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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

#91

Post by why_at »

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…

>Personally, I love the "hallucinations" as they help me fine-tune my prompts, base instructions, and reinforce intentionality

This reads almost like satire of an AI power user. Why would you like it when an LLM makes things up? Because you get to write more prompts? Wouldn't it be better if it just didn't do that?

It's like saying "I love getting stuck in traffic because I get to drive longer!"

Sorry but that one sentence really stuck out to me

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

#92

Post by mr-wendel »

j2kun wrote: post #80
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…

This is a bit of a straw man. The harms of AI in OSS are not from people needing accessibility tooling.

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 only gets brighter.

My point, essentially, is that I think this is (yet another) area in life where you can't solve the problem by saying "don't do it", and enforcing it is cost-prohibitive. Saying "no AI!" isn't going to stop PR spam. It's not going to stop slop code. What is it going to stop (see edit)? "Bad" people won't care, and "good" people (who use/depend-on AI) will contribute less.

Thus I think we need to focus on developing robust systems around integrating AI. Certainly I'd love to see people adopt responsible disclosure policies as a starting point.

--

[edit] -- To answer some of my own question, there are obvious legal concerns that frequently come up. I have my opinions, but as in many legal matters, especially around IP, the water is murky and opinions are strongly held at both extremes and all to often having to fight a legal battle at all* is immediately a loss regardless of outcome.

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

#93

Post by qsera »

IshKebab wrote: post #88
sothatsit wrote: post #70

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…

It should be the responsibility of the person submitting changes. The problem is AI apparently makes it easy for people to shirk that responsibility.

> people to shirk that responsibility.

Actually not shrink, but just transfer it to reviewers.

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

#94

Post by distances »

moduspol wrote: post #74
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…

> But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. This is the technique I've picked up and got the most from over the past few months. I don't give it hard, high-level problems and then review a giant set of changes to f…

This, and I curate a tree of MD docs per topic to define the expected structure. It is supposed to output code that looks exactly like my code. If not, I manually edit it and perhaps update the docs.

This is how I've found myself to be productive with the tools, or since productivity is hard to measure, at least it's still a fun way to work. I do not need to type everything but I want a very exact outcome nonetheless.

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

#95

Post by ok_dad »

moduspol wrote: post #74
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…

> But, on the flip side, I personally advocate hard for AI from the point-of-view on accessibility. I know (more-or-less) exactly what output I'm aiming for and control that obsessively, but it's AI and my voice at the helm instead of my fingertips. This is the technique I've picked up and got the most from over the past few months. I don't give it hard, high-level problems and then review a giant set of changes to f…

The only issue to beat in mind is that visual inspection is only about 85% accurate at its limit. I was responsible for incoming inspection at a medical device factory and visual inspection was the least reliable test for components that couldn’t be inspected for anything else. We always preferred to use machines (likes big CMM) where possible.

I also use LLM assistance, and I love it because it helps my ADHD brain get stuff done, but I definitely miss stuff that I wouldn’t miss by myself. It’s usually fairly simple mistakes to fix later but I still miss them initially.

I’ve been having luck with LLM reviewers though.

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

#96

Post by QuercusMax »

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…

A few years ago I was in a place where I couldn't type on a computer keyboard for more than a few minutes without significant pain, and I fortunately had shifted into a role where I could oversee a bunch of junior engineers mostly via text chat (phone keyboard didn't hurt my hands as much) and occasional video/voice chat.

I'm much better now after tons of rehab work (no surgery, thankfully), but I don't have the stamina to type as much as I used to. I was always a heavy IDE user and a very fast coder, but I've moved platforms too many times and lost my muscle memory. A year ago I found the AI tools to be basically time-wasters, but now I can be as productive as before without incurring significant pain.

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

#97

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #76
bombcar wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately for AI maximalists, code is more than just letters on the screen. There needs to be human understanding, and if you’re not a core contributor who’s proven you’re willing to stick around when shit hits the fan, a +3000 PR is a liability, not an asset. This isn't necessarily true; I've seen some projects absorb a PR of roughly that size, and after the smoke tests and other standard development stuff, th…

So because some projects can absorb some PRs of a certain size, all projects of should be able to absorb PRs of that same size? This anecdotal argument is a dead end. The nuance is clear: not all software is the same, and not all edits to software are the same.

>So because some projects can absorb some PRs of a certain size, all projects of should be able to absorb PRs of that same size?

Your argument has nothing to do with AI and more to do with PR size and 'fire and forget' feature merges. That's what the commenter your responding to is pointing out.

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

#98

Post by qsera »

sothatsit wrote: post #70

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…

> If they submitted bad code...

The core issue is that it takes a large amount of effort to even assess this, because LLM generated code looks good superficially.

It is said that static FP languages make it hard to implement something if you don't really understand what you are implementing. Dynamically typed languages makes it easier to implement something when you don't fully understand what you are implementing.

LLMs takes this to another level when it enables one to implement something with zero understanding of what they are implementing.

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

#99

Post by PowerfulWizard »

vladms wrote: post #51
rustyhancock wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important though we generally assume few bad actors. But like the XZ attack, we kind of have to assume that advanced perissitant threats are a reality for FOSS too. I can envisage a Sybil attack where several seemingly disaparate contributors are actually one actor building a backdoor. Right now we have a disparity in that many contributors can use LLMs but the recieving projects aren't able to review them as effecti…

> Is judging a PR harder than making one? Depends on the assumptions. If you assume good intent of the submitter and you spend time to explain what he should improve, why something is not good, etc, than it's a lot of effort. If you assume bad intent, you can just reject with something like "too large review from unproven user, please contribute something smaller first". Yes, we might need to take things a bit slower…

On judging vs. making, also someone has to take time away from development to do code review. If the code being reviewed is written by someone who is involved and interested then at least there's a benefit to training and consensus building in discussing the code and the project in the review phase. The time and energy of developers who are qualified to review is quite possibly the bottleneck on development speed too so wasting review time will slow down development.

For AI generated code if previous PRs aren't loaded into context then there's no lasting benefit from the time taken to review and it's blank slate each time. I think ultimately it can be solved with workflow changes (i.e. AI written code should be attributed to the AI in VCS, the full trace and manual edits should be visible for review, all human input prompts to the AI should be browsable during review without having scroll 10k lines of AI reasoning.)

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

#100

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

bombcar wrote: post #65
jruohonen wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is like trying to stop spam by banning emails that send you spam. They can spin up LLM-backed contributors faster than you can ban them.

Banning AI would hardly stop that, the LLM contributors would simply claim they're not AI.

Hence why banning AI contributions is meaningless, you literally only punish 'good' actors.

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