Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by yfw » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 4:45 AM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #126

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'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…

The curl project is proof of this. No rumors

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

#242

Post by cortesoft » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 4:47 AM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #126

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'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…

How is an AI policy going to help prevent bad faith actors, though?

People who are doing those harmful things with AI aren’t going to stop because of a policy. They are just going to lie and not admit their submissions are AI generated.

At that point, you will still have to review the code and reject it if it is bad quality, just like you had to without an AI policy. The policy doesn’t make it any easier to filter out the bad faith AI submissions.

In fact, if we DO develop an efficient way to weed out the bad faith PRs that lie about using AI, then why do we need the policy at all? Just use that same system to weed out the bad submissions, and just skip the policy completely.

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

#243

Post by golem14 » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 5:16 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #223

golem14 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, that's what the link I posted also discusses (but then goes into much detail, but then offers no actual resolution).

I guess we will have to wait for cases to be brought and resolved at the courts. Not a great recipe to be the leader in AI, it must be said.

An updated copyright bill from legislature, or even positive regulatory action from the executive branch would speed things up and give much planning certainty to actors here in the US.

The rest of the world won't be waiting though -- maybe Europe, but Europe sadly doesn't really matter that much anymore :(

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

#244

Post by beachy » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 5:21 AM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #188

pixl97 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>other people are reasonable like you No AI needed. Spam on the internet is a great example of the amount of unreasonable people on the internet. And for this I'll define unreasonable as "committing an action they would not want committed back at them". AI here is the final nail in the coffin that many sysadmins have been dealing with for decades. And that is that unreasonable actors are a type of asymmetric warfare…

> Going to be interesting to see how human systems deal with this. At least a bunch of lawyers already got hit when their court filings cited hallucinated cases. If this trend continues, I'll not be surprised when some end up disbarred.

This seems self-correcting. Every lawyer, and maybe court, will use AI to review the other party's filings for such things. AI overseeing what is true and what is not - nothing disturbing about that distopian future.

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

#245

Post by duskdozer » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 5:29 AM UTC

mr-wendel wrote: post #189

setgree wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting aside the specifics for a second, I'm sorry to hear about your injury and glad you've found workarounds. I also think high-quality voice transcription might end up being a big thing for my health (there's no way typing as much as I do, in the positions I do, is good).

Much appreciated. I find is that referencing code in conversation is hard -- e.g. "underscore foo bar" vs `_fooBar`, "this dot Ls" vs `this.els`, etc happens often. Lower-powered models especially struggle with this, and make some frustrating assumptions. Premium models do way better, and at times are shockingly good. They just aren't remotely economically viable for me. My solution so far is to use my instructions t…

maybe you've done this already, but my first thought would be to make a preparser script that would take your likely voice inputs like "underscore foo bar" and translate to "_fooBar" which you would then pass on as input. i do something similar for a local TTS generator which often stumbles on certain words or weird characters

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

#246

Post by duskdozer » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 5:32 AM UTC

fc417fc802 wrote: post #234

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…

> AI generated code isn't owned by anyone, it can't be copyrighted, so it cannot be licensed. Translation: AI generated code is in the public domain in the US (until and unless something changes). You can freely incorporate public domain code into any other codebase. You can relicense it as you see fit. Public domain material is not viral the way the GPL is. Furthermore, if you make changes to public domain code the…

Big tech employees better be quick then!

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

#247

Post by duskdozer » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 5:39 AM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #171

pixl97 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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. IMO you can blame this on ML and the ability to microtarget[1] constituencies with propaganda that's been optimized, workshopped, focus grouped, etc to death. Proto-AI got us there, LLMs are an accelerator in the same direction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtargeting

welp, flip another one from the "they definitely could do this and might be" pile to the "they've already been doing this for a long time" pile

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

#248

Post by petterroea » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 5:48 AM UTC

trinsic2 wrote: post #236

petterroea wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who got a pretty severe case of carpal tunnel in his youth that can still blow up today, I have to admit I have worried about my ability to work. "Will I have to become a manager?" Etc. I think you have a good point

for some reason that hasn't happned to me yet. im only in my 50ies, but I have been on a split keyboard for a long time...

I think a good routine matters a lot. I played a lot of video games in my youth and got carpal tunnel from there, and haven't been able to recover 100% since.

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

#249

Post by himata4113 » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 6:09 AM UTC

I think the problem is that AI can generate 1-2k lines of junk and dress it up in a PR. But take it as someone who regulary maxes two x20 accounts: Once you get a workflow going especially cases when you want to satisfy a fixed amount of tests there is no going back.

The days of AI hardcoding things to past tests are going to be behind us as they gain the ability to generalize not just in their knowledge but problem solving instead, especially if you know how to hit AI where it hurts.

This is where it becomes relevant: upstreaming hardware support, if someone wants to add / fix a bug and they successfully test it and it works there has to be some kind of middle ground where the PR should be justified and worth the effort of a review, but the person submitting the PR possibly has no idea about what they're talking about and just has to trust AI.

I do not have an answer to that except for limiting the size and scope of such PRs. Possibly require previous work being acknoledged (hand made) rather than AI generated to validate that you at least know what the PR is about and what it does.

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

#250

Post by citizenpaul » Wed, Mar 11, 2026, 6:13 AM UTC

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #237

I don't particularly care if vibe coding and the like are used for web apps and mobile apps. The quality there has always been poor and gets worse over time. AI slopware is just the new low and in a few years time I'm sure they will find a way to make things even worse. But for software infrastructure; Kernels, operating systems, compilers, browsers, etc, it is crazy we are even considering AI at it's current ability…

i dont work in then auto industry but Ive read stuff from people that do and Im pretty sure I remember they all say that all major car mfg code is tons of auto generated slop even pre AI.