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

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On 15/01/26 at 19:44 +0100, Dominik George wrote:
> 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.

I don't think that AI coding assistants fit in the same category, as
they do not impose anything on other developers or users.  Can you
elaborate on why you think this is a similar situation?

There's the argument of the review load. I think that either the
developer should take full responsability for the AI-assisted
contributions and ensure through their own review that the contributions
are of the same quality as others (so there's no additional review
load); or the developer should clearly state that the contribution is
AI-assisted/AI-generated and can be of lesser quality, so reviewers can
decide on the energy they want to spend on the contribution.

(The second case happened to me in the context of proposing a change to
something in a language I'm not familiar with -- I can test the change
and review the logic, but not review whether the syntax is optimal.)

> > 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.

Note that most of the contributions I was describing are to
infrastructure / services code : https://udd.debian.org,
https://trends.debian.net, https://debaudit.debian.net.
I don't have much experience on using AI for package maintenance tasks,
mainly because I don't do much package maintenance nowadays.

> 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.

Thanks, that's nice.

Lucas

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              Re: On rejecting LLM-based contributions (Was: On publicly shaming people) "Sylvain L. Sauvage" <sylvain.l.sauvage@free.fr> - 2026-01-15 18:00 +0100
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