Comment by lucideer
2 days ago
A lot of people pointing out that Proposal A is untenable/ at philosophical odds with the widespread upstream LLM usage, etc. etc.
I think that's an unfortunate framing & I think A would be the best option for the opposite reasons. If they go with Proposal A, people will absolutely use AI tooling to contribute to Debian. This might be in bad faith (unlikely but possible), but it will also be done in good faith through a number of avenues:
1. people having a saturation of LLM tooling integrated into their development environment to such an extent that it can't help touching everything they code - an infrequent Debian contributor is unlikely to change their entire dev setup, stripping out, turning off & limiting various ai tooling configs, just to comply with one project's social contract.
2. some people will mislead themselves by reframing the social contract's stated intent to suit their own world view. Maybe they'll subconsciously ignore the "or other generative AI tools" & just avoid direct chatbots, categorising some other LLM assistive tooling as out of the scope of the ban. Or perhaps they'll reframe it in terms of generation: using LLM agents to investigate, understand & guide them in their work while they actively type out each line of code committed (occasionally copypasting from an LLM response but never granting it repo write access): "This doesn't count, right?".
3. Some contributors might simply not read the social contract carefully enough, miss this line, & innocently forget to mention their LLM usage when pushing patches.
And ultimately, that's all ok. That's the reality of the world we live in: the social contract is ultimately "social", it's not intended to be strictly enforcable, it's a statement of intent aimed at a community who are assumed to be (& generally are) acting in good faith.
LLM tools are great - they open up amazing new horizons of what individual devs can achieve, which is positive for open source in particular. But they also come with an incredible upscaling of open source review burdens & I think anything "less" than Proposal A actively invites a tsunami of slop.
The wording of "written with ai tools" implies generation, as do all the concerns about copyright etc. it would be beyond insane to attempt to ban asking a chat bot or an agent questions to navigate or understand a codebase, not in the least because that is completely unenforceable
> not in the least because that is completely unenforceable
You've completely missed my point. It's ALL completely unenforceable. That doesn't mean the directive is useless - it's a guideline for contributors towards a general project direction that will materially limit & reduce overt LLM usage by anyone acting in good faith (the vast majority). The enforcement doesn't need to be strict, but anything less than strict wording won't be effective in influencing people's behaviour.
IMO firm wording against non generative uses of AI or lightweight uses like tab complete will go beyond just influencing good faith actors to reduce llm usage - it'll just influence them to not contribute instead. If you make it clear you don't even want llms used for debugging, if you're a good faith actor that makes use of even the most minimal extent of these very common and basic tools, you'd rather just not deal with the hassle. Either you don't deal with debian at all or you don't try and upstream your changes. The latter is probably the desired outcome to limit slop contributions, but when you have the Linus Torvalds making clear that llms are a tool and that he thinks banning their use is absurd when it comes to the kernel itself, youre gonna cut down on a lot more than slop.
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