// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Debian votes to allow "responsible use of generative AI"
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. The use of a generative AI
tool does not diminish the contributor's responsibility for the
work they submit. Contributors are expected to understand, review,
test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before
incorporating it into Debian.
Posted Aug 29, 2026 14:03 UTC (Sat)
by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
[Link] (1 responses)
I'm a bit sad it went that way, but I guess it was inevitable. Debian is too large a project to be able to meaningfully enforce a stronger stance against LLMs. So I think they realized it's pointless to make rules that you can't enforce.
Posted Aug 29, 2026 15:06 UTC (Sat)
by MarcB (subscriber, #101804)
[Link]
Posted Aug 29, 2026 14:20 UTC (Sat)
by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
[Link] (3 responses)
The rest of the options cleared that line and then it was a (complicated) matter of which one was the "least unfavored" among all voters, so to speak.
A handy graph that someone else prepared makes the result a lot more digestible: https://people.debian.org/~lucas/gr-2026-002/results.png
Posted Aug 29, 2026 14:41 UTC (Sat)
by mhvk (subscriber, #86585)
[Link] (2 responses)
Personally, I hope that truly open locally run models, perhaps specialized to coding, become sufficiently good that one can do without the large, closed-source ones (which to me are very problematic for lots of reasons; it doesn't help to come from a country that will be under water -- the Greenland icesheet melting completely is nearly unavoidable by now, and 6 meters of sea level rise is more than one can build dykes for; why these data centers are not forced to rely on renewable energy is truly beyond me).
Posted Aug 29, 2026 14:45 UTC (Sat)
by bluca (subscriber, #118303)
[Link]