The Debian project is engaging in a debate and vote on whether large language model (LLM) tools may be used in the development of Debian, its distribution-specific code, and the project’s website. The general resolution is currently being discussed leading into a vote on the subject.
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In summary,
Argument 1: LLM code is trained on stolen copyright, filled with errors, will mix up best practices, burns out our contributors, hurts the free software community, and threatens Debian’s most important quality: its stability.
Argument 2: Some people find AI tools helpful.
“just one more dpkg bro I swear we are going to get pulseaudio and systemd working this time bro just one more data lane, you have to do this or you are going to fall behind bro trust me”
I’m all for Argument 1. Also, it’s been scientifically proven that any sort of extended use to AU lowers your intelligence, and that would be the last thing we need for a distro that needs to remain a bastion of Stable.
Scientifically proven? Any sort of AI usage? Just genereal intelligence?
There are definitely some initial studies out already that point in that direction, but I think your wording is a bit overly broad and definitive. It will be a while until we understand all the factors involved and what is going on there exactly.
One of the most dangerous things about modern LLMs is that they rarely mess up in obvious ways.
They are incredibly good at making very subtle mistakes that look correct to non-experts.
That, combined with how drastically they lower the barrier of entry to creating functional software, creates the ultimate Dunning-Kruger scenario.
The amount of effort it takes to properly vet LLM-produced code is an order of magnitude more than the effort it takes to produce, which makes maintainers’ work basically untenable. The “solution” proposed by AI shills is for the maintainers to do the same thing, but obviously that suffers from the exact same problem.
It’s better to be broadly right than precisely wrong, and LLMs are fantastic at the latter.
I think we’re in the middle of another wave similar to the “code bootcamp” era. The market is getting flooded with a bunch of people who want to make software engineer salaries without having to put in the effort to learn proper software engineering skills or computer science theory.
We’re constantly hearing a more extreme version of the coding bootcamp propaganda, “Why go into debt $60k-$100k and spend four years of your life getting a Comp Sci degree, when you could spend just $15k-$25k and 6-12 months getting our cert to land the same jobs?” Now it’s, “Why spend all the time and effort learning how to write & understand code, when you could just prompt an LLM to build all your software for you?”
But in the end, people will learn that there actually is value in having a deep, technical understanding of the theory and practices of software engineering. They’ll learn that you can’t just vibecode the next AWS, Linux kernel, SAP, hypervisor platform, or firewall appliance. They’ll learn that it’s not enough to just tell a swarm of agents to maintain your code base forever.
But it’s going to be a very painful lesson for a lot of people, and when the AI bubble finally pops, it’s going to be a truly Biblical reckoning for the entire tech industry.
I’m not bothered that much: the results are observable empirically with how idiocracy people in general have become in the last 2 years (not that we as a species were a beacon of understanding before that).
That said, in terms of “just general intelligence?” I’d say it’s two intelligences that are hit the most: emotional intelligence and logical intelligence. Not necessarily in that order.
i swear to god fuck ai and llms can we just have one thing that’s not enshittified by them
i really do think this is something that should be brought up more, whatever ones opinion on AI there at least needs to be some things that don’t immediately jump on the bandwagon, as a fallback and control group.
like, fuck, imagine if our earliest ancestors had found some funny looking red mushrooms with white spots and all had a taste at once, our species would have gone extinct!
Those mushrooms are not deadly, they are hallucinogenic. People do in fact eat them for recreation, and berserkers used to take them in battle. Fly agaric is only deadly when its mycelium has been crossed with its sibling, the death cap, this creating a deadly hybrid. The psychedelic properties of fly agaric can be neutralized by boiling the mushrooms in salt water, do not try at home.
Wondering who gets a vote
These 1044 people: https://nm.debian.org/members/
Some of the people who work on Debian.
Feel free to put me in a cross and burn me alive for posting this, but I don’t see a single problem with AI/LLM’s being used in small things like bug testing a code and/or finding out ways to improve a code.
i mean… okay then, step up and stretch your arms out while i get the hammer and nails…
I highly doubt that you don’t know a single thing about AI, the climate crisis, the computer parts crisis, the datacenter/human health crisis and a lot of other things.
LLMs are not going to replace a large number of people.
But they are very helpful, especially in coding. If you’re not using LLMs in normal business development, you’re going to fall behind.
It’s made me a significantly faster developer, largely that a lot of the tedious work feels less tedious, and my projects are more polished.
You just can’t vibe too much or you’ll come out with an unmaintainable mess. There’s a difference between using these tools responsibly and just producing slop.
Everyone I work with who uses LLMs more than a little bit hasn’t gotten better at coding. They’ve just made bad code faster, with even less understanding.
It’s something like a catch-22. The people smart enough to use them effectively don’t need to. The people who aren’t smart enough will misuse them.
So you don’t code and you like pithy nonsense.
I’m a professional software engineer. You seem to have drawn at least one nonsense conclusion
Hacker News is over there →
This isn’t tesseract. I’m allowed to have (professional, informed) opinions.
Then do so, please.
Burn.
Yeah, I don’t think worrying about 450 new CVEs in the Linux kernel each day made me any faster… Or my life as an admin more comfortable… This and fine-tuning all kinds of spam filters, securing web forms, protecting the servers which all get hammered by scrapers… I mean we got a lot to do because of AI. But it all feels kinda unproductive to me. Like the myth of Sisyphus. Bur maybe some admins and devs got quicker shoving the boulder around thanks to AI?!
Like the myth of Sisyphus
And like the myth of Sisyphus, it’s all about self-inflicted pains.
AI is more like placing a downwards conveyor belt under your feet on the mountain. You get a quicker result, but that result doesn’t have you going anywhere useful.
Wasn’t Sisyphus a clever rascal who evaded death, pissed off the Gods several times and that’s why he got punished? I think it was sacrilege, not really self-inflicted pain. Unless we want to count rebelling against powerful entities as inflicting something upon oneself 😄
I wouldn’t say he’s clever if he hasn’t yet realized he has access to a kinetic weapon against any town or settlement downhill that he has been fruitlessly charging and resetting for ages. At best, I’d say he probably has built up mad upper body strength.
Weird how you don’t like Tesseract when it’s made by one of the admins you go to bat for and have removed several comments you disagree with.
You’re just like Patrick.
This feels like almost exactly like a comment I have seen before on llms. Are you cutting and pasting something?
Jesus Fucking Christ. Typing in full sentences does not make me an llm.
I didn’t say that. I asked if you copy and paste the same reply on llm critical posts.
