Re: ungarbled and properly wrapped

Simon Richter <[email protected]> Sat, 25 Jul 2026 02:11:29 +0900
Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.devel.vote
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
Hi,

On 7/23/26 20:12, Marc Haber wrote:

> I still have to manually grep trough the sources of a package I maintain 
> to manually create debian/copyright files instead of uploading the 
> source package to an LLM asking for a debian/copyright file (and of 
> course sampling whether the output makes sense)?

Yes, because otherwise you are offloading this work to the DFSG team.

The problem with AI workflows is that they move the effort from the 
"writing" to the "reviewing" stage. Doing a proper review is more than 
"sampling" the output, so the "efficiency" gain of such an approach 
happens on the backs of other volunteers.

This is one of the main issues open source projects have with 
AI-generated submissions: it takes more work to review these than it 
took to generate them, in some cases even more work than writing the 
code by hand would have taken.

The role of the submitter then changes from a person *doing* work to a 
person *directing* the work of the volunteers -- basically, I can raise 
the priority of my wishlist bugs by simply feeding it to a prompt, and 
dumping the result into a PR. The actual work is then done by the 
maintainers in the time they reserved for onboarding new project members.

That is where the "loss of trust" comes from. I am happy to provide 
extensive feedback if it helps someone learn, because that is how we 
build a resilient free software ecosystem, but if that feedback is just 
going to be pasted into a prompt, it is a waste of my time, but it 
registers as an "efficiency" gain for the AI prompter, because my work 
is cheaper than even AI tokens.

> It could kill Debian.

People getting frustrated with reviewing slop has a much higher chance 
of killing Debian.

Obligatory remark: my main issue with AI is resource usage, that alone 
makes it completely unacceptable for me to use for anything. Any 
concerns about the negative social or technical effects are secondary, 
but I recognize that there are people who believe that the resource 
expenditure can somehow be rationalized, and who need other arguments.

    Simon
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