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Debian Deciding Whether to Ban Slop Plagiarism in Debian Development
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Diziet ☛ diziet | Debian LLM GR - Summary of the options
LLMs have finally made it to the ultimate stage of Debian’s governance processes, a General Resolution of all the project’s full governing members (DDs).
There are a lot of options on the ballot, and they all have a different structure and approach the question in a different way. It can be hard to see the wood for the trees. I have made a summary table to try to capture the main differences, both in effect, and sentiment.
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John Goerzen ☛ John Goerzen: Hey Hi (AI) in Debian: The Vote, Proposals, and Nuance [Ed: Slop boosters (plagiarists) want to tell us there's an anti-plagiarism ("AI") bias. Yes, that's right. Because plagiarism is a bad thing.]
Let me start with a hypothesis:
For human developers, using coding LLMs magnifies their difference in skill levels.
I am one that rarely thinks things are always black and white. Back in March, I wrote Artifial Intelligence: Shades of Gray. Since then, I’ve had more of a chance to experiment with LLMs myself. I also happen to work for an employer that is taking a very pragmatic approach to LLMs: teams and individuals use it as they see fit, but if they are causing considerable expense, they have to justify it.
In various settings, I have seen the egregious examples of Hey Hi (AI) slop we all know about. As I wrote in March, “I have seen it both waste more time than it saves, and save a ton of time.”
Thomas Lange:
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LLM usage in Debian
After spending many hours on reading all the proposals and discussions the best choice for me is NOTA (None of the above).
We do not need to create new rules for LLM usage, we already have our DFSG and our social contract.
Keep it simple, stupid. Avoid more rules!
Planet Debian:
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Debian’s General Resolution on AI and LLM
As a Debian developer, I have had to cast a vote for the General Resolution named LLM usage in Debian (progress report here). This was not an easy task for me…
It’s a good thing that the vote is secret so that people are not scared of voting according to their own beliefs. I have Debian friends on the whole spectrum of opinions that are represented here, and I hesitated twice on sharing my own thoughts for fear of alienating my relationship with them. But in the end, we all make efforts to respect the opinions of those who are not thinking like us, and it’s precisely that willingness to work together towards a solution that is acceptable by the majority that makes Debian so strong. So here’s the train of thoughts that I followed to cast my vote.
The difficulty for me was to reconcile the political statement that I want to make and my desire for this vote to not be (too) divisive for the Debian community, and to make sure we are not putting off newcomers with choices that might be hard to stand by in the long term.
A couple more:
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Colin Walters: For agentic code execution, generic tools + skills and sandbox [Ed: LLM plagiarism in code]
If your agentic workload involves the agent being able to run arbitrary code (like bash or equivalent), then you should not use a “LLM as part of your app” framework like LangChain, BeeAI, OGX etc.
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Gunnar Wolf: As far as LLMs go in Debian, I think that 936241857
I believe that, in the context of Debian voting, we are better off when we know the opinion of our peers, however, since the 2022-001 vote, it is no longer the case. Still, some DDs have disclosed the way they are voting on the 2026-002 General Resolution currently in progress, regarding LLM usage in Debian.
Late takes:
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Joey Hess: Debian and the sirens
Thirty years ago I became a Debian developer. Twelve years ago I left the project. I left because it seemed that the Debian ship had become too slow to turn, too barnacled with a series of individually OK decisions that each added a little bit of friction and a little less flexability. That made Debian strongly what it is, but prevented it from fruitfully exploring the vast possibility space of what it could be.
[...]
Unfortunately, one of the things that Debian is, is almost unable to manage packaging modern dependency trees. While more recent distributions like Guix can recursively import dependencies from a dozen programming languages' package repositories, with a result that is generally acceptable to add to the distribution, Debian's policies don't make that very possible for a program to accomplish. Perhaps some will use LLMs to do that. If they succeed, Debian will become dependent on proprietary software for development, while still needing people in the loop, doing even less appealing scut-work.
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Otto Kekäläinen: The growing divide between Hey Hi (AI) hype and software engineering reality
It is widely accepted that there is an Hey Hi (AI) bubble in the financial markets at the moment. The moderate opinion is however that LLMs are constantly improving and will eventually take over more and more tasks from humans and increase productivity. But are LLMs actually getting smarter, or just better at fooling us?
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Later:
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Iustin Pop: Hey Hi (AI) agents aha moment
Looking at the reactions to the Debian Hey Hi (AI) vote, I think some people still think the clock can be turned back, as if that ever worked in history. Rather than cry about spilled milk, I prefer to find a path forward in the new world. There are many ways to use LLMs, some of them are straightforward, others not so much.