Hi, I feel this vote is rushed. Yes, we had a few discussions on -project and -vote, but these barely scratched the surface, and they also do not reflect recent changes in the AI space.
On 2026-07-22 17:35, Matthias Geiger wrote: > 1. Copyright LLM output has very unclear legal status: it may be possible > to copyright on its own merits, or not; it may be affected by all of the > licenses and copyrights in the training data, or not. Debian Policy and > the DFSG require absolute clarity for licensing and copyright[1][2]. Software > and other contributions written conventionally by humans with unclear > copyright or license status are not allowed in Debian; > LLM output should not have a special exception to this. I dispute this, on various grounds, to a large part, but this is such a complicated discussion that this would go beyond the list. While some of the above may be technically true, I want to note that if these concerns were even remotely valid, no corporation would be touching these tools. > 2. Quality LLM output has many well-known problems with > accuracy.[3][4][5] A LLM can never "know" if its output is correct > since it merely produces syntactically likely combinations of the > training data. I strongly dispute this. Especially in agentic usage, code is very typically validated, run, profiled, etc. That's the entire point. Regardless of the above, coding models since last ~autumn have become utterly fantastic, much better than your average human developer. Example: like everyone else, I used to spend hours tracking down bugs. But today, being able to tell an AI tool - here is a massive codebase - here is the output I'm seeing - here is the output I'm expecting - find the cause and the AI tool coming back a few minutes later with - detailed analysis - a solution verified from multiple angles is utterly life-changing. > 3. Community Debian is a project that is more than just code: > it is a community built on shared interests in free software and solving > technical problems. I want to note that this argument could just as easily be read as in favor of AI tool usage. These tools have built entire new communities, have enabled people to work with software they would otherwise not be capable of working with, and they can solve technical problems much, much, *much* faster than any human could, and without re-inventing the wheel for the hundredth time. Best, Christian Disclaimer: I use these tools all day long, but have so far have not used generated code within Debian, out of respect for the opposition.
