I followed the discussion on debian-vote with interest. I'm glad that the hysterical objections lost, as they seemed quasi-religiously motivated.
But it's an """ethical""" argument against it.
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
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Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#12[deleted]
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?
Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does
Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#14Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#15[flagged]
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#16New 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.
Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it", oh poor me, someone got a bug. If it's paid for through a job your argument is sound.
"Responsible for it" just means nobody has to tolerate shitty patches even if the reason they're shitty is because you neglected to pay attention to them. And if you blatantly fail to understand your own code or engage with reviewers, nobody has to trust that your LLM knew any better.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#17I 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?
It's based off that 30% of code written by AI quote from the MS CEO last year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
Note that he said written by, not assisted; and also that there's been some major QA issues with win11 the last year, enough for Microsoft to have made a public apology/commitment to improve...
So, no definitive evidence, but the rest of the breadcrumbs provide enough to say that yes it does appear to have suffered from it.
Given the Debian policy seems more geared towards aided/assisted an existing dev than replacing them and shipping because the code works on the golden path on a devs monster pc ... Well I'd still keep an eye on it but trust OSS OS engineers to have some competence at knowing if this works and adjusting the policy later if it proved to be wrong.
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#18New 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.
Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it", oh poor me, someone got a bug. If it's paid for through a job your argument is sound.
> Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it"
Sure there is. Contributing to open source is a privilege, not a right. Abuse it, and find yourself unwelcome as a future contributor
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#19I hope it works out better than Microsoft and using it on Windows 11...
Source? The rumor is the opposite, that Microsoft has actually used AI to discover and fix common security issues at scale.
> common security issues
the entire industry is experiencing this as model capacity increases. How does "all projects get critical security fixes now" relate to "crap apps and loopy services by literally millions of lines of slop code" ?
Re: Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
#20I followed the discussion on debian-vote with interest. I'm glad that the hysterical objections lost, as they seemed quasi-religiously motivated.
> ... hysterical ... quasi-religiously ...
I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case that when my fellow citizens begin to act insane - might it be the result of foreign propaganda.