LLM Usage in Debian: Three Proposals

Article URL: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050859

Points: 191

# Comments: 173

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191 points · 175 comments · 查看原帖

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.
hkalbasi
> A LLM (...) merely produces syntactically likely combinations of the training data While 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.
Meneth
Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.
rixed
> Documentation and translations added by Debian contributors I wonder what fraction of Trixie already violates this requirement of the first proposal...
simondotau
Whatever the decision is today, it's going to become utterly moot within a decade or so. Think about how far we've come over the past three years. Programming with AI in ten years will be utterly unfathomable. It would be like showing Fable 5 to someone a decade ago. It will be unbelievable. In twenty years, programming by hand might be somewhat akin to writing assembly today: a skill that a limited number of programmers understand, and fewer still actively practise. Writing code by hand will become the new "I want to be close to the metal." Perhaps by 2050, the concept of a Linux "distro" will be obsolete, replaced by a GPL-licensed local AI that just directly assembles everything from scratch to meet your exact specifications. Instead of relying on a predefined package manager, it traverses a distributed network of trust to find suitable candidate parts, downloading and verifying every
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.
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 che
Kon5ole
Debian is conservative so it makes sense that they have proposals for not using LLM's. They'll need another year or so but I am convinced it'll soon be obvious that any "no LLM" policy is untenable. We are in the "cool new toy, let's make slop" phase, but we already see how careful use of LLM's can make high quality code faster and better than humans can do solo. Once they are over the learning threshold, every good developer I know actually likes to use LLM's, as they allow them to realize their visions faster. If Debian has a "no LLM" policy I think they will eventually only have devs who like to type. I should add that of course the "immoral companies burning too much energy" argument has actual merit, no matter how useful LLM's are or aren't. But I don't think Debian should die on that hill, as the only difference it will make is that we no longer have Debian.