Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian

On Thu, Jul 23, 2026 at 09:12:44PM +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
>My points in this subthread are mainly that: 1) I don't think that a GR is the
>correct place to do detailed technical design [of safety nets]; 2) I think
>that it's better to ensure that people feel responsible, and to let them
>decide which safety nets are necessary for them, rather than arbitrarily
>decide that 'git commit' or 'git push' should be excluded from the scope
>of agents.

I have never written a ballot for a GR, but I would be willing to ask 
the AI assistant of my choice to draft a ballot basically saying

"Debian does not endorse the arbitrary use of generative AI tools, but 
we acknowledge that the responsible use of generative Ai significantly 
can speed up development significantly. Since we want our project 
members to spend their volunteer time making sense, we understand that 
people might be willing to use such tools. We do, however, expect that 
project members using generative AI will always review the output of 
their tools and not blindly use those results in their Debian work. We 
explicitly do not prejudice the problem of whether the output of 
generative Ai is copyrightable or not which is still being discussed on 
the legal side of the world, and delegate those decisions to the 
conscience and responsibility of our individual project members."

(and of course review the output before submitting the ballot).

>Which skill am I giving up by asking my agent to 'git commit && git
>push' for me, instead of doing it manually?

>Note that for 'git push', my personal safety net would agree with you
>(my agent cannot 'git push' because it cannot access the required
>credentials).
>
>For 'git commit' however, I routinely ask my agent to 'git commit', and
>find it very useful: after several interactions to design a specific
>change, the agent is usually in a very good position to write a detailed
>commit message capturing the various design choices that were made
>during the discussion (while humans tend to be more lazy and write
>shorter commit messages). And I don't see what I would gain (except
>potential errors) from asking the agent to generate a commit message,
>and then commit myself manually.

+1. Fully agreed.

Greetings
Marc