Re: GCC LLM policy adopted

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On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 08:54:05AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>You seem to be assuming that my concerns are about incorporating
>substantial LLM output are about copyright law. They are not, primarily.
>For good or for ill, my working assumption is that copyright law will be
>rewritten to say whatever the corporations with the most money want it to
>say, either implicitly through the courts or explicitly through the sort
>of open corruption practiced by the US government. It seems quite unlikely
>at this point in time that this process will converge on an anti-LLM
>interpretation. Maybe the EU will succeed in being a bastion against this
>trend, but I'm dubious.

Thanks, this is liberating.

>Debian is more vulnerable in this area because we do not have the
>resources to do anything close to the level of code review that is
>standard in Linux kernel development

(or any at all)


> so I think it's reasonable to be
>somewhat more concerned in the Debian context that a practice of
>incorrporating large blocks of LLM-generated patches into packages could
>further exacerbate a problem Debian already has: Insufficient human
>understanding of the changes in and interactions between distribution
>packages to make good strategic decisions.
>
>I'm guessing you're going to rightfully point out that we already do a bad
>job at this, and I agree, but I still think that unsupervised agentic
>development (to take the most extreme example) would make that problem
>noticeably worse.

This may be perceived as trolling but I sincerely don't think the typical
approach of pushing stuff until CI is green and then uploading stuff until=
=20
excuses are empty is worse than what a modern agent can do (and they=20
should at least run linters locally), and I sincerely think that modern=20
agents should be better than humans at understanding our processes,=20
because they at least read the docs when those exist.

(I'm not the one suggesting unsupervised agentic development! But asking=20
an LLM how to handle an upload with a bumped SONAME will already produce=20
better results than asking some of our library maintainers.)

--=20
WBR, wRAR

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