A Vote About Bots Is Really a Vote About Trust

Debian is polling its developers on how to handle AI-assisted contributions, with options that range from broadly permitting them to banning them outright. Whatever the outcome, I think this is one of the more consequential governance conversations in open source right now, and not for the reason the headlines suggest. The framing everyone reaches for is philosophical. Is generated code authored? Is it derivative? Does using a model make you less of a contributor? Those are real questions and I do not have confident answers to them. But if I imagine actually being a Debian maintainer, my problem is not philosophical at all. It is that my queue is full and my reviewing hours are finite. The bottleneck was never writing code Volunteer projects have always been constrained by review capacity, not by supply of patches. The scarce resource is someone knowledgeable enough to say "this is correct, this fits our conventions, I will own the consequences if it breaks." Assistants change the ratio between those two things dramatically. The cost of producing a plausible patch has fallen much faster than the cost of evaluating one. That asymmetry is the whole story. A project can absorb a lot of contributors when each contributor's output is roughly proportional to their understanding. It struggles when someone can submit a large, fluent, superficially reasonable change to a subsystem they have never read. I want to be careful here: plenty of experienced maintainers use these tools well, and their patches are better for it. The failure mode is not the tool. It is the decoupling of confidence from comprehension. Why detection is the wrong axis A ban sounds like a clean answer, and I understand the appeal. But I am skeptical it can be enforced in a way that means anything. You cannot reliably detect generated code, especially after a human has edited it, and especially for the kind of small idiomatic patch that makes up most of a distribution's traffic. A rule you cannot enforce d