General Resolution: LLM Usage in Debian

zzdw about 4 hours ago 36 commentsRead Article on debian.org

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Discussion (36 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

simonw•37 minutes ago

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.

clcaev•27 minutes ago

Of the 3 proposals, the 2nd/B seems to be more of an “informed consent” model while the other two are seeking a comprehensive exclusion. I hope earnest dialogue and driving to a broad consensus among significant contributors is forthcoming.

Notable are the endorsements, which are balanced over all three options, perhaps indicating only 1/3 are supportive of a more permissive position. If this represents core contributors, this could be worrisome: a clear majority favoring a exclusion, but yet a sizable portion of contributors who don’t want a ban. Losing 1/3 of core contributors would be a significant loss to the project.

smellf•14 minutes ago

I wonder how they can reconcile the stricter proposals with the LLM usage in kernel development. That seems totally untenable. I mean it all seems untenable, but with the kernel especially.

Also, what about when you inevitably get a situation where a critical vulnerability is discovered, and the only patch available is LLM generated? Do they have to wait to patch until some person who hasn't seen the LLM-generated patch does a clean room implementation?

I understand the objections to LLMs, but rejecting LLM-generated code really doesn't seem realistic.

simonw•10 minutes ago

Kernel development is excluded from this, because it's covered by "Upstream projects using LLMs for development".

On security, I worry that proposal A's "forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models", as written, excludes contributions where the LLM assisted in discovering the vulnerability. That's clearly a bad policy, and they should update their wording to clarify that.

bradfa•9 minutes ago

The proposals which say no LLM generated code mean just for Debian, if upstream allows it then they will still accept it. It’s just contributions to Debian itself which would prohibit or discourage LLM contributions.

Meneth•14 minutes ago

Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.

prologic•32 minutes ago

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.

sanxiyn•30 minutes ago

It's more like: food processing tool A is known to be defective. We ask employees of this restaurant and supply chains to avoid food processing tool A. This seems eminently reasonable. The question is whether the tool is in fact defective.

dataflow•16 minutes ago

> 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.

Stupid? Since when has there been a difference in copyright status with electric vs. hand saws?

hkalbasi•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

aabhay•37 minutes ago

I think the questionable term is not “syntactically likely” but “merely”. Syntactical likeness is a vast solution space that encompasses the work of a terrible developer and a genius developer. In fact this solution space is a gap wide enough to encompass all coding knowledge and expertise.

alightsoul•39 minutes ago

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.

aabhay•31 minutes ago

Un what? There’s several friendly clauses among these proposals including

> 8. Any contributor who feels they cannot write in English without assistance, may write in their native language, and expect readers to use translation tools of their choice. In that case a human-written English summary would be very welcome but is not required. In any case we promise not to shame anyone for any linguistic mistakes.

sanxiyn•29 minutes ago

That is Proposal C, not Proposal A. (Although I do think Proposal A as written also does not forbid translation usage to communicate.)

clcaev•14 minutes ago

As an aside, as an English speaker, I have found round-tripping documentation to a foreign language and back is a lovely way to identify inadvertent colloquial expressions, words that are needlessly complex, and unnecessarily complicated phrasing. Conversely, text that survives the round trip is often boring but clear enough.

sanxiyn•32 minutes ago

I don't believe Proposal A forbids this usage.

alightsoul•26 minutes ago

I would say it leaves communication between individuals in a gray area. And discourages translation work because it has to be done manually. I would say, LLM-translated text on documentation is better than having an LLM translate it again and again on the fly every time someone asks how to do something, because the LLM-translated text can be corrected for everyone to see, whereas conversations with LLMs stay private by default.

sanxiyn•23 minutes ago

For now, I find the quality of LLM translation highly inadequate, I can do much better, and LLMs agree my translation is much better. So I think "no LLM for official documentation" could be a right call, for now. It should be re-evaluated as LLM translation advances.

Barrin92•15 minutes ago

this doesn't prevent you from reading documentation in whatever language you like. If you're saying this is the end of someone communicating with you through an LLM despite not speaking the language, that should never happen and I've never been in any technical organization where that was considered appropriate, if you want to work in international software projects you need to have at least a functional grasp of English

alightsoul•12 minutes ago

most documentation is not translated to spanish, for example. working on international projects is the exception, not the rule. Spanish speakers just use LLMs because searching on google in spanish yields no results, because the info they need is in english so google doesn't show it to spanish speakers or by searching it in spanish. Spanish speakers have their search result language set to spanish by default based on IP location and most never change it to english, where the results are far more detailed, and then they almost never search in english.

rixed•about 2 hours ago

  > Documentation and translations added by Debian contributors

I wonder what fraction of Trixie already violates this requirement of the first proposal...

russfink•about 1 hour ago

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•about 1 hour ago

I certainly hope they'll choose C.

accountrequired•24 minutes ago

looks like the best proposal is the just the least bad

sanxiyn•22 minutes ago

What do you think is the best proposal?

carterschonwald•about 1 hour ago

i think the line is: expressing that you reputationally certify its correct and its worth the time

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

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.

aabhay•30 minutes ago

I’m curious what makes you believe that this distinction is precise or meaningful. What exactly is the difference?

dismalaf•about 1 hour ago

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?

Narishma•about 1 hour ago

Even if they wanted to forbid that, how would they even detect it?

RodgerTheGreat•42 minutes ago

Asking for good-faith compliance, and failing that, simply waiting for slop enthusiasts to publicly brag about using LLMs to break the rules. All evidence suggests that it is impossible for slop enthusiasts to resist outing themselves for any significant span of time.

mt42or•about 2 hours ago

Good so Debian will die soon or later.

ahofmann•about 2 hours ago

Are you aware, that a very big chunk of Linux distributions like Ubuntu are build in top of Debian?

Why do you want Debian to die?

numpad0•about 1 hour ago

The fact that some react to these like they were taken away some possession is genuinely interesting

TZubiri•about 2 hours ago

By Lindy effect, debian has a life expectancy of 25 more years