Re: LLM usage in Debian -- ballot options comparison

Hi Bas,

On 02/08/26 at 09:28 +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> The "new" point (it was mentioned before, but not discussed much) is about
> human brains: the way LLMs are presenting themselves, is that they will do
> all your work. The way our brains respond to that is "let me see what you
> can do". We closely check their work for a while and once we're confident
> that they are indeed good at it, we scale down those reviews: they are
> boring and apparently unnecessary. But LLMs can do a lot of things right,
> and then mess up in ways that actual intelligence would not. So this leads
> to things breaking, unless you are extremely careful to avoid that, and I'm
> not even sure if our brains are capable of that.
> 
> What makes it worse, is that they claim that they can do the thinking for
> you. Brains are always looking for shortcuts to spend less energy, and
> thinking takes a lot of energy. So in the same way, unless we are very
> careful (and again I'm not sure if our brains can even do that in the long
> term), we are going to let them do the things that used to require our
> thinking, and we're doing it less and less ourselves. Apparently science has
> already shown that LLMs make people dumber; I think that is this effect.
> When we are very careful, as Lucas suggests, I think it may be possible to
> slow that effect. I'm not so sure if it's possible to entirely stop it, and
> it worries me a lot that so many people are stepping into this "trap".

Some comments about this:

I see the brain analogy as mostly PR (originally from Anthropic, I
think).

At some point, some people described LLMs as "super-fast interns", then
as "assistants". But I find that the analogy that works best is the one
of the exoskeleton: it's a tool that extends the user's powers, but the
user still decides what it does (unless they decide not to decide on
some details, which is essentially what they do when vibe-coding).

I'm not sure that LLMs make people dumber. My feeling is that the
problem is that LLMs make dumb/simple/automatable activities obvious. As
a consequence, when people try LLMs, first there's excitement at being
able to automate some of one's activities, but then there's Fear Of
Becoming Obsolete: if some activities can be performed just as well by
LLMs, what essence does one's job retain?

Note that this is a general problem with automation, not specific to
LLMs.  There are some processes in Debian that were mostly manual and
were mostly automated (such as computing sets of packages for
transitions from unstable to testing).

Of course, the fact that more activities can be automated transforms
jobs. The future of software engineering is probably more about
engineering than about coding craftsmanship: coding can be largely
automated, so what remains are questions about general strategy,
technological choices, specification and consistency with requirements,
design, architecture, test, verification, codebase consistency, etc.

There are two consequences to this:
1/ Some people are attached to doing manually what can now be automated
(similarly to manually repairing your car even if it's more time/cost
efficient to have a professional do it for you). I think that's part of
Johannes' "taking my hobby away" argument. As a volunteer-based
organization, it of course makes sense for Debian to respect one's
willingness to perform tasks either the traditional way, or the
modern/efficient ways.
2/ Mental fatigue: as the "easy" tasks are now automated, what remains
are mostly mentally-challenging tasks. I don't think that's an issue for
Debian as most contributors only spend a few hours per day or week on
Debian stuff, but it is clearly a problem in professional environments.

> Another related effect is that it removes creativity. I've heard from
> multiple sides that when people started using LLMs, all their works started
> looking the same, "soulless". Their games are no longer fun, their texts are
> no longer interesting to read. This may not be the most relevant for
> packaging (because a boring package is good), but for most tasks that LLMs
> seem to be used for, I think creativity is important and leaving all the
> "boring" parts to an LLM results in default choices for all of those, which
> is very unpleasant to experience as a player/reader/etc.

I think it's useful to distinguish between true creativity, and what I
would call "industrial creativity". Coding is often an "industrial
creativity" task, where one re-does stuff that has already been done
elsewhere, with some adaptations (to context, or change of programming
language, etc.).

Lucas