Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian

Hi,

On 22/07/26 at 17:35 +0200, Matthias Geiger wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> What follows is a GR proposal to ban LLM contributions.
> 
> It is time for Debian to make a statement regarding generative AI and LLM usage.
> Since this has been discussed in exhaustive detail on -private and -project,
> the proposal follows below without any further discussion.
> 
> 
> BEGIN PROPOSAL
> 
> 
> Preamble
> ===========
> 
> This proposal aims to expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with
> the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools.
> 
> The scope of this GR is (non-exhaustive): - Debian source packages
> - Official Debian project software, such as lintian

You should probably add here "or Debian infrastructure software"

For context, most of my recent Debian contributions on infrastructure
software were AI-assisted, including debaudit.debian.net, various
changes to udd.debian.org (duck importer and dashboard, salsa importer
and dashboard, reproducibility dashboard), and various changes to
trends.debian.net. I understand that all of those would not be welcomed
under this policy, but I believe that this desserves explicit
clarification since Debian infrastructure software is an area where the
Debian project does a lot of software development.

> - Debian web resources - Documentation and translations added by Debian
> contributors
> - Official communication from Debian

And maybe also:
- Bug reports and other communications between developers

For context, I've had rather successful experiments with using AI to
analyze bugs and build better reports. A recent example is #1142332.
Again, I suppose that this is not acceptable from your point of view,
but believe that explicit clarification is useful.

Lucas