Re: Draft permissive ballot option (was: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian)

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Hi,

On 27/07/26 at 18:09 +0200, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:
> Yes. The difference is, that in this case, it would be something which De=
bian
> itself and some of its contributors endorse which would make me spend my =
time
> on other stuff and I think that is an important distinction.
>=20
> We are working together, sharing a hobby, collaborating in a common club.=
 It is
> important that we more or less get along in this club and that we feel go=
od
> when we work on something together. We should not feel that our contribut=
ions
> are meaningless because of how others in the same club choose to work.
>=20
> As I understand others in this thread, current LLM offerings are more than
> capable and would have a very easy time automating a lot of actual packag=
ing
> activities. Others in this thread have expressed fear that Debian would s=
tart
> dying a slow death if we forbid LLMs but would it not be the opposite? I'=
m not
> here to crank out as many packages as possible but to enjoy the work itse=
lf and
> the interactions with others surrounding it.

I believe that there are many different motivations to contribute to
Debian. Some (many!) do it because of the community. Some do it because
they like the kind of activities they do in Debian (the joy of the
work). Some do it because it's a way to contribute to something great.
Some do it because it's a way to interact with cool new technology.

You might not be here to crank out as many packages as possible, but
some people might be interested in the efficiency gains that AI brings,
because they think they could do more for Debian using it.  And even if
you think that those efficiency gains are just promises that will turn
false, some people would be frustrated not to be able to experiment with
AI in the context of Debian.

I really don't think that Debian would be dying if we accepted
AI-assisted contributions. On the contrary, I think that AI can help
busy contributors focus on where they really add value, and
semi-automate more tedious tasks.

If Debian banned AI-assisted contributions, it would feel a bit like a
retro-computing project, or a project around an esoteric programming
language such as brainfuck: I would totally understand why some people
find it fun to work on this, but that's not something I would personally
like to spend much time on.

> And for many things which are
> tedious and repetitive we should feel encouraged to look at improving our
> tooling instead of throwing the slop machine at the problem. (I think)

What about using AI to improve our tooling?

Two recent examples:
1/ I recently worked on debaudit.debian.net[1], a service to verify
the reproducibility of source packages. Then I added a reproducibility
dashboard to UDD[2]. Both of those developments were largely
AI-assisted. I would not have attempted to create debaudit without AI,
because the work needed largely exceeded the time I could have spent on
it.

2/ Several AI-assisted MRs[3] were submitted to improve the performance
of lintian on large packages. While they require more work, I think
that they are useful examples of how using AI to analyze our tooling can
lead to interesting findings.

[1] https://debaudit.debian.net/
    https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2026/03/msg00004.html
[2] https://udd.debian.org/reproducibility/
[3] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/769
    https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/770
    https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/merge_requests/771

Lucas

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