I will no longer upload to NEW

louwrentius

I’m still sad that Debian is now integrating (external?) LLM in the build process which seems antithetical to the core values of Debian (as pointed out). There is no alternative to Debian for me. I’m ready to justy throw out all my computers and become a goat herder at this point. PS I’ll remove memory and storage from said computers to pay for land and goats before I chuck them out of my window.

disiplus

I don't think there's another way. Everybody is being spammed with Gen AI outputs and the only even to it seems like a paradox way to fight it is with LLMs of some kind or go around it like what the EU is trying to do with watermarking and then detect AI and have different processing for it. I kinda think we could end up there, but we are still not there.

tommica

> spend my valuable developer time (this is my free time)... Lesson for us all is that if we do not own the thing/project/etc, things can suddenly change without our decision, and all time we put into it might become a waste-of-effort retroactively

monsieurbanana

I'm not anti-ai but I am firmly anti-make-people-read-llm-output-I-didn't-read-myself, and this breaks this. They also have a reward system that punishes people for ignoring the llm review (by pushing their submission lower in the queue).

cadamsdotcom

This is a strongly phrased message but the problem could be solved with an opt-out. Even something as simple as writing the phrase "No LLMs please" somewhere in the upload, that if present, prevents LLMs being triggered. Nothing elaborate and it preserves the default-on behavior the team seems to want.

baumschubser

i wozld not care for most other actors even in the FOSS universe to swallow their pride and put LLM into their workflows. However, Debian proved in countless occasions before that they can and will go the route that is right, not the one that is easy, even if it makes everything slow or cumbersome and I think thats a good thing and the reason why so many others build their stuff in top of it.

mono442

There's no point volunteering free time just to deal with slop.

boredhedgehog

So how often is this LLM wrong?

vconnor

Elsewhere in the email thread: Picking at random a successful and unsuccessful LLM-generated review from the dashboard, the successful review consists of 734 words (~2.5 printed pages) and the unsuccessful review weighs in at a whopping 1,535 words (~5 printed pages). I haven't tried to fully read either report, nor spend brain cycles checking if the LLM output is legitimate or not. I just want to emphasize the many orders of magnitude change in review size that's being generated, and that uploaders may need to spend time trying to review and understand in this new process. A bit rude to expect people to swallow 5 pages of slop to figure out why review failed. EDIT: made my comment more constructive, but originally asked if any distro has adopted a hard anti-AI stance.

frou_dh

I think some developers are kinda dense or something, and don't understand that shoving AI content in people's faces is simply rude. In recent versions of iTerm2 for example, when using the plain old menubar and hovering over some items, panels appear showing awful sloppy AI images. WTF? https://files.catbox.moe/5ivkhw.png - That makes me question everything... Was the developer always tasteless? Or did they get a taste bypass?

slybot

Related: https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002 GR resulted in Proposal E, Choice 5: Responsible Use of Generative AI. Clearly stating: "Any such automated process should be overseen by a human who remains accountable for its behavior and output."

Tade0

The company I work for has an automatic review system as a first pass. It became actually useful only with the advent of Opus 5 and its competitors. Nowadays it usually makes a few good points, but in instances where it doesn't, it's quite the stubborn asshole. This one time I had to paste a function from a library because it couldn't get it to its digital head that its assuming the function has a certain implementation based on its name only.

WesolyKubeczek

If whoever approves or rejects the package wants to use an LLM to help with the submission, it's their thing. Not for, not against, LLMs can be good "interns" a lot of the time. That said, the LLM presence and involvement should be confined to the team using it. "We don't know what it says, it is not a part of judgement, it may make mistakes, but here's a wall of text from it for you to read for who knows what benefit" is quite a dick move. Don't throw slop into people's faces like that.

viraptor

I'm disappointed by how things like this are (as far as we know) implemented. There could've been a clear page with reasoning and stats from backtesting showing the system is actually useful. There could've been a good framework for this review that makes it clear and succinct. I'm actually a big fan of automated early reviews, which are really good these days. But it looks like the team decided to shoot themselves in the foot there and both implement and communicate the change badly...

hypfer

I do not understand why people keep building these anti-human LLM systems. It just needs ca 5 seconds to realize "oh damn, I would not want to be at the receiving end of this" and conclude that it's probably a bad idea. Why does this keep happening? Especially since the idea of having such automated reviews probably isn't bad. But why mess up the execution like this basically every single time?

zzzeek

have two queues. one is the normal one with the AI review and all that, the other is for AI-abstainers, where: > I rather wait a year before my package makes it through NEW (yes, that happened) than have my strong opposition to LLMs be ignored and all my uploads being automatically screened without my consent. so those entries go in the "abstain-from-LLM-queue", where there is no guarantee of timeliness at all, and human volunteers can process that queue manually as they are available tldr just tag the entries as "OK for LLM" or not. it's just like organic and non-organic produce, it can be done.

doginasuit

This is a very relatable sentiment. On the other hand, checking code is one of the best use-cases for an LLM, it is better at checking code than generating it. It seems like the question is where to fit it in to the pipeline. The team responsible for reviewing submissions could leverage it to speed up the process, and still respond personally.

VortexLain

As somebody who's actually a proponent of providing an AI-review before human review, I think making AI review optional could be a solution.

joshstrange

While I, like almost everyone, doesn't love reading LLM output, code review is an excellent use for LLMs. You know what I like less than reading LLM output? - Slow PR review - Nitpicks on style, not substance - Async waiting for review or re-review after making changes, harder to stay in what passes for a "flow state" nowadays - A lot of a ceremony around straightforward changes We use LLM reviews at my company and it's caught things human reviews have not (as in in the early days we human-reviewed code and then did tests running the LLM afterwards and it caught things we didn't). It can review code at any time of the day and re-review it just as quickly as you can address the feedback. I predict we (my company) are less than a year out from having a fully automated pipeline for reviews with only humans getting called in when it touches certain parts of the code. We already have a crude system for detecting certain file paths that we want a human to review if touched and we tweak that list over time as needed.