's another niche edge case that needs wrapping up.

When human developer time was the limiting factor, it was easy to draw a line in the sand and say enough is enough.

It's harder to say no when it's just one more prompt and one more go-around.

Demanding LLM reviews on volunteer maintainers sounds like a great way to quickly end up with no maintainers.

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