Linux

Are Anti-AI Linux distributions practical?

It's not possible to have a 100% no-LLM-coding-involved Linux distro anymore now that the kernel itself is welcoming LLM-assisted contributions, but it's still possible to say that everything which the distro produces itself will not use AI.

How can AI commits be responsible?

What Debian means is: by reading what it produces and not just blindly accepting it but having humans review it carefully. The quality of LLM-assisted software is highly variable. Experienced people like Linux and Debian developers are much less likely to publish very bad slop than inexperienced developers who are newly able to make a thing work well enough to ship it.

I am concerned about the extent of Debian's embrace of LLMs but I still have a lot more confidence in them than most other distros (especially small hardcore-anti-AI distro projects lacking sufficient developer capacity to even keep up with security updates).

I expect we'll be seeing lots more things like this non-upstreamable-because-AI hardware enablement and distros like Nura (formerly postmarketOS) will either either adopt more nuanced LLM policies or be forked.

I am doubtful about if there will be any serious distros with hard LLM bans in a few years from now. But also, perhaps the bubble will have burst by then, so hosted inference won't be so cheap and the use of LLMs will probably be quite different.

the primary reason is AI is a thief

This is not the primary reason for most people, I don't think. I think the fact that it increases complexity while reducing human understanding is the biggest problem; it's possible (easy even) now to produce mountains of good-enough-by-many-metrics source code which the person doing the prompting has very little comprehension of. The fact that it is also a plagiarism machine is far less of a problem than this. (There are a litany of other problems too of course, several others of which I would also rate as worse than the plagiarism aspect.)