Re: GR -- Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 01:54:38AM +0900, Simon Richter wrote:
> 
> No, I expect the people performing the simple tasks with AI assistance will
> no longer gain the necessary understanding to graduate from there and take
> on more complex tasks over time, but this has been how we've traditionally
> gained members.

The same argument could be made that with the advent of compilers, the
number of people who gained the necessary understanding that can only
be gained by writing assembly language has decreased.  For that
matter, when I was an undergraduate, I was in one of the last classes
that was required to learn how to build a general register and
stack-based computer from TTL chips.  .(MIT's famous 6.004 class,
where students carried around a briefcase sized "nerd kit" that
contained breadboards on which the TTL chips were mounted, and upon
which students spent the entire semester building a computer from
scratch.)

There were many people who mourned the discontiuation of this
low-level knowlege of how to program or create computesr from all MIT
undergraduates --- but you know?  The sky has not fallen over the last
two decades.  I've mentored new college grads that didn't have the
experience of building a computer from scratch, and they were not
worse systems programmers despite that critical lack.  :-)

> We cannot stop individual contributors from using it, which leads to point
> 3: it requires stronger vetting of contributors before allowing them
> unsupervised access, and a more rigorous review culture than we currently
> have for first-time contributors.

Some anti-AI voices are concerned that use of AI will decrease the
ability to gian seasoned contributors, with the implied concern that
this is self-defeating because it restricts the ability to gain new
members in the future.  And you are now saying we should gate keep
contributors that might be using AI as being unworthy of contributing
to Debian?  I'd say that is even more self-defeating.

We already probably have developers in Debian, that are using
closed-source IDE's because when Java programming they don't want to
have to type long variable or class names, such as
InternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState.  Shall we
run them out of Debian because they are using non-free tools, even
though the output might still be free?

Or how about people who are using closed source tools like Coverity to
make sure our software doesn't have security vulnerabilities?  Should
those be prohibited as well?

						- Ted