Deeply disappointing. I was hoping it would be a refuge from AI infection.
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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I will wait to see if it actually comes at the detriment of the program.
from my POV Debian has fallen already.
I hope either Alpine does not commit the same mistake or Chimera becomes a major distro.
This is disappointing.. It would have been good to have at least one major distro that was AI free
This is a very hard decision to reverse out of if it turns out to be a problem in a few years
The good news is that it could roll back to the current stable Trixie at any point
It's pretty much the same policy as the Linux kernel, but still disappointing.
I've been dumping things left and right as they decide Claude is their buddy, and that won't stop because the same idiots who dropped decent init systems for that RedHat tech bro's mess decided not to block it.
The Linux kernel project forces LLMs on all the devs.
At least the kernel requires disclosure of AI use. The new Debian "policy" doesn't even require that.
I am most concerned about that. If the legal position on copyright of AI code is decided in the future an audit or tracking of AI contributions in the codebase may be necessary to understand risk and exposure.
Granted you can't make people disclose AI assistance with 100% accuracy but I would expect a majority to comply.
Alright, what are the alternatives folks?
Gentoo? Gentoo!
(But I'll keep watch to see of they don't revert course because "the models are now too powerful", since it is a policy from 2024)
The policy
Gentoo Council has voted on 2024-04-14 on the following policy:
It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case be made for such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.
This policy affects Gentoo contributions and the official Gentoo projects. It does not prohibit adding packages for AI-related software or software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream.
Contributors are expected to understand, review, test, and, where appropriate, modify AI-assisted output before incorporating it into Debian. Blindly accepting or uploading AI-generated material without appropriate human review is inconsistent with Debian's established development practices. We [encourage] our contributors to disclose whether a contribution was made with AI [assistance], but do not require them to do so.
And how are they (Debian) going to to make sure this happens?
That last bit is a bad idea
I agree. Disclosure of A.I. use should be mandatory.
My main concern with A.I. use is its ability to hide incompetence. If a new agent introduces code that was entirely written by illegal-software that violates copyright law--A.I.--then that should be made clear, even if competent-programmers review the new inclusion and approve of it. Otherwise people are left with the impression that this new agent is a competent programmer. A.I. use--undisclosed--creates false reputations.
The disclosure being encouraged and not mandatory is purely to protect the egos of programmers currently utilizing A.I. products.
However I do respect their decision and I maintain projects should be self governing.
I disagree. For one, it's unenforceable, just like outright banning it.
But AI assistance can also mean a lot of different things, from outright vibecoding through autocomplete up to only asking it to so review. It diminishes the human work in the eyes of other people, because a simple disclaimer doesn't distinguish between the work done, and also encourages people to point out to AI as a scapegoat for their mistakes.
Good code always was and should always be one where a human is fully responsible for it; if you decide to vibecode and happens to end up with perfect code, good; if you write it fully yourself but it's crap it doesn't absolve you that you didn't use AI...
It's a tool, so use it responsibly like any other tool and stand behind your code no matter what tools you used.
I do respect their decision and I maintain projects should be self governing.
Me too, but I also think that governance isn't as simple as "we get to decide what we do", it also interacts with how well the decision-makers understand their domain and their broader it sits in, both of which are potentially reduced as a consequence of relying on AI.
Also there is the possibility of AI tools dominating workflows and then getting ripped away (either as the corporates raise costs, or the bubble bursts and they collapse), leaving a project overwhelmed with a unmanageably large array of weaknesses. In that scenario self-governance starts to become irrelevant.
I trust their judgement here. I hope this is the right call.
char strawberry = "r"
I have 2 installations of debian that will now be deleted.
In favour of what? The kernel itself is now worked on with ai tooling. I don't see how you can get away from it...
There is still NetBSD with its clear "no AI code allowed" stance out there...
I am not against AI useage, but having it slowly creeping into every project is concerning.
Is there already a list of distributions / projects out there that decided against it's useage?
by going elsewhere i imagine
linus's will be linus's eh
I had debian installed as back up distro's, just for something that wasn't arch based. The debian partitions were deleted from the arch based distro's installed on both pc's today. I was waiting to see which way debian was heading on this, but was fairly certain they were going to shit due to the choices that were being voted on, and how none of them appeared to be anti-ai. They seemed deliberately verbose knowing that most people scan text at best these days.
Time to look around again I guess, I've never looked into BSD, Hurd, Solaris... https://distrowatch.com/search.php
please don't downvote me jensen huang/sam altman/pedophile pope trump/alex carp/emperor palpatine/elon musk. omg.
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