Re: Ballot option: Debian is created by humans

On Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:27, Christian Kastner <[email protected]> wrote:
>Hi Matthias,
>
>while I respect that you have principles that lead you to reject LLM
>contribution, for the purposes of this vote, things like this don't
>help:
>
>On 2026-08-11 19:57, Matthias Geiger wrote:
>> Lintian complaining that a package has no watch file. An LLM might try
>> to "help" by writing a d/watch file. However, without context, this can
>> be totally wrong.
>
>Yes, and this was realized from the very beginning, resp. a design decision.
>
>LLM solutions have evolved substantially. The have been doing retrieval
>augmented generation, tool calling, and do lots of other things for many
>years now.
>
>To offer some anecdata, the results I'm getting from LLMs are generally
>high quality.
>
Hi,

I'll grant that there has been some development,sure.
>> If the package has no VCS upstream or isn't developed
>> anymore, a watch file makes no sense. A seasoned contributor will know
>> that and ignore/override said warning; an LLM can't.
>
>Of course it can...
>
>Here's a simple dialog [1] with Kagi Assistant [2] for ISC cron. You can
>see the search queries it performed, the reasoning steps, and the
>conclusions.
>
>For cron, it generated a correct version 5 file pointing to isc.org, the
>original (and inactive) upstream. Our cron still has version 4 pointing
>to Salsa (because we maintain a fork), so it didn't just copy our code.
>
>One could argue "but it didn't find the fork", but I asked specifically
>for ISC cron (not Debian cron), and one of the searches included the
>Debian package specifically so it's not like it missed something.
>
>Again, I do wish to respect other people's principles and decisions. But
>we need to have an informed vote, and for that we need to get the facts
>straight.
>

Some models might be able to do this, yeah. This doesn't change the fact 
that unless the model is constantly retrained (which takes a significant 
amout of time and resources), it will have information that is out of 
date.

Furthermore, it is simply not possible to build an LLM that does not 
hallucinate [0]. This means that even if you get to 99% accuracy, at the 
end of the day, I still can't trust the output. Which defeats the 
purpose, if such validation is still needed. Then I can just go ahead 
and write my own code; if I make any errors, that is on me, but at least 
it is deterministic.

best,