Re: GCC LLM policy adopted

[Andrey Rakhmatullin]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 08:54:05AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

You seem to be assuming that my concerns are about incorporating
substantial LLM output are about copyright law. They are not, primarily.
For good or for ill, my working assumption is that copyright law will be
rewritten to say whatever the corporations with the most money want it to
say, either implicitly through the courts or explicitly through the sort
of open corruption practiced by the US government. It seems quite unlikely
at this point in time that this process will converge on an anti-LLM
interpretation. Maybe the EU will succeed in being a bastion against this
trend, but I'm dubious.

Thanks, this is liberating.

Debian is more vulnerable in this area because we do not have the
resources to do anything close to the level of code review that is
standard in Linux kernel development

(or any at all)

so I think it's reasonable to be
somewhat more concerned in the Debian context that a practice of
incorrporating large blocks of LLM-generated patches into packages could
further exacerbate a problem Debian already has: Insufficient human
understanding of the changes in and interactions between distribution
packages to make good strategic decisions.

I'm guessing you're going to rightfully point out that we already do a bad
job at this, and I agree, but I still think that unsupervised agentic
development (to take the most extreme example) would make that problem
noticeably worse.

This may be perceived as trolling but I sincerely don't think the typical




--
WBR, wRAR

approach of pushing stuff until CI is green and then uploading stuff until excuses are empty is worse than what a modern agent can do (and they should at least run linters locally), and I sincerely think that modern agents should be better than humans at understanding our processes, because they at least read the docs when those exist. (I'm not the one suggesting unsupervised agentic development! But asking an LLM how to handle an upload with a bumped SONAME will already produce better results than asking some of our library maintainers.)

signature.asc
Description: PGP signature