- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- linux@lemmy.ml
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I seen alot of people say “AI is just a tool” ngl There is nothing wrong with that it’s just a little overused
Time to fork Linux
best of luck with that
Why would anyone want a chatbot to shit code? If you need to reuse (your own or others’) code, use functions. Functions are the right approach, or maybe try subroutines, procedures or methods. Flooding code bases with this verbose incoherent mess creates a lot of technical debt. Who will clean up after Linus and at what cost? Should not weeding out complexity and fixing bugs be a priority over creating more chaos?
If your chatbot is shitting code, don’t contribute to anything important. LLM is a navigation, you’re the one behind the wheel, and ultimately responsible for where you end up.
I don’t generally take issue LLMs used as a tool, but I do have a huge problem with lazy slop slingers. I also don’t like that the frontier models are closed source and rent-seeking, especially when they were trained on copyleft code and by all rights should themselves be open source if they were respecting the licenses. I’d think Linus would have something to say about that.
IMO, a decent philosophy is that LLMs can be useful tools, but if anyone can tell you used a LLM, you failed. People should have a healthy fear of being ridiculed for outsourcing their critical thinking. Anyone using a ton of tokens shouldn’t be commended; instead, the quality of their work should be called into question because they’re likely using LLMs as a crutch instead of a tool. Commits by Claude probably mean the person didn’t review the diff to clean up the slop, and also probably didn’t understand the changes well enough to write a clear commit message themselves. I wouldn’t want to see any commits crediting Claude in the Linux kernel.
Edit:
I’d also think that if Linus likes LLMs and wants to see quality tech democratized, he’d be advocating for FOSS LLMs under the Linux foundation where all code and training data are open source. What we have now with Anthropic and “OpenAI” is the equivalent of cloud-hosted Windows, and open weight models like Qwen are more like Windows XP in that they can be run locally, but they’re still proprietary and can’t be inspected, modified, or built upon. We need the Linux of LLMs.
Hot Take: IMO, using generated code is fine, if it goes through the exact same due diligance as normal code. (unit tests, is the algo optimised, etc.)
Exactly, the argument that whether the code was written entirely by hand or produced by an LLM is the wrong thing to focus on. To see why, we have to consider how software development actually works at scale.
There’s a view that code written by hand has to be more intentional, almost has to be by definition since it requires the maintainer to actually put it in there themselves. That’s, of course, true but once a project grows past a certain size or it has multiple maintainers, nobody really has the totality of the code in their heads. So, any new code that’s added is always done with limited understanding. Code being written by hand should not be equated with it expressing the intent faithfully; if that were the case, then we’d never have software bugs. Humans make mistakes all the time as is clearly evidenced by there being no lack of buggy code predating LLM use.
I’m also not intimately familiar with most of the code in the projects I’ve been maintaining over the years. Any code I’ve written even a few months ago might as well have been written by someone else. When I need to make changes, I read through the code and figure out what it’s doing, and I rely on the test harness to make sure I don’t introduce regressions.
It’s simply not feasible for humans to keep the entirety of large projects in their heads all at once. When you’re working on a project, you’re constantly forgetting and relearning code as you go. And the situation is even worse for projects where multiple people work together where nobody knows what everyone else was thinking. We look at the code and try to build up sufficient context in our heads to make the necessary changes. When we misjudge that context or misunderstand existing code, then we end up making mistakes.
The way we judge whether projects are actually solid is by the level of specification and testing they have, the experience of the developers, and amount of usage they see in the wild. All of these same tools work just as well with LLM generated code as they do with code written by hand.
Farming out design decisions to the LLM without reviewing the output or doing proper testing will almost certainly produce low quality code, but that is no different from somebody just slapping some code together to make a kludge rather than really thinking through a problem. Working with LLMs does not mean farming out your thinking to the machine. What these tools actually do is automate the mechanical aspect of producing the code. Once it is written, you can read it, understand it, and change it as you would with any other code.
Only if you don’t care about your own cognitive decline, property theft, and climate damage
I feel like people parroting these tropes uncritically are the ones who should be worried about their own cognitive decline.
Such a strong science backed rebuttal.
I’m gonna go rethink my entire life now.
Being aware of the numerous massive lawsuits currently being levied against AI companies for their theft, reading research papers on cognitive decline in AI users, and being aware of where the majority of energy in the US comes from, especially for new AI datacenters, really does have a cognitive impact, but it isn’t decline.
As strong a rebuttal as a parrot requires. I also love how you lump together a whole bunch of issues inherent in capitalism in your complaint further illustrating that you’re not able to put together a coherent argument.
Programmers already spend about as-much of their time, if not more, reading other’s code as they do writing their own. It doesn’t mater if that “other’s code” is AI generated or not.
There’s an argument to be made about excessive vs not-enough commenting, but that’s not where you went, and its clear you have negligible programming experience, or creative experience for that matter, to be coming after the concept of sharing code like-so.
One wonders how many books you’ve read, to be pretending that reading a book without paying for it, even borrowing from a library, is theft. Stick with the environmental costs arguments - its what you are personally suited to argue, and far more urgent than the rest.
Lol. Way to show how little you know. I swear AI bros get the most butt hurt over provable stuff.
I’ve stated my experience elsewhere but I’m a senior software engineer, 20 something years of experience. I have actually created a neural network from the ground up for a previous company.
Programmers already spend about as-much of their time, if not more, reading other’s code as they do writing their own.
And how is this an argument in favor of AI code? If 5-10 percent of you job used to be writing code and now you dropped it by half, that’s not very effective of optimization. Especially if the code you now have to review takes more time to review due to it being generated by AI.
and its clear you have negligible programming experience, or creative experience for that matter, to be coming after the concept of sharing code like-so.
As someone with several years of experience as a programmer: fuck off with this elitist nonsense
Only if you don’t care about your own cognitive decline
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
And absolutely, people will probably forget the syntax by heart if they don’t type it as frequently. Personally, knowing syntax is not very valuable to me, as it’s just a means to an end. And whether that leads to cognitive decline or not, is really up to who’s using the tool.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
You’re the proof that it’s true.
Sorry. :D
Don’t be sorry, that poster walked right into it. Have you met anybody who actually checks code before just putting on production servers? Maybe, but the shareholders need moar monies guy. Proof-reading code is so 2010’s.
Firmly agree. I spent 6 years coding in python as a daily language, then I swapped to using nodejs for 10 years, only using python on and off. I went to make a basic script with python the other day and I had to look up how to convert a set over to a list.
If you don’t use it, you lose it is fully valid.
Not true. You came into the problem knowing:
- I need to process data according to rules
- Python can solve this
- I need a set data structure
- I need to convert that to a list data structure
- …
That’s the thoughts of a good engineer. You don’t think in code and you shouldn’t have to. Loosing your memory on the particular syntax is hardly an issue. You’ll still churn out a small program in under a day. You need to remember that people who really don’t know how to code take months for a product half as good.
Why should anyone seriously concern themselves with memorizing all the syntaxes? That’s like memorizing all the dates in History class. It takes so much bandwidth away from other concerns with higher payout. Go learn some architecture, some risk management, stuff like that.
That sounds like Socrates’ argument that writing would weaken people’s memories.
Saying it leads to cognitive decline is saying you can’t use an LLM and have critical thinking, which I can’t agree with.
That’s not me saying it. MIT, Harvard, and others have released numerous studies that show using LLMs does exactly that, reduce critical thinking. You can disagree all you want but until you do the science you’re disagreeing with a growing body of actual experts.
Are those studies in the context of software development? What are the tasks at hand? Do they evaluate critical thinking on matters that people actually care about or on chores? Were they instructed to use LLMs in a particular way that is equivalent to their personal preference?
You can’t pull a wildcard saying something like that because it’s too broad of a conclusion.
This is where you go look at any of the studies and start figuring out for yourself.
They’ve been looking at it in several contexts including software development, general problem solving, reading comprehension, writing ability, and more.
In some they were instructed to use LLMs certain ways, in others they weren’t. That’s the neat thing about so many studies being done is they’ve used a wide set of methodologies.
well, you didn’t link any and you’re the one generalizing it, so the proof is on you to provide. I doubt their conclusions are like you’re making them sound.
I didn’t link any because the internet exists. Spend literally five seconds on google.
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/15/1/6
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6097646
Their conclusions are right in the abstract in black and white terms. And this is just a teeny tiny sample of the papers that exist all saying the same thing.
Yeah, they never are. Scientific conclusions are generally a lot more nuanced and cautious than what this guy’s claiming. He only read headlines.
Sigh.
It official. Linus is a boomer now. He so old He’s destroying everything around him. enjoy the ride, folks.
Didn’t know you could change generations.
Kids have no idea what a “boomer” is.
Originally a reference to a generation, the term has shifted to point to a behavior exhibited by old people in general. Language is fluid.
People often forget dictionaries exist to quite literally define words and their meanings.
Dictionaries update to reflect current-usage. Millenials were also a US baby-boom generation, and my older three children, born mid-00’s, were part of a surge in births that made the papers. There’s good reason even your own link doesn’t include a date range.
Some are born in good times. Some are born into lots of company in their age range. Plenty are born-into neither, and the dictionary can’t distill all that into understanding without being vague on-purpose to leave room for idiots to grow.
Your perfamatry is quite obliqueto.
Language is fluid.
Never liked him much as a person, so hopefully it kicks him in the ass sooner rather than later
TL;DR
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
In response to
I expect maintainers who want to act on sashiko reviews to triage and verify them first before bothering authors, yes.
Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
Wouldn’t be a proper Linus post without calling everyone else an idiot.
I’m sure he included himself in that group
it’s a safe assumption that he didn’t given his track record of drama.
Didn’t call everyone an idiot, but he’s not wrong, humans makes mistakes all the time
Not a single acknowledgement of the environmental or cognitive costs of LLM use. Disgusting.
That’s well outside the scope of the Linux kernel policies.
The immediate external consequences of what tools are used for development?
Linus is not a very progressive guy. Alas, it is what it is. Hence the political bans in the LKML, who has votes in The Linux Foundation, where such foundation is based, the embracing of (Rust based) permissive licensing of drivers, and now this AI bullshit. Linux is not GNU.
I’m pretty sure the money talked, and in the next few years we’re going to see walls being put around the kernel. We should rethink whether the ‘benevolent’ part of ‘benevolent dictator’ still applys.
IIRC Linus is self-declared as “woke”. The exact quote is:
I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with. And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race.
Linus is Liberal as a pejorative.
He’s a political/economic pragmatist. If you have record of him promoting capitalism or bashing socialism, please share, but as it is, Norway is one of the dozen most-socialist-leaning coutries on earth.
Maybe don’t apply USian non-sense everywhere. Liberal vs Mamdani as a prejorative is relavent. Liberal vs Torvalds as a prejoritive makes about as much sense as saying the same about Xi Jiping, Kim Jong Un, Miguel Díaz-Canel, or Lenin.
It’s absurd, obtuse, and besides the point, every bit so as the DNC using identity politics only to silence, promote, or ignore real voices for change.
Ah, the liberal progressiveness. Not the seizing the means of production for the proletariat kind. My bad, I wasn’t being fully open in my past comment because I know the world ‘socialism’ triggers many in the technology bubble.
You can run a local LLM capable of assisting in software development for less energy than running a AAA video game. I’m not denying the environmental impact of the current AI landscape, but I kind of disagree that it’s intrinsic to LLMs as a whole, I think it’s more a symptom of capitalism and its disregard for sustainability causing everything it touches to have a high environmental cost.
Also, all modern computing has high environmental costs. I think instead of focusing on AI only it would be more helpful to engage in a broader discission on how computing can be made more energy efficient as a whole, and engage in cost benefit analysis of all things we use computers for, including but not limited to LLMs. We may well still conclude from that process that we need to stop using LLMs, in which case we should, but doing environmental protection piecemeal by independently targeting single things and not the entire system has been shown time and time again to not work at best and make it worse at worst.
You’ll hear no arguments from me. Let’s cut energy usage for a lot of things. Let’s read books more. Let’s spend more time outside. Let’s eat less red meat.
That isn’t some gotcha you think it is. A lot of people finding the alarm over AI have been working to reduce their carbon footprint
Everything in your first paragraph is contrary to your first sentence. Every single one of those is another argument, but using a turn of phrase and baiting was apparently more important that even making the first, best, and most relavent argument you brought-out.
The real clincher is that you then pretend the person you are replying to didn’t already make those arguments, well, and that you are disagreeing with them.
“This isn’t [the] gotcha you think it is”, really?
Bro whatever you’re smoking please share.
And his did you get that local LLM?
Currently, LLMs impact on electricity usage and fresh water usage across the world is HUGE.
The painful part to me is the choice on where to put the stress. Which areas to highlight and talk about.
Yes some weak LLMs can use comparatively little electricity. Yes some other industries use electricity, generate CO2 and consume fresh water, too. But the existence of other problems, to me, does not mean that eco impact of LLMs should be swept under the rug.
So, if one was to check your post history, they would find complaints about the energy usage of video games? The water usage of golf courses?
Or would we find neither, and learn instead that anti-AI is the only bandwagon you’ve hopped on because it is the most popular?
I don’t think its the LLM usage that is doing this I think using it is exposing what was already there since some people who use it are genuinely improved by using them, and not just the dummies, there are people who know their stuff, using them to do more stuff, and not showing obvious cognitive impairments.
I think its just that many people got to where they can use ai in these ways by single mindedly focusing on one thing which meant being bad at the meta skills involved in keeping brains healthy across different contexts.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but “is it useful” is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.
It’s implied to be included in ‘other questions’, and that whether AI is useful to development efforts is the only question being considered for whether to permit its use.
There are other questions
Not sure if that’s really _acknowledging_ the problem.
If he’s taking a clear position that the controversies over whether AI is a net negative for society may have merit but still are not going to be considered because that sort of thing is not the priority of the project, it seems reasonable to not lay them all out or get into why AI may or may not be overall bad. You can say that choice is wrong, but it isn’t an evasive statement.
Torvalds has slowly been slipping I feel. Just more cracks.
It seems like maintainers doing a thankless job in FOSS are some of the most affected by the AI mania
he has always been like this. god, he’s one of the most consistent public figures i can think of. nothing has changed except that now you can see.
