Reasonable policy, a lot of people are still gaining experience with this stuff [LWN.net]

Reasonable policy, a lot of people are still gaining experience with this stuff

Posted Mar 10, 2026 16:10 UTC (Tue) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296)
Parent article: Debian decides not to decide on AI-generated contributions

There's been a lot of people freaking out about "AI slop", but it's important to remember that we had problems with bad, low effort, driveby commits before LLMs came along :)

LLMs will (try to) do exactly what you ask them; if you rush for the first thing that builds and runs, don't be surprised if you're left with a mess afterwards :)

But, if you work with them iteratively - same as you would with a human contributor - making sure you've got a solid plan and design, cleaning up as you go, you can get very high quality work done with an LLM writing all the code.

You do have to spend some time getting to know their strengths and weaknesses. LLMs are still pretty weak at the design aspect - reasoning that requires thinking about an ambiguous problem from multiple angles and layers of abstraction. But once the problem is understood, they're quite fast and high accuracy at the implementation.

Not that much has really changed about programming. Someone's still got to be putting the effort in on all the boring code hygiene and engineering standards stuff - making sure stuff stays organized, documented, tested :)

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Reasonable policy, a lot of people are still gaining experience with this stuff

Posted Mar 10, 2026 19:44 UTC (Tue) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (2 responses)

Humans submitting realistic looking garbage aren't that many and will get bored. Machines doing that with budgets of several thousands dollars might be similar in principle but certainly not in the amount of damage they can do.

It's like comparing bow and arrow with a machine gun.

Reasonable policy, a lot of people are still gaining experience with this stuff

Posted Mar 10, 2026 21:23 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

What's worse, they compared humans working together to achieve an aim, and it only took a couple of saboteurs to completely ruin things.

Iirc they were reconstructing shredded Stasi documents, and found that a bunch of dedicated people could do a pretty good job, treating it like a jigsaw. But it only took one or two people deliberately muddling things up to make the others give up.

So if we've got big ABNIs muddling things up, the web is going to be pretty much destroyed in fairly short order. If we're lucky, they're going to make a big enough mess, quick enough, such that they'll go bust and disappear off the scene. The worry is they'll just become false prophets and conspiracy theorists, on a large enough scale to truly mess things up right royally.

Cheers,
Wol

Reasonable policy, a lot of people are still gaining experience with this stuff

Posted Mar 11, 2026 2:18 UTC (Wed) by koverstreet (✭ supporter ✭, #4296) [Link]

Honestly, I think people can use a good wake up call and stress test every now and then. Remember University of Minnesota?

People have a real tendency to get lax on engineering standards - "it's fiiiine, I know how everything works" - and get sloppy over time. *cough Linux kernel automated testing* - people like to go on autopilot, and that works until it doesn't.

But if you're using your head, LLMs are a godsend for all that tedious janitorial work that everyone likes to let slide.

And if you're doing all the work keeping the codebase documented, tested, organized, and you're migrating to Rust and maybe even thinking about formal verification, you'll find that the idiots with chainsaws have a hard time doing real damage.