Re: GR -- Allow AI-Assisted Contributions

Bdale Garbee <[email protected]> Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:37:39 -0700

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

Russ Allbery <[email protected]> writes:

> I too am concerned about the potential degredation in quality of free
> software given the *volume* of bad code that people can generate using LLM
> agents, but the objectively worst software in the archive is the product
> of human ingenuity and I am dubious that's going to change.

I agree.  What keeps me from wanting to take a hard line one way or the
other on all this "AI stuff" right now is that in many ways, I see it as
just another evolutionary stage we don't really understand the longer
term positive and negative impacts of yet.

I started out in this reply to write out a long bit about my perceptions
of how software development has evolved starting with my own discovery of
a compiler for the first time, and how everything since has felt like
programmers moving up in levels of abstraction with various pros and cons.
But I think that's largely a distraction here, and perhaps best left for
another "Bdale, tell us a story!" style "fireside chat" at a conference,
or something like that. 

I'd love to see this conversation focus less on concerns about who is
or is not using whatever tooling to help them write code, and more on
the longer term support implications.  Things that worry me, like what
is the preferred form of modification for code written by issuing chat
prompts?  And what does a reproducible build look like if we someday
decide prompts are source code and there's a significant
non-deterministic element operating between the human expression of
intent or need and a compiled object code? 

Bdale

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