Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian

Marc Haber <[email protected]> Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:56:59 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 12:30:40PM +0100, Jessica Clarke wrote:
>LLMs and compilers are very different in their nature, and as someone
>whose day job is working on compilers quite frankly it’s insulting how
>much people want to say LLMs are the same for code. Compilers are
>engineered to follow input and output specifications and generally any
>miscompilation is regarded as a serious bug. LLMs are a roll of the
>dice where you pray you get something sensible out, and if you don’t,
>that’s just accepted as a thing that happens, and you have to pull the
>slot machine arm again after another prayer.

An LLM in software development will easily bring you to 90 from 100, 
while for a hand-written solution of the task you will be at 80 after 
spending ten times the time. And probably stop there ("good enough") and 
release.

Starting with the LLM output at 90, you still have energy to bring the 
project to 95 of 100 and then release and STILL be quicker than 100 % 
hand coded, 80-of-100-code.

Greetings
Marc