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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

#221

Post by hatmike »

mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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 love the "hallucinations"

Sorry, the rest of your comment could have the recipe for fat free deep fried blowjobs that cure cancer and I wouldn't read past that.

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

#222

Post by jaredcwhite »

pessimizer wrote: post #174
jaredcwhite wrote: post #151

LLM-generated code is incompatible with libre software. It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly. It's certainly bad enough to see such a widespread embrace of this dangerous and anti-libre technology within proprietary software teams, but when it comes to FLOSS, it should be a no-brainer to formalize an emphatic anti-slop contributor policy.

> It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly. It is. You haven't argued it at all, right here. You just asserted it as if it were self-evident, talked about your feelings, then demanded policy. Your only job here was to convince people to align with you, and you didn't bother. It makes me suspect that you haven't really solidified the argument in your own…

Spoken like a true LLM!

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

#223

Post by heavyset_go »

golem14 wrote: post #215
heavyset_go wrote: post #164

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. No, it's not that simple. AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed. This matters for open source projects that care about licensing. It should also matter for proprietary code bases, as anyone can co…

Care to explain? I see that statement in this thread, but I am not sure where this is grounded in fact. This is very interesting, because there must be a line here that AI is crossing, and the line is not clearly determined yet. Is linting code crossing the line? Is re-factoring code with automated tools like bicycle repair man crossing the line ? Is AI doing a code review and suggesting the code crossing the line ?…

Here's what a Red Hat/IBM IP lawyer said about the chardet situation: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/334#issuecomment-4...

Here's what the US Copyright Office says: https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...

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

#224

Post by hickelpickle »

mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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…

Glad to see this response, I was wondering the other day how the affected accessibility. I remember reading a thread a few years back of visually challenged developers and their work flow and was kinda surprised there has been such little discussion around developer accessibility with the advent of ai agents and coding routines.

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

#225

Post by sheepscreek »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #46
SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reputation isn't very relevant here. Yes, for established well known FOSS developers, their reputation will tank if they put out sloppy PRs and people will just ignore them. But the projects aren't drowning under PRs from reputable people. They're drowning in drive-by PRs from people with no reputation to speak of. Even if you outright ban their account, they'll just spin up a new one and try again. Blocking AI submi…

Well, the problem you just outlined is a reputation (+ UI) problem: why are contributions from unknown contributors shown at the same level as PRs from known quality contributors, for example? We need to rethink some UX design and processes here, not pretend low quality people are going to follow your "no low quality pls i'm serious >:(" rules. Rather, design the processes against low quality. Also, we're in a new wo…

I don’t know why you got downvoted. Those are good points.

Contrary to popular belief, I believe open-source projects are poised for a significant windfall. If a project lacks the ability to transform a good problem into an advantage, that’s their prerogative, but it shouldn’t be the norm (I hope not).

I like to think of it as a stranger/volunteer using their tokens to give the project maintainers a choice. Imagine each issue having 3-4 PRs - it’s a brave new world that demands new solutions!

From a place of scarcity - to now picking from multiple PRs, not a bad problem to have. This is turning into a signal vs noise optimization problem. Could it be solved with agents specially fine-tuned for this use-case? Maybe. Why not?

Also many projects on GitHub do have discussions (typically in a long Issues thread) before someone opens a PR.

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

#226

Post by sheepscreek »

lich_king wrote: post #77
sheepscreek wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. “AI” contributions should be seen as an extension of the individual. If anything, they could ask that the account belong to a person and not be a second bot only account. Basically, a person’s own reputation should be on the line.

> Precisely. “AI” contributions should be seen as an extension of the individual. That's an OK view to hold, but I'll point out two things. First, it's not how the tech is usually wielded to interact with open-source software. Second, your worldview is at odds with the owners of this technology: the main reason why so much money is being poured into AI coding is that it's seen by investors as a replacement for the in…

I know. But the irony is, agents, that is AI, need to collaborate with other agents, so other AI, to get any work done. Collaboration is at the core of how work takes place. As humans or as machines. So I don’t necessarily think Open Source will disappear. It will evolve and turn into something very different and more powerful.

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

#227

Post by yodsanklai »

mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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…

> without a battle of ego.

This resonates. Recently, I've started to consider Claude as a partner. I like how he's willing to accept he's wrong when you provide evidence. It can be more pleasant than working with humans.

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

#228

Post by nunez »

BeetleB wrote: post #106
mr-wendel wrote: post #58

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…

Similar story, albeit not so extreme. I have similar ergonomic issues that crop up from time to time. My programming is not so impacted (spend more time thinking than typing, etc), but things like email, documentation, etc can be brutal (a lot more computer usage vs programming). My simple solution: I use Whisper to transcribe my text, and feed the output to an LLM for cleanup (custom prompt). It's fantastic . Way be…

I maintain expense tracking software that I wrote a while ago (before ChatGPT) that sends receipts and some metadata about them into Google Sheets (previously Expensify). A few months ago, I used Claude to add a feature that does exactly what you describe, but using the data types and framework I built for receipt parsing. It works really well.

Honestly, you can probably build what I built entirely with Gemini or Claude, probably with a nice frontend to boot.

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

#229

Post by zadikian »

retired wrote: post #84

Fork it to Slobian and let the clankers go to town creating, approving and merging pull requests by themselves. Look at the install base to see what people prefer.

Was going to say, I'm interested to see if someone can build a nicer Linux distro going full AI spam.

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

#230

Post by Dylan16807 »

jaredcwhite wrote: post #222
pessimizer wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's extremely frustrating to see such a lack of conviction to argue this point forcefully and repeatedly. It is. You haven't argued it at all, right here. You just asserted it as if it were self-evident, talked about your feelings, then demanded policy. Your only job here was to convince people to align with you, and you didn't bother. It makes me suspect that you haven't really solidified the argument in your own…

Spoken like a true LLM!

What you think is obvious is not obvious. Please make your argument instead of insulting people.

I could guess at arguments but the ones that come to mind are pretty weak. For copyrightability, if half the lines in a FLOSS project are public domain, the license will still be effective. For infringement when training, that's not really the user's problem. For LLMs being proprietary, that doesn't infect the output, also many LLMs are not proprietary. For danger, there's not a lot of that specifically in the code-making context, and I don't see how danger makes something anti-FLOSS either.

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