On Fri, 31 Jul 2026 at 12:00, Gard Spreemann <[email protected]> wrote:
> Aigars Mahinovs <[email protected]> writes: > > > You've missed significant exceptions that GCC policy grants > > I wasn't specifically referring to the GCC policy at all. I was agreeing > with and picking up on Sean and Russ' about the importance of > distinguishing between AI-generated code and AI assistance while writing > code. I should have changed the email subject, sorry. > IMHO the GCC policy is a well considered stop-gap and if we were to craft a ballot option in a similar vein, then refering to it and implementing close to it would be useful for building community consensus. And it would clearly signal the intent to review that policy when GCC does the same. > > - grant on changes below "legally significant" limit (~15 lines of > > code) > > Instinctually to me, there's so little to be gained from automating the > writing of ~15 lines of code that I'm not very worried about this. > You know the old joke about the TV repairman with a hammer? TV does not work, a repairman comes by, inspects the TV and hits it with a hammer, the TV works perfectly again. - Here is your repair bill, 92$ - Why so much, you just hit it with a hammer! - The 2$ is for hitting it with the hammer, 90$ is for knowing where exactly to hit Same with AI-generated contributions, especially bugfix patches and security fixes. The most useful of them tend to be way smaller than 15 lines of code, but can take massive effort to actually find the right place and the right change. > > and grant to on adding tests > > True. > > > as well as writing aids, including spell check, translation, > > speech-to-text and reverse and so on. They also make a point that AI > > patch review is fine. > > Spell-check and AI patch review are explicitly fine under my draft > ballot suggestion. Is there anything in the language that makes it seem > not fine? > Documentation (or even code, especially in comments) that has AI-driven translation will be "AI-generated content contributed to Debian" fully, same (to lesser extent) for spell check and grammar clarifications. One big benefit of AI patch review is that it often can suggest fixes for its comments. Including those fixes (even if that is only a 2-line diff to the original submission) will again be "AI-generated content contributed to Debian" and thus forbidden under your current formulation, but not forbidden under GCC policy. These kinds of questions are why the GCC policy was formulated as it was - these exceptions allow many trully useful AI-assisted workflows without legally significant copyright risks. -- Best regards, Aigars Mahinovs
