General Resolution: LLM Usage in Debian

Don't misinterpret this link as representing a final decision. It's actually three separate proposals which will be debated and then voted on.

Proposal A is "expressly forbid any contributions to Debian written with the use or assistance of large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools."

Proposal B is "The Debian project allows AI-assisted contributions (partially or fully generated by an LLM), provided the following conditions are met [...]"

Proposal C is "request that all contributors to Debian avoid the use of LLMs in their Debian work" without an outright ban.

Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.

This set of proposals, are (sorry) just stupid. It's like saying to someone, you are not allowed to saw wood using an electric saw, you must do it by hand. What are we doing here?! LLM(s) are just a tool. Use it as such. You should own the work anyway.

> A LLM (...) merely produces syntactically likely combinations of the training data

While doesn't matter much in the rest of the policy, this is a common misconception among AI skeptics. It is not the case for a long time (since RL is used heavily in the training) and a LLM may go beyond its training data.

Proposal A is the end of debian for non-english speakers. For those who don't speak english which is most of the world, using an LLM has become vital, because technical information is not available in their language or is extremely basic. Arch Linux is far more lenient with this.

  > Documentation and translations added by Debian contributors

I wonder what fraction of Trixie already violates this requirement of the first proposal...

What comprises “assistance?” Getting Claude Code to find bugs, suggest a fix, but a human actually editing the source files and testing the result - is that assistance? Perhaps this policy is as it says: a guiding principle that the community is expected to follow.

I certainly hope they'll choose C.

looks like the best proposal is the just the least bad

i think the line is: expressing that you reputationally certify its correct and its worth the time

Interesting that this makes no distinction from using LLM output and using LLM assistance. An overly strict policy is better than no policy, but I wonder if using llm for conversation and analysis, but not code/config generation, was discussed.

Curious what the "use" or "assistance" of LLM models means. I mostly use Gemini as a front-end to search Google without getting ads or SEO garbage, would that be forbidden?

Good so Debian will die soon or later.