On Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:27, Christian Kastner <[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Matthias,
while I respect that you have principles that lead you to reject LLM
contribution, for the purposes of this vote, things like this don't
help:
On 2026-08-11 19:57, Matthias Geiger wrote:
Lintian complaining that a package has no watch file. An LLM might try
to "help" by writing a d/watch file. However, without context, this can
be totally wrong.
Yes, and this was realized from the very beginning, resp. a design decision.
LLM solutions have evolved substantially. The have been doing retrieval
augmented generation, tool calling, and do lots of other things for many
years now.
To offer some anecdata, the results I'm getting from LLMs are generally
high quality.
Hi,
I'll grant that there has been some development,sure.
If the package has no VCS upstream or isn't developed
anymore, a watch file makes no sense. A seasoned contributor will know
that and ignore/override said warning; an LLM can't.
Of course it can...
Here's a simple dialog [1] with Kagi Assistant [2] for ISC cron. You can
see the search queries it performed, the reasoning steps, and the
conclusions.
For cron, it generated a correct version 5 file pointing to isc.org, the
original (and inactive) upstream. Our cron still has version 4 pointing
to Salsa (because we maintain a fork), so it didn't just copy our code.
One could argue "but it didn't find the fork", but I asked specifically
for ISC cron (not Debian cron), and one of the searches included the
Debian package specifically so it's not like it missed something.
Again, I do wish to respect other people's principles and decisions. But
we need to have an informed vote, and for that we need to get the facts
straight.
Some models might be able to do this, yeah. This doesn't change the fact
that unless the model is constantly retrained (which takes a significant
amout of time and resources), it will have information that is out of
date.
Furthermore, it is simply not possible to build an LLM that does not
hallucinate [0]. This means that even if you get to 99% accuracy, at the
end of the day, I still can't trust the output. Which defeats the
purpose, if such validation is still needed. Then I can just go ahead
and write my own code; if I make any errors, that is on me, but at least
it is deterministic.
best,
--
Matthias Geiger <werdahias>
Debian Developer -- KiCad Contributor
GPG: ECBEDBB607B9B2BE
Links:
[0]: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-99965-9_39
