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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"

#451

Post by newswasboring »

pyreko wrote: post #439
newswasboring wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nope, most of the PRs are authored entirely by agents with people instructing them to “pr famous projects in my name to increase my GitHub profile value or “hire ability”. I've heard this in a lot of places, don't have a way to verify this in action. Do you have any citation or just gut feel (still valid but less useful for me).

Anecdotally, as someone who's been starting to get more and more agent-only/driven PRs, a good amount of the time it's by an account with little to no activity until one day they suddenly start doing 50-100+ PRs a _day_ on entirely unrelated projects... you can kind of guess what they're doing. As for motive, it probably varies, though some will loudly put that they're some agent manager or something with lots of con…

These are all fair observations, I have not personally come across these yet but I am also not looking for them. I guess someone more involved in open source collaboration would have a better lens here.

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

#452

Post by BlueRoguesDevel »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #3
BlueRoguesDevel wrote: post #2

I hope it works out better than Microsoft and using it on Windows 11...

Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?

Apologies for not replying to you right away. I intended to follow up but HN wouldn't let me because my account is too new. No, it wasn't a random snipe. I used Windows extensively from 95-Vista and Win 10 for work. In my person user experience W11 is bafflingly bad, and the MS team are making design choices that honestly make me feel like Windows ME was doing more right in that area.

Now the argument that genAI is helping them find and fix bugs faster has a lot of merit because it can be pretty darn good at that. But for lack of a better phrase, 'The Windows 11 Experience' feels, as other users pointed out too, either vibe coded or like the dev teams went insane. I live and die by Debian in my servers and I really hope the same kind of thing doesn't happen to them.

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

#453

Post by [deleted] »

tdrz wrote: post #417
bfgeek wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review. A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner. The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch au…

I'm an OSS maintainer and to me it's not just about the review itself. Being greeted by a wall of text for every little small thing is counter-productive. I hate going through 2 pages of text for each PR. It usually shouldn't take more than a couple of sentences if you understand the issue and the solution. But most important for me: lots of time the PR just adds even more code, although other options do exist (ie so…

[deleted]

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

#454

Post by ahartmetz »

tdrz wrote: post #417
bfgeek wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue that open source projects are facing at the moment is that it takes significantly less effort to submit a patch for review. A lot of developers who are submitting these AI patches don't necessarily understand the patch, so the onus is on the reviewer/code-owner. The reviewers are getting swamped (some reviewers are receiving 100s or patches per month). If feedback is provided at lot of the time the patch au…

I'm an OSS maintainer and to me it's not just about the review itself. Being greeted by a wall of text for every little small thing is counter-productive. I hate going through 2 pages of text for each PR. It usually shouldn't take more than a couple of sentences if you understand the issue and the solution. But most important for me: lots of time the PR just adds even more code, although other options do exist (ie so…

I've seen it. Walls of text with stereotypically worded non-summaries that just repeat all of the code in words, mutating values all over the place instead of the obvious canonical one place that touches related values...

Yeah you can use LLMs, but don't let me notice it from the quality of the output.

I've noticed that LLMs seem to be especially bad at things relating to space, position and movement. I guess they have to synthesize that part of human intelligence entirely, it's not in the words.

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

#455

Post by ahartmetz »

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?

Presumably they are trying to farm karma / reputation, which (I think, mostly) doesn't work if they need to switch accounts all the time.

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

#456

Post by winrid »

sisyphus15 wrote: post #83
winrid wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Completely wrong generalization. I'm a person who is over-reliant on LLMs, doesn't know how most of the things in the codebase work, and is atrophying both in programming and in general cognition. I used to care, a lot. And I still do.

Nope you just don't care to know. Stop making excuses.

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

#457

Post by b112 »

inigyou wrote: post #351
b112 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that in a few years, or even less time, we'll see a whole bunch of companies implode, whist others remain fine.

We should have already seen it. Software was slop quality even before AI. But we didn't see it.

The whole point is, it's 10x, 100x more slop now, if no one looks at LLM output. If no one reviews it. Context.

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

#458

Post by b112 »

lrvick wrote: post #369
b112 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that in a few years, or even less time, we'll see a whole bunch of companies implode, whist others remain fine.

We see it every day in the news with hacks that were, in every single case, completely preventable. That is had any competent security engineers been involved, with leadership willing to fund the cycles to do it right. "But we passed SOC2 and that is all our customers care about" they say, right up until they are in the headlines for a data breach directly resulting from them putting all customer data in plain text i…

Yes, indeed. But at the same time, this is about "how much worse" it will be, with LLMs. With code review being skipped. With there being so much code, no one has the time to even code review.

It's a whole other level of junk. 100x worse than now. So multiple what you just said, x100.

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

#459

Post by Barrin92 »

newswasboring wrote: post #450
Barrin92 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>people were making the exact same arguments about them. That not knowing your API to the core makes you a bad programmer. And they were correct. You're entirely right that this time it isn't different, but in the sense that the quality of both developers and code has been going downhill for decades. The only thing that has kept this industry alive is that hardware got more performant faster than developers became mo…

I am not arguing that things don't change and certain skills dont atrophy. I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop. But your personal attack makes me feel like your purpose is to win, not to be right.

>I am arguing that the atrophied skills are compensated by new skills we develop

is there a lot of evidence for this? You can broadly put technology into two camps. Technologically that, as it becomes more powerful, demands more attention and skill from the user and just the opposite. A bow is more powerful than a stick but also more demanding to use. A car is more powerful than your feet but your population ends up obese. Almost every single piece of software, with the exception of maybe debuggers, who an astonishingly amount of seasoned developers do not utilize (I suspect for that reason), is a car and not a bow.

There's a study on English college students roughly ten years ago who were tasked to read the first few paragraphs of Dicken's Bleak House. They were even allowed to use a dictionary and the internet. A majority could not interpret the text. That's where we were at before LLMs. My rural working-class grandfather at an underfunded Catholic school had to translate Ovid from Latin into German in 8th grade. It wasn't even a personal attack, we're just this fried now.

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