Hi, On 2/24/26 23:14, Theodore Tso wrote:
Some anti-AI voices are concerned that use of AI will decrease the ability to gian seasoned contributors, with the implied concern that this is self-defeating because it restricts the ability to gain new members in the future. And you are now saying we should gate keep contributors that might be using AI as being unworthy of contributing to Debian? I'd say that is even more self-defeating.
I'm saying we need to define criteria:- Should AI-generated answers and essays be accepted in the "Philosophy and Procedures" part of the New Maintainer process? - Are we accepting candidates who are entirely reliant on AI to perform simple tasks? - If no, how do we distinguish between "might be using AI" and "is entirely reliant on it"?
There absolutely is a level of "using AI" where people do not have the necessary skills to adequately review the AI output, and where the best possible outcome is that they are burdening other people with these review tasks, and the worst outcome is deploying changes without proper review, causing other people to have to step in and do damage control.
As I said, from a technical perspective[1] I have little concern about seasoned contributors using a tool and reviewing its output, but free software projects can only accept these contributions if the cost of doing so is low enough, and that largely boils down to an established trust relationship and long time tenure in a project.
For newcomers, we still need to find someone experienced to review their large changesets, and that, too, is a cost for the project.
We already probably have developers in Debian, that are using closed-source IDE's because when Java programming they don't want to have to type long variable or class names, such as InternalFrameTitlePaneMaximizeButtonWindowNotFocusedState. Shall we run them out of Debian because they are using non-free tools, even though the output might still be free?
I have zero problem with deterministic tools. Replacing the data type of a variable and then following all expressions where it is ever used (the example you give in your other mail) is a common enough problem that such tools have existed for a long time. I remember using Visual Assist for that twenty years ago, and my expectation is that these tools still hold up a lot better than any AI solution today, work offline, and cost less for a perpetual license than the token cost for one invocation.
On the topic of token cost, I fully expect that to "solve" the problem of AI contributions in the near future anyway.
Simon[1] usual reminder that the externalized cost of this technology is still too high.
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