Debian Community Votes on Banning LLM Contributions to Protect Stability
General Resolution: LLM Usage in Debian
Debian is currently debating a General Resolution to either ban or regulate Large Language Model usage in project contributions. Proposal A argues that AI-generated code threatens Debian's stability, copyright clarity, and community health, while Proposal B suggests allowing AI assistance under strict legal and licensing guidelines. This vote aims to clarify the project's stance on generative AI to ensure the long-term reliability of the operating system.
Debian is not here to generate as much code as possible requiring manual review by a shrinking number of human volunteers, or to package every piece of software, or to rush new features, but these are what LLMs are used for.
- simonw
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.
- hkalbasi
> 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.
- Meneth
Gentoo chose to ban LLMs two years ago. They seem to be doing well.
- zzo38computer
I might su combining Proposal A (but only for contributions (to Debian) that actually involve the output of LLMs/generative-AI or that blindly trust their results) with Proposal C (for everything else).
However, in the case of item 4 of Proposal C, there are multiple kind of "assistance" that is possible; not all of them involve contributing the output of LLMs (e.g. the assistance might be to check for a mistake such as if a paragraph seems to be redundant or is incomplete or something like that; the result from the LLM might be incorrect but you will have to decide by yourself what (if anything) to do about it when writing your message). Even if some kind of assistance should not be banned entirely, it should still be discouraged (like the rest of Proposal C says). (Also, there are other programs that can sometimes be used for the assistance; e.g. sometimes ordinary spelling/grammar checking will do (although that won't find that an incorrect word that is spelled like a correct word in the correct grammar).)
I do not use LLM/generative-AI for any purpose, and would not accept contributions including their output into my projects, and would discourage other uses. (This seems to be similar to Proposal A and Proposal C.)
- rixed
> Documentation and translations added by Debian contributors
I wonder what fraction of Trixie already violates this requirement of the first proposal...
- russfink
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.
- mike_hock
I certainly hope they'll choose C.
- Alien1Being
Debian should completely avoid AI slop.
Let the Salesforces and the Atlassians of the world destroy themselves with poor quality vibecode driven teams.
Using LLM to scan for security holes is another issue altogether.