Re: GR -- Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

Sean Whitton <[email protected]> Thu, 19 Feb 2026 20:28:36 +0000

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Lucas Nussbaum [19/Feb 12:18pm +01] wrote:
> Could you elaborate on how you would use such distinction in ballot
> options?  I think that the core issue is the fact that tools generate
> content that is then integrated into Debian. I don't really see how it
> could be useful to distinguish between uses of such tools as long as
> they are used to generate code.

My point is that they have uses beyond generating code and someone might
want to vote to say to allow those uses, but to disallow including
generated code.

For example, if you use them as a fancy find-and-replace to do some
refactoring, that's not really generating code.  Someone might be okay
with that.  Someone else might not be (even though we couldn't detect
that a contribution was made using an LLM purely to do refactoring like
that, we want to vote on what we believe is actually acceptable).

> Also, in terms of terminology, I find talking about "AI" slightly better
> because it encompasses the whole ecosystem: trained model, inference
> provider, agent (client-side tool that interacts with the codebase).

It makes sense to want to include all those, but they're still the
LLM-based incarnation of AI, not AI in general.  So I would suggest
saying "LLMs and surrounding tooling" or something like that.

-- 
Sean Whitton

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