A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.
Make that some/a lot, but not all.
There is a clear bifurcation. A lot of those that never cared really don't care now, but then you get others that can use it to crank that much harder than ever before.
If you put the same brain effort in but leverage LLMs you really can be dramatically more productive.
It doesn't apply to everyone, but yes I know people who are over-reliant on LLMs and definitely getting dumber. With devs and non-devs too. I hate seeing this happen.
They cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.
Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?
We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion.
I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation.
So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
My employer has this policy. We also have a strong code review process. But it all crumbles in the face of developers burning out as management thinks we can move way faster and being overloaded with code that had little thought put into it.
This is the sensible option and well reasoned position, rather than a zero vote, total and complete ban by a single core maintainer, which is rather destructive for a project to do.
When you ask others that use AI frequently, the responsibility and understanding on what the agent wrote does not go away. You need to know what you are doing.
As soon as attackers are also using AI against your project, you have no choice but to use AI to protect yourself.
Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it", oh poor me, someone got a bug. If it's paid for through a job your argument is sound.
You can make the exact same argument with code written by humans. And if you were right we should see shitty bad code in open source projects like Linux, Postgres, etc. We don’t.
"Responsible for it" just means nobody has to tolerate shitty patches even if the reason they're shitty is because you neglected to pay attention to them. And if you blatantly fail to understand your own code or refuse to engage with reviewers, nobody has to trust that your LLM knew any better.
Well said. No one should trust an llm without verification/validation. They're just not good enough to do that and they have no sense of responsibility or ability to take it themselves. LLMs are empty.
The whole voting mechanism just exists as an elaborate dance that makes everyone keep their face, while the only sensible option wins.
A bureaucratic tarpit for bad ideas and emotions.
In a better world, none of this would be necessary, but we live in this world, and for that one, it's nice that someone engineered the system that way. Good job.
Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
If there weren't a wide range of options offered, there'd be a risk of it not actually reflecting what people want - which is, presumably, the whole point of putting it to the vote in the first place.
This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
August 29th, 2026. Debian votes to allow responsible use of generative AI. Human decisions are removed from strategic apt packaging. Debian Sid is ported to GNU Hurd by a "free as in speech" swarm. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Now you have seen both cases where a majority vote was involved to allow AI or not, vs a single core beloved dictator for life (BDFL) forces a ban without a vote to allow / disallow AI.
This is democracy in action. A fair and square vote and look at how well it works with no core BDFL to force in their opinions.
There are several occurrences in history that the democratic majority has chosen the "wrong" person/way/thing. Democracy is considered the best system but it's not perfect.
This will turn to shit because laziness will take over and comprehension will fall as a consequence of that. Junior will "contribute" and the seniors will eventually become too lazy to care.
What's next... vibecoding airline ADA code.
Save me lord jesus christ.
As an example for "responsible LLM use" (albeit not necessarily debian-related).
While doomscrolling HN right now, I have an agent crunching away at figuring out how to build a flashable TWRP ZIP file, because I could not care less about such android specifics.
Such use-cases would be blanket banned by some of the harsher options, forcing people to do stuff they have no interest in doing, for reasons that are at best well-meaning.
Which, in something volunteer-driven, is not necessarily a good idea, because if you're not allowed to do the work in the way you'd like to, you might just stop doing it altogether.
That said, if your work ends up shit, you still shall get shat on. Simple as that.
Note that he said written by, not assisted; and also that there's been some major QA issues with win11 the last year, enough for Microsoft to have made a public apology/commitment to improve...
So, no definitive evidence, but the rest of the breadcrumbs provide enough to say that yes it does appear to have suffered from it.
Given the Debian policy seems more geared towards aided/assisted an existing dev than replacing them and shipping because the code works on the golden path on a devs monster pc ... Well I'd still keep an eye on it but trust OSS OS engineers to have some competence at knowing if this works and adjusting the policy later if it proved to be wrong.
Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does
Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.
I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadership is demanding everyone be super reckless? But why would anyone with experience even touch those areas of the operating system enough to break them that badly?? The mistakes they're making really do not seem like mistakes that would be made by even the most rushed possible senior engineers. Maybe they're letting completely inexperienced people touch super low levels and that's the problem? Or completely inexperienced machines...
I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.
I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we have to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.
the entire industry is experiencing this as model capacity increases. How does "all projects get critical security fixes now" relate to "crap apps and loopy services by literally millions of lines of slop code" ?
I don't believe they had a choice though, sticking to hand written code would be backwards and eventually meaningless as people would just submit generated code as "handwritten", the coding models are quickly becoming capable enough for this.
I wonder what it means copyright wise though. To what degree is the code even copyrightable if it's entirely generated, even if you review and provide feedback.
I think most communities tackling this issue, or at least the open source ones, work on a honour basis for determining if a project is LLM based or not.
1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.
2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.
New policy boils down to "AI or not, it's still your code and you're responsible for it". I can get on board with that.
A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.
Linus Torvalds regarding the Linux kernel is reasonably similar. He views AI/LLMs as just another tool in the development process. Think about life before and after modern IDEs that features IntelliSense circa 2000. It was night and day. It did not make programmers dumber -- it was a new tool.
Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber. I personally know people, people whom I know for a fact were good programmers before, who have now completely stopped using their brains. When you ask them why they did something in the code, they say "I don't know, Claude did that and I didn't really question it". There was no such analogous phenomenon with IDEs.
> Except LLMs actually are making programmers dumber.
Make that some/a lot, but not all.
There is a clear bifurcation. A lot of those that never cared really don't care now, but then you get others that can use it to crank that much harder than ever before.
If you put the same brain effort in but leverage LLMs you really can be dramatically more productive.
It doesn't apply to everyone, but yes I know people who are over-reliant on LLMs and definitely getting dumber. With devs and non-devs too. I hate seeing this happen.
They're not dumb. They just don't care. They didn't before either. Now they just have an easy excuse.
They cared enough to do good work before, so I don't think that your explanation suffices here. From my observation (not just with their programming but in other interactions), it truly is that using an LLM has made these people less intelligent than they were before.
This is the way it should've always been. I don't care what tool you use, but you'd better be ready to stand by and explain the results if necessary.
Are there examples of anyone discussing this and reaching other conclusions?
We've come to the same conclusion in our organization and while it felt like it needed to be discussed and stated, I've never heard of anyone coming to a different conclusion.
These are unprecedented times, I think every single company on the planet is figuring our what AI means to them.
I think the dust has kind of settled though for engineering teams on: You must use AI for your work, and you must stand by your work.
The meat between these two mandates are still being fleshed out.
> it's still your code
I wholly agree with your comment, but is it legally "your code"? Copyright is implicit at the moment of human creation. But there isn't yet settled law on AI-assisted creation.
So it might be a problem for projects to accept contributions where it's not clear who actually owns that work.
This is why AI agent attributions in commits is silly (it’s really just a stealth ad for the tool)
Had someone at $DAYJOB just shrug and say Claude messed up when I pointed out a sql injection in the code in their PR.
It became explicit policy at the company after that moment that blaming the AI is not an excuse for shoddy work.
My employer has this policy. We also have a strong code review process. But it all crumbles in the face of developers burning out as management thinks we can move way faster and being overloaded with code that had little thought put into it.
Well, Debian has the benefit that the project has no trouble at all saying "no". Most open source communities have a difficult time with that.
That's the policy we have at my work. Use AI if you want, as long as people can review it and if it breaks, don't go blaming Claude, it's your fault.
This is the sensible option and well reasoned position, rather than a zero vote, total and complete ban by a single core maintainer, which is rather destructive for a project to do.
When you ask others that use AI frequently, the responsibility and understanding on what the agent wrote does not go away. You need to know what you are doing.
As soon as attackers are also using AI against your project, you have no choice but to use AI to protect yourself.
86Box is like that and I like it.
You’re also responsibility not to write crap PRs.
Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it", oh poor me, someone got a bug. If it's paid for through a job your argument is sound.
> Debian is open source, there is no incentive to be "responsible for it"
Sure there is. Contributing to open source is a privilege, not a right. Abuse it, and find yourself unwelcome as a future contributor
You can make the exact same argument with code written by humans. And if you were right we should see shitty bad code in open source projects like Linux, Postgres, etc. We don’t.
How is it different to hand written code if the author doesnt care?
Basically what you’re saying is that anything that exists outside of capitalist incentive structures isn’t allowed to have standards.
When I am at home practicing my musical instrument or learning to paint, those aren’t paid activities, so I can’t demand high standards for myself.
When Habitat for Humanity is looking for volunteers to do electrical and plumbing on homes, they have to allow unlicensed random folks do it.
This is not how life works at all.
"Responsible for it" just means nobody has to tolerate shitty patches even if the reason they're shitty is because you neglected to pay attention to them. And if you blatantly fail to understand your own code or refuse to engage with reviewers, nobody has to trust that your LLM knew any better.
Well said. No one should trust an llm without verification/validation. They're just not good enough to do that and they have no sense of responsibility or ability to take it themselves. LLMs are empty.
This outcome was to be expected.
The whole voting mechanism just exists as an elaborate dance that makes everyone keep their face, while the only sensible option wins.
A bureaucratic tarpit for bad ideas and emotions.
In a better world, none of this would be necessary, but we live in this world, and for that one, it's nice that someone engineered the system that way. Good job.
Good to see the most common sense option winning. Some of the other proposals were so disconnected from reality I'm surprised they were even considered.
If there weren't a wide range of options offered, there'd be a risk of it not actually reflecting what people want - which is, presumably, the whole point of putting it to the vote in the first place.
This indicates you might be in a bubble. I interact with people with a very wide range of opinions on AI and I’m not surprised by any of the proposals here.
Joey Hess is unimpressed. See https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/Debian_and_the_sirens/
> I lost a parent yesterday, and I'm trying hard not to think of the results today as having lost a child,
More than a little dramatic.
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
How absurdly naive.
August 29th, 2026. Debian votes to allow responsible use of generative AI. Human decisions are removed from strategic apt packaging. Debian Sid is ported to GNU Hurd by a "free as in speech" swarm. It begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
I followed the discussion on debian-vote with interest. I'm glad that the hysterical objections lost, as they seemed quasi-religiously motivated.
But it's an """ethical""" argument against it.
How can we use this coding tool amidst the general rising tide of fascism?? /s
I've literally seen people claim that using Claude Code makes you a racist.
https://bsky.app/profile/boxobark.ing/post/3mtr7j3tpok26
> ... hysterical ... quasi-religiously ...
I'm beginning to wonder if it might be the case that when my fellow citizens begin to act insane - might it be the result of foreign propaganda.
Now you have seen both cases where a majority vote was involved to allow AI or not, vs a single core beloved dictator for life (BDFL) forces a ban without a vote to allow / disallow AI.
This is democracy in action. A fair and square vote and look at how well it works with no core BDFL to force in their opinions.
There are several occurrences in history that the democratic majority has chosen the "wrong" person/way/thing. Democracy is considered the best system but it's not perfect.
What does "Responsible" even mean...
This will turn to shit because laziness will take over and comprehension will fall as a consequence of that. Junior will "contribute" and the seniors will eventually become too lazy to care. What's next... vibecoding airline ADA code. Save me lord jesus christ.
As an example for "responsible LLM use" (albeit not necessarily debian-related).
While doomscrolling HN right now, I have an agent crunching away at figuring out how to build a flashable TWRP ZIP file, because I could not care less about such android specifics.
Such use-cases would be blanket banned by some of the harsher options, forcing people to do stuff they have no interest in doing, for reasons that are at best well-meaning.
Which, in something volunteer-driven, is not necessarily a good idea, because if you're not allowed to do the work in the way you'd like to, you might just stop doing it altogether.
That said, if your work ends up shit, you still shall get shat on. Simple as that.
gross
I hope it works out better than Microsoft and using it on Windows 11...
Do we know that Windows 11 has suffered due to the use of genAI or is that just a random snipe?
It's based off that 30% of code written by AI quote from the MS CEO last year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-a...
Note that he said written by, not assisted; and also that there's been some major QA issues with win11 the last year, enough for Microsoft to have made a public apology/commitment to improve...
So, no definitive evidence, but the rest of the breadcrumbs provide enough to say that yes it does appear to have suffered from it.
Given the Debian policy seems more geared towards aided/assisted an existing dev than replacing them and shipping because the code works on the golden path on a devs monster pc ... Well I'd still keep an eye on it but trust OSS OS engineers to have some competence at knowing if this works and adjusting the policy later if it proved to be wrong.
Either they're using GenAI or the entire team collectively lost their minds and started getting a huge number of colossally bad ideas about fundamental primitives of Windows that hadn't changed for decades. Backwards compatibility used to be the major concern and now it feels like they didn't even know what would break ahead of time. If that doesn't feel like GenAI then I don't know what does
Believe it or not, I find it more plausible that the entire team collectively lost their minds — or more specifically, the leadership. There's a long and sordid history of such things that goes back well before GenAI.
I suspect their experienced senior engineers that actually knew the products have left, and they cannot attract talent like they once did.
I can sort of get how leadership has been losing its mind with all the ridiculous product launches and renames and force-installed apps and browser extension-installing malware, but that doesn't explain the countless instances of hardware bricks, critical errors like failing to recognize the C: drive, and other really weird and suspicious things that I can't imagine would've been driven by leadership. Maybe leadership is demanding everyone be super reckless? But why would anyone with experience even touch those areas of the operating system enough to break them that badly?? The mistakes they're making really do not seem like mistakes that would be made by even the most rushed possible senior engineers. Maybe they're letting completely inexperienced people touch super low levels and that's the problem? Or completely inexperienced machines...
I don't remember where, but I once read that all the developers that knew and understood the inner workings of core Windows components have left Microsoft many years ago, and that this is part of the reason that they introduced a brand new Settings menu and haven't changed Control Panel since Windows 7. I don't know how reliable that report is so take it with a grain of salt, but it does make a lot of sense considering what's been happening to Windows over the past 10 years.
I suspect they have used rounds of salary-based cuts to boost their PnL in the past, like some other large companies I've worked at, and that only bites you down the road because each time they do it they'll ask, "who do we have to keep?", but you're still losing experienced people and eventually you will get mid-level or junior engineers working on core code.
lol windows doesn’t need AI to be the dumpster fire it’s always been
Source?
The rumor is the opposite, that Microsoft has actually used AI to discover and fix common security issues at scale.
> common security issues
the entire industry is experiencing this as model capacity increases. How does "all projects get critical security fixes now" relate to "crap apps and loopy services by literally millions of lines of slop code" ?
progress of a kind
If they can't be bothered to write the code, can they be bothered to maintain it?
And so it begins.
I don't believe they had a choice though, sticking to hand written code would be backwards and eventually meaningless as people would just submit generated code as "handwritten", the coding models are quickly becoming capable enough for this.
I wonder what it means copyright wise though. To what degree is the code even copyrightable if it's entirely generated, even if you review and provide feedback.
I think most communities tackling this issue, or at least the open source ones, work on a honour basis for determining if a project is LLM based or not.
My predictions for genAI code in F/OSS projects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49203613
1. Companies will revert to closed-source and cease contributions to F/OSS projects. Their legal team will advise them that trade secrets are the only way to protect LLM-generated code.
2. Contributors to F/OSS projects, and developers who run them, will falsely claim authorship of the code written by LLMs.