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Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

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Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you sign off the code and put your expertise and reputation behind it, AI becomes just an advanced autocomplete tool and, as such, should not count in “no AI” rules. It’s ok to use it, if that enables you to work.

this sounds reasonable, but in practice people will simply sign off on anything without having thoroughly reviewed it. I agree with you that there's a huge distinction between code that a person understands as thoroughly as if they wrote it, and vibecoded stuff that no person actually understands. but actually doing something practical with that distinction is a difficult problem to solve.

Unless the code is explicitly signed by AI as auto-commit, you cannot really tell if it was reviewed by human. So it essentially becomes a task of detecting specific AI code smell, which is barely noticeable in code reviewed by an experienced engineer. Very subjective, probably does not make sense at all.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. I do agree that at large, the theoretical upsides of accessibility are almost certainly completely overshadowed by obvious downsides of AI. At least, for now anyway. Accessibility is a single instance of the general argument that "of course there are major upsides to using AI", and there a good chance the future onl…

> I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say >Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for maki…

> are worth the downside of collapsing society.

At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this.

>It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress.

So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#143
post #137

Concerns about the wasting of maintainer’s time, onboarding, or copyright, are of great interest to me from a policy perspective. But I find some of the debate around the quality of AI contributions to be odd. Quality should always be the responsibility of the person submitting changes. Whether a person used LLMs should not be a large concern if someone is acting in good-faith. If they submitted bad code, having used…

The real invariant is responsibility: if you submit a patch, you own it. You should understand it, be able to defend the design choices, and maintain it if needed

Great for large patches, great way to kill very small but important patches.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#144

My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made full time work impossible. With the advent of LLMs, AI-autocomplete, and agent-based development workflows, my ability to deliver reliable, high-quality code is restored and (arguably) bett…

Fwiw, I try to make sure we have an accessibility focused talk every year (if possible) at the Carolina Code Conference. Call for Speakers is open right now if you'd be interested in submitting something on your story.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#145
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've done nothing to argue that the harm isn't real, downplayed it, nor misrepresented it. You're literally saying that the upsides of hallucinanigenic gifts are worth the downside of collapsing society. I'd say that that is downplaying and misrepreting the issue. You even go so far to say >Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for maki…

> are worth the downside of collapsing society. At least in the US, society has been well on it's way to collapse before the LLM came out. "Fake news" is a great example of this. >It's a decision that your mindset is the only right one and anyone else is a opposing progress. So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?

Sure. I always said Ai was a catalyst. It could have made society build up faster and accelerate progress, definitely.

But as modern society is, it is simply accelerating the low trust factors of it and collapsing jobs (even if it can't do them yet), because that's what was already happening. But hey, assets also accelerated up. For now.

>So pretty much every religious group that's ever existed for any amount of time. Fundamentalism is totally unproblematic, right?

Religion is a very interesting factor. I have many thoughts on it, but for now I'll just say that a good 95% of religious devouts utterly fail at following what their relevant scriptures say to do. We can extrapolate the meaning of that in so many ways from there.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#146

My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made full time work impossible. With the advent of LLMs, AI-autocomplete, and agent-based development workflows, my ability to deliver reliable, high-quality code is restored and (arguably) bett…

Fantastic point. I do think there was a bit of an over correction toward AI hostility because capitalism, and for good reason, but it did almost make it taboo to talk about legitimate use cases that are not related to bad AI use cases like instigating nuclear wars in war game simulations. I think the ugly unspoken truth whether Mozilla or Debian or someone else, is that there are going to be plausible and valuable us…

I think generating slop and having others review it is bad even if you are disabled. I say this as a disabled person myself.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#147

My two cents: I've been coding practically my entire life, but a few years back I sustained a pretty significant and lasting injury to my wrists. As such, I have very little tolerance for typing. It's been quite a problem and made full time work impossible. With the advent of LLMs, AI-autocomplete, and agent-based development workflows, my ability to deliver reliable, high-quality code is restored and (arguably) bett…

> I'd MUCH rather see a holistic embrace and integration of these tools into our ecosystems. Telling people "no AI!" (even if very well defined on what that means) is toothless against people with little regard for making the world (or just one specific repo) a better place. That doesn't address the controversy because you are a reasonable person assuming that other people using AI are reasonable like you, and know h…

[dead]

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#148
post #16

> disclosure if "a significant portion of the contribution is taken from a tool without manual modification", and labeling of such contributions with "a clear disclaimer or a machine-readable tag like '[AI-Generated]'. Quixotic, unworkable, pointless. It’s fundamentally impossible (at least without a level of surveillance that would obviously be unavceptable) to prove the “artisanal hand-crafted human code” label. >…

Debian has always been Debian and thus there are these purist opinions, but perhaps my take too would be something along the "one-strike-and-you-are-out" kind of a policy (i.e., you submit slop without being able to explain your submission in any way ) already followed in some projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47109952

Yeah this is what I was getting at with “reputation” - I think the world where anyone can submit a patch and get human eyes on it is a thing of the past.

IIRC Mitchell Hashimoto recently proposed some system of attestations for OSS contributors. It’s non-obvious how you’d scale this.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer. Both can look like the same exact type of AI-generated code. But one is a broken useless piece of shit and the other actually does what it claims to do. The problem is just how hard it is to differentiate the two at a glance.

> It's the difference between raw LLM output vs LLM output that was tweaked, reviewed and validated by a competent developer. This is one of those areas where you might have been right.. 4-6 months ago. But if you're paying attention, the floor has moved up substantially. For the work I do, last year the models would occasionally produce code with bugs, linter errors, etc, now the frontier models produce mostly flawl…

This very much depends on the domain you work in. Small projects in well tread domains are incredible for AI. SaaS projects can essentially be one-shot. But large projects, projects with specific standards or idioms, projects with particular versions of languages, performance concerns, hardware concerns, all things the Debian project has to deal with, aren't 'solved' in the same way.

Re: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way niche/luxury product and services compare to fast/cheap ones: they are made with focus and intent that goes against the statistical average, which also normally would take more time and effort to make. McDonalds cooks ~great~ (edit: fair enough, decent) burgers when measured objectively, but people still go to more niche burger restaurants because they want something different and made with more care. Th…

> McDonalds cooks great burgers when measured objectively Wait, what? In what world are McDonalds burgers "great"? They're cheap . Maybe even a good value. But that's not the same as great .

Probably more of the measure of the Deluxe burger, which if fresh doesn't seem to have any faults for a burger. Now the little McFrankinstines leave much to be desired.
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