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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"

#301

Post by catlifeonmars »

Loughla wrote: post #273
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…

The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

Probably a time waster because of the intermediate patch contributor. It’s like a game of telephone at worst, at best the reviewer could just use their own LLM and get the same result.

Here’s my hot take: maybe code contributions are obsoleted by coding agents. No one will accept outside contributions because it’s faster to do it themselves.

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

#302

Post by Retric »

lokar wrote: post #229
hypfer wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that was already blown up way before LLMs existed. Foss wasn't exactly not miserable before 2022. The dysfunction just got amplified so that we cannot fix it anymore by just throwing more human resources at the problem.

I tried to nod a bit to the inconsistency. Some projects clearly lost patience with imperfect contributions long ago. But many were still pretty supportive. This dynamic also plays out in many companies. I see a lot of posts from mid to sr engineers frustrated with plummeting code quality and unsure how to manage the reviews. They are increasingly pulling away from the idea that they should mentor people to do better…

The correct response to irresponsible AI use in the workplace is maintaining standards and rejecting poor quality. Performance improvement plans as a fair warning followed by firing people works for incompetence or laziness, AI doesn’t change anything.

I’ll admit I’ve seen a spike in negative performance reviews but this is the new normal people will adapt.

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

cassianoleal wrote: post #100
vlyan wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDEs enable us to not bother memorizing the number and order of arguments, long names beyond the first word or two, etc. the impact is comparable, freeing some of the very limited space in our memory for more important things. sure, students and juniors shoot themselves in the dick if they let LLMs do everything, but they're fucked anyway so it doesn't matter,

It's really not. Number and order of arguments, long names, etc. are just bureaucracy. Knowing them doesn't mean you understand the codebase any better than if you rely on the IDE for it. It's a bit like remembering the exact date an historical event happened vs. knowing at which point in history it did, what other events relate to it, etc. Neither makes you better or worse at knowing and understanding the history of…

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by a34729t »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #57
throwaway2037 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.

Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.

It is insiduous how easy it is to stop thinking. When writing complex code it seems like most of the time it would have been faster just to write it myself and build a complete understanding of it. I swear if I asked most engineers at my company to describe their changes recently they would be unable to.

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

#305

Post by sgarland »

Loughla wrote: post #273
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…

The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

[dead]

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

#306

Post by CamperBob2 »

moring wrote: post #272
Keyframe wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you know EXACTLY what would happen in such a system.

I don't, please enlighten me.

Explain, in at most 300 characters, why we should merge your change, or at least why we should invest the time to read a longer explanation (somethings things ARE complex) would simply become a prompt.

The solution, of course, is to use the best available LLMs as the first line of defense against slop contributions. But if the project maintainers have issued a sweeping fatwa prohibiting an entire class of useful tools, that option along with many others is off the table.

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

#307

Post by pydry »

Loughla wrote: post #273
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…

The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

It depends entirely on how much slop they are flooded with.

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

#308

Post by sebmellen »

a1o wrote: post #284
Loughla wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question becomes, does it take more time to create or review in the Grand scheme of the software life cycle? Because if it's still a time saver, even with the increased review load, then it's a win, correct? I'm not a coder so I have zero idea. Thoughts?

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”. The original authors have no idea what their agents are writing, these are mostly badly quality models (people doing this are not only cutting corners, but also using the less amount of money/tokens to do so). If the agent creates 200, 400 or whate…

Just had a thought, what if you made new contributors write a human-authored essay on why they’re submitting a patch, and then check it against Pangram? Pangram is really accurate from what I’ve found…

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

#309

Post by amysox »

chuckadams wrote: post #6

New 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.

Exactly the sort of thing I agree with. If there's code, ultimately, some human is responsible for it, regardless of whether they produced it by hand, by AI, or by rolling dice. (Not that anyone does produce code by rolling dice, mind! Or, if they do, I really don't want to see the results...)

    All project contributions must be submitted by *identifiable human participants* who accept full responsibility for their content. Automated agents, bots, or autonomous AI systems *may not* independently submit issues, pull requests, or other contributions.
   Contributors may use software tools, including AI-assisted tools, but the submitting contributor *must:\*
    - Fully understand the contribution.
    - Be able to explain design and implementation decisions without the use of AI.
    - Accept responsibility for maintenance and correctness.
    Contributors should indicate AI-generated content in issue and pull request descriptions and comments, specifying which model was used.
    Do *not* use AI to reply to questions about your issue or pull request. The questions are for *you,* the human, not an AI model.
https://git.erbosoft.com/amy/amsterdam/raw/branch/main/CODE-...

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

#310

Post by stillpointlab »

GZGavinZhao wrote: post #110

Related: I find this self-assessed AI level for contributions [1] to be extremely useful, both professionally and personally, to communicate the level of AI assistance so that the person on the receiving end can evaluate how much time & effort they want to spend understanding my code. [1]: https://www.visidata.org/blog/2026/ai/#self-assessed-ai-leve...

I think 10 levels here is too much and hints that someone anchored on 10 as a round number and then forced the levels to fit after the fact.

I don't really see much value beyond the 3 levels of AI disclosure that have been floating around:

- fully human - ai assisted - ai generated

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