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Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people)

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Hi,

> 1/ Back in June I volunteered to explore if we could get AI companies to
> sponsor Debian with LLM access (for Debian development). This went
> nowhere so far, unfortunately, but several DDs contacted me privately
> (for example during DebConf) to express interest. So clearly some DDs
> think that AI-assisted contributions are worth exploring in the context
> of Debian.

There are also some DDs who think that GitHub is a great platform to 
host their source package repos, or to let telemetry activated in their 
packages, and so on. That some DDs think that something is good doesn't 
actually mean it *is* good.

> 
> 2/ Most of my personal Free Software contributions over the last year
> have been AI-assisted to some degree. Usually that degree is that I let
> the agent write an initial version of the code, and then I review it,
> and then either rework it manually or prompt the agent to rework it until
> it matches my expectations, or a mix of both. When they were
> contributions to projects where I don't consider myself the maintainer,
> I think I was always clear that the contributions were AI-assisted.
> My feeling is that contributing that way made me produce more and in a
> more interesting way, because I was able to focus more on what the code
> achieves, than on not-so-interesting implementation details. Also it
> makes addressing boring bugs in legacy code a bit more fun.
> So if Debian had a policy of banning AI-assisted contributions, I would
> probably just decide to contribute elsewhere.

Please be aware that your statement implies that you already willingly 
violated Debian policies: You added code that you most likely do not hav 
a valid, DFSG-compatible license for, and cannot correctly attribute in 
d/copyright.

So, if you think the existing policies are worth nothing and you are not 
willing to comply with them, then yes, contributing somewhere els 
instead sounds like a reasonable idea.

> - If it's about non-free tools, what about bug reports generated by
>    services such as Coverity Scan?
> - if it's about environmental impact, what about large-scale QA checks
>    and CI?

And if it is about whataboutism, then what about whataboutism?

-nik

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