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Comments (97)

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  simonw
  Don't misinterpret this link as representing a final decision. It's actually three separate proposals which will be debated and then voted on.Proposal A is "expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools."Proposal B is "The Debian project allows AI-assisted contributions (partially or fully generated by an LLM), provided the following conditions are met [...]"Proposal C is "request that all contributors to Debian avoid the use of LLMs in their Debian work" without an outright ban.
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  hkalbasi
  > A LLM (...) merely produces syntactically likely combinations of the training dataWhile doesn't matter much in the rest of the policy, this is a common misconception among AI skeptics. It is not the case for a long time (since RL is used heavily in the training) and a LLM may go beyond its training data.
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  fisheuler
  This is ridiculos, think about that, will Debian project survive without a Linux kernel written with the help of LLM tools?
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  Meneth
  Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.
• zzo38computer
  I might su combining Proposal A (but only for contributions (to Debian) that actually involve the output of LLMs/generative-AI or that blindly trust their results) with Proposal C (for everything else).However, in the case of item 4 of Proposal C, there are multiple kind of "assistance" that is possible; not all of them involve contributing the output of LLMs (e.g. the assistance might be to check for a mistake such as if a paragraph seems to be redundant or is incomplete or something like that; the result from the LLM might be incorrect but you will have to decide by yourself what (if anything) to do about it when writing your message). Even if some kind of assistance should not be banned entirely, it should still be discouraged (like the rest of Proposal C says). (Also, there are other programs that can sometimes be used for the assistance; e.g. sometimes ordinary spelling/grammar checking will do (although that won't find that an incorrect word that is spelled like a correct word in the correct grammar).)I do not use LLM/generative-AI for any purpose, and would not accept contributions including their output into my projects, and would discourage other uses. (This seems to be similar to Proposal A and Proposal C.)
• rixed
  > Documentation and translations added by Debian contributors I wonder what fraction of Trixie already violates this requirement of the first proposal...
• ares623
  "Look at this. Look at what they make you give." - The Professor from The Bourne Identity (2002)
• russfink
  What comprises “assistance?” Getting Claude Code to find bugs, suggest a fix, but a human actually editing the source files and testing the result - is that assistance? Perhaps this policy is as it says: a guiding principle that the community is expected to follow.
• mike_hock
  I certainly hope they'll choose C.
• sublinear
  I think when we're talking about mature software, LLMs aren't the problem. It's the lack of discussion justifying the change. LLMs don't necessarily lower code quality. They put a spotlight on people "just going through the motions".When the changes are small and properly reviewed, there's no point in caring how it was done. It should be trivial to write, but difficult to approve and merge.Projects as significant as Debian should own the fact that they are indeed a bureaucracy and take inspiration from what has always worked long before LLMs.
• anon
  undefined
• skeledrew
  Be interesting to see what happens when it becomes a serious hacker target.
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  phyzix5761
  How can they even tell code was written by AI instead of a human?
• carterschonwald
  i think the line is: expressing that you reputationally certify its correct and its worth the time
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  alightsoul
  Proposal A is the end of debian for non-english speakers. For those who don't speak english which is most of the world, using an LLM has become vital, because technical information is not available in their language or is extremely basic. Arch Linux is far more lenient with this.
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  dismalaf
  Curious what the "use" or "assistance" of LLM models means. I mostly use Gemini as a front-end to search Google without getting ads or SEO garbage, would that be forbidden?
• nilespotter
  Proposal D, currently enacted: Use LLMs but don't tell anyone
• lilerjee
  Proposal AUsing LLM encourages data theft or unethical acts.
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  accountrequired
  looks like the best proposal is the just the least bad
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  TZubiri
  Interesting that this makes no distinction from using LLM output and using LLM assistance. An overly strict policy is better than no policy, but I wonder if using llm for conversation and analysis, but not code/config generation, was discussed.
• tulio_ribeiro
  [flagged]
• horseandcart
  [dead]
• 1saadcodes
  I suspect the debate shouldn't be LLMs or no LLMs, but rather what level of human accountability is required.We've accepted compilers, static analyzers, and code generators because the maintainer is still responsible for the final result. The interesting question is whether LLMs fundamentally change that responsibility, or just change the kinds of mistakes reviewers need to look for
• baggy_trough
  Proposals like these are arrogant and obnoxious. You aren’t going to tell me what tools I can use.
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  mt42or
  Good so Debian will die soon or later.
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  prologic
  This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. What are we doing here?! LLM(s) are just a tool. Use it as such. You should own the work anyway.