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WC Will Cooke Will Cooke An engineer who spent years as Director of Engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, leading the team behind the Ubuntu desktop experience, and now works on...

“I genuinely believe that if Debian were to say we will never use AI for anything, they would just drown and would never be able to keep up.”

Late Night Linux · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · September 2026

“I genuinely believe that if Debian were to say we will never use AI for anything, they would just drown and would never be able to keep up.” — Will Cooke, Late Night Linux

Cooke spoke straight after, on a show where the other voices had spent the segment swearing about AI slop landing in Debian. His case is workload rather than enthusiasm: maintainers are buried under bug reports and pull requests, and refusing the tools is the thing that would sink the project. It was the least popular position in the room, argued on practical grounds.

Late Night Linux · 2026-09-08 Listen to the episode → More from Will Cooke → More Hands-On Engineering Podcasts quotes →

Transcript

Late Night Linux Around 11:24 into the episode
Speaker 1

Yeah, it is. It's completely my fault.

Graham Morrison

Such a depressing take.

Will Cooke

Oh, God. I think in Debian's case, as in lots of very popular open source projects, there is a choice between drown under the never-ending sea of pull requests and bug fixes and comments and not even bug fixes, but bugs being logged. I think that the answer for these projects is to fight fire with fire and leverage AI to help them stay on top of the workload. I genuinely believe that if Debian were to say we will never use AI for anything, they would just drown and would never be able to keep up. And the people on the project would just go, oh, fuck this, and they would give up. So I think that this is an investment in the future of Debian existing, whether you like it or not. Well,

Speaker 1

I don't like it. And some Debian developers don't either. And they've left. At least one of them has left very publicly. And I think that this is like system D all over again. There was this big debate and vote and they went with system D and that pissed people off and we ended up with Dev1 and who…

Speaker 3

What I found interesting was I looked a little bit into the voting mechanics of how these sorts of votes work. There's a thousand and something contributors to Debian and they all have a vote in this. And so 600 people around that cast a vote, but only 450 were valid. And I immediately was like, oh…

Speaker 1

Feels very Debian to me.

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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