I love how people with a fraction of his development experience are shitting on him now because his opinion on an aspect of development doesn’t align with theirs.
Won’t anyone think of the environment or small communities? AI is a nice-to-have, not an essential. We need to stop developing technology without thinking long term about the world we live in. We can’t use the “oh we didn’t know” excuse anymore.
Global solar generation has increased by 50% in the last 2 years, meanwhile a token is something like 900 times less energy consuming than it was a year ago?
Something comes first, almost free energy and deeply embedded ai usage or total environmental collapse, capitalism deems that we will find out which in due course.
Why does everyone who starts using AI always devolve into posting like this?
it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore. You get to have results without putting in any work of your own. In corpo-world where everything is a metric, outputting massive amounts of code quickly and effortlessly is a great thing. For the others who actually enjoy making something it’s a useless tool.
It’s really weird when people with a kink try to push that kink on everyone else and they act like everyone else is wrong for building their entire persona around the kink. We get it, you really love hand crafting your code, line by line character by character, but I don’t need that to enjoy coding. I like producing useful things and then working on ways to make them even more useful. I have hand crafted enough widgets and thingamabobs that I don’t need to personally fondle another one into existence. I don’t need to be an expert at yet another language that will be obsolete well before I retire. When I was a young lad I could get off a really good wank to the bra section of the Woolworths catalog, but not so much anymore. That doesn’t mean I am burnt out or that I don’t like a good wank anymore, but frankly I would prefer someone with a pretty face and soft hands to yank on my dick for me. Have you never worked with or trained junior programmers before? I guarantee you that the nonsense a junior can produce is much worse than the crazed hallucinations of some AI.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, like the destruction of the dev experience pipeline… but shitting on people who manage to find ways to use AI is not really helping your crusade.
I generally try to avoid using AI for my hobby projects, but I think there is still a niche for it in working out issues that take a disproportionate amount of time to track down manually relative to the scale of the fix. Things like a subtle typo somewhere or missing some hyperspecific nuance of whatever stack I’m working with. In those particular cases I would say it actually enhances my own creative ability insofar as I don’t need to spend hours of effort banging my head against a wall until I eventually figure out what went wrong, and I can put that time and mental energy into the stuff that’s actually interesting to me.
But yes, in general I do agree it’s kind of useless otherwise for creative endeavors or passion projects. It’s great for helping with code being written solely for a paycheck, but for personal projects it largely defeats the purpose of working on them in the first place. I think the trouble is that in general AI does make a lot of things easier and I have a lot of anxiety about getting into the habit of overusing it in that way, so I try to keep it as a sort of last resort.
That’s pretty accurate, but only the good case. Burnt out programmers still have some kind of system understanding and some kind of leftover appreciation for good software architecture, they’ve just been battered down by years of the stupidest requirements, deadlines and incompetent management. Even with AI they usually keep a hand on the wheel and aren’t particularly set on always using it for everything. Maybe they’ll even start advocating for AI because they can’t imagine anyone using it in a different way than they do.
The bad case is all the people who never cared about anything to begin with and aren’t any more emotionally attached to writing code than they are to filling out an excel sheet. That’s the kind of people that will absolutely derail an entire project by vibecoding it into the ground and then arguing for every single thing Claude changed. “You have to be able to understand/code this yourself” does stop them dead and they will piss and shit themselves because they can’t do anything and aren’t used to feeling stupid.Tbh I mostly like no-AI policies because it’s funny to see those meltdowns 🤷
Maybe because when they actually try them out they’re discovering that AI coding agents are pretty good?
Probably because they get pissed off by the illogical anti-AI crazies.
Lol, I could kind of understand (not really support) his use of AI. While I doubt it’s something you can do for long without starting to make compromises, people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode and (more importantly) their willpower slowly runs out.
But this argument made me loose all my respect for him. It’s so utterly stupid. I hate it when i have to check my assembly code line by line, because it’s not guaranteed that the compiler will compile the same code I’ve written deterministically, and basically just randomizes what it outputs. Or when my editor does not save what I typed, and instead decides based on a random language statistics what to actually save, so I have to double-check my text word-by-word every time.
Oh, wait. No, because the tools are deterministic, and that doesn’t happen. But of course, adding randomness into your workflow, where you have to focus and review everything line-by-line, is the same as using deterministic tools, lol.
His point is that an LLM is just another tool for increasing productivity, the same as a compiler or IDE. The quality of the code is the only metric that should be judged.
Reviewing AI code is harder than reviewing human code. I’ll judge humans on what they do, and LLMs on what they are.
“Deterministic” compilers and reproducible builds are actually fairly difficult problems. (Yes I know technically the compiler is deterministic, but AI is also technically deterministic since you can set the seed).
It’s not just about being deterministic. A compiler crucially follows clearly defined formal rules on what is a correct output given some input, which the programmer can fully rely on.
You can add deterministic testing to AI output though?
Wouldn’t it be just… writing code yourself? It’s just instead of writing what you want directly you are writing tests for it.
But you really should be writing those tests regardless of whether or not you or an LLM ends up writing the actual code. That helps ensure that the code actually does what you think it does, and prevents bugs or unintended changes in behavior from sneaking in later when something changes
Well, depends. My thousand-line pet project does not need any tests, it needs to be feature complete and never touched again.
Bigger projects are usually ones where multiple people are contributing and having code that practically nobody wrote there is a huge problem on it’s own in my opinion, even if it passes a number of tests. Good tests themselves are usually harder to write than the code they are testing, I am not sure if delegating the actual fun part of development to an LLM and doing “chores” manually is a good idea.
Indeed, my code has never been more rich in unit tests now that coding assistants make them so easy to add. If the coding assistant subsequently does something weird that changes program behaviour it knows immediately.
What do the tests do?
They check to make sure that the code continues producing the expected results. For example if I had some code that added up numbers, I might have a unit test that calls that function with the parameters “2” and “2” and checks to make sure the result is “4”. If something changes that makes it start returning something else then a flag is immediately raised.
Are these tests written by AI? Have you reviewed the tests? Do they cover all code paths and all the possible inputs and outputs? Do the tests have requirements cited (traceability)?
This is a seriously weak and narrow argument. First off, the parallel drawn with existing tools is shallow. When was the last time an editor or a compiler promised to replace employees? Which of those notably accelerates climate catastrophe? Which one of those is the biggest theft of labor in the history of humanity? Everything is political. Externalizing the social and environmental cost of the major LLMs is taking a clear stance in favour of the late stage capitalistic tech empires currently taking shape.
This might get me banned here but I mostly agree with him
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
But used right, it can be a huge benefit. We know how deeply checked and tested all code is (who doesn’t remember the continuous Linus rants?) so why does it matter if submitted code covers a bug that was discovered through AI, or even written by AI? As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool
Obligatory AI doesn’t exist, its LLM’s, and LLM’s are tools, and tools are fine as long as you use them well.
If companies suddenly started making two meter long chainsaws and people started running around with these chainsaws cutting little girls in half, then yeah, people would rightly question if we shouldn’t ban those tools too.
Force AI companies to be responsible for how their products are used and wait to see how fast things would get better.
And for developers: as long as every commit is reviewed and checked by humans, to me its just another tool being used to make Linux better
For those arguing the water of energy and the theft of intellectual property, it’s the same point: governments need to put rules in place to control the stupid growth of data centers, AI companies must be held yo account for the data they’ve stolen, absolutely. However, that doesn’t mean that LLM’s are tools without any use
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
Maybe if the tool is so finicky that it’s practically impossible to get right, it’s a bad tool? For sure millions of programmers are just prompting it wrong… Can’t be that it’s just not as great a tool as the AI overlords claim
As long as the code checkers know and understand what happens, I dont see the problem with the code having been written by a tool
Until the code checkers resort to LLMs because the agentic coders submit so much code for review. I will just let AI run over this one time, what could go wrong? I’ll tell AI to generate test cases beforehand to make sure it gets the implementation right. Bad tests never lead to problems right?
Or maybe, just maybe people eating up a constant stream of propaganda produced by those whose whole financial future is tied to AI being the universal solution to every problem (and some they have to create in the first place) are indeed a problem.
Just because 24/7 advertising tells you to hammer in screws doesn’t mean it’s the smart thing to do. And neither does it show how useless a hammer is as a tool.
AI is a tool and the problem world wide is that nearly everyone is using the tool wrong
Because the public discussion devolved into some insane fight between people ideologically against any AI (funnily often the argument “it’s stealing other people’s work” is coming from people that are fundamentally against copyrights in every other case) and some not less crazy people believing that AI is their new lord and savior (and a lot of them are paid or the followers to said paid influencers you just changed one idol (tech billionaires) to another one as instructed…).
It’s basically a mud fight between those believing that hammers are inherently evil and need to be destroyed and those that think everything in this world is a nail. Nothing in-between.
It’s so funny when they try to argue that the conditions around it are somehow different and make it unethical. Like yeah, I’m against fascism and climate change, but all our previous tooling was also built on unethical grounds, this isn’t any different. You like trains? The railroads were built by slave labor, extracting the fuel displaces indigenous people and hurts the environment, and folks like Carnegie used their train-powered wealth for their own personal benefit to the detriment of the public. Does that mean taking a train is unethical?
Things were bad before AI, so let’s make them worse.
The only intelligent people that I trust are those that use drugs and drink until they drop!
If you deny to consume those things than you ate dumb!
What? It’s obvious that it can lead you to a downwards spiral, into alcoholism, a life of mental problems and struggles? Create a toxic environment around you, make your family worry and suffer because of those actions? Makes the world a even worse place? Oh well that’s on you being weak, you should’ve been smart and know how to use the things well.
It’s weird that you only trust people who take drugs to exess and harm.
I too only trust people who take drugs, but not those who harm themselves and those around them with excess. Caffeine, prescription drugs, recreational drugs too if they don’t do as you suggest, those are fine.
I don’t really trust anyone who would turn down a vaccine or antibiotic. Those people are even worse than the heavy drug users. They take neurotic beliefs to the point of harm even worse than the “destroy the family with drug use” people.
I thought it was devastating to lose Steve Yegge to AI psychosis. But damn. This is… unspeakably bad. Like if the guy in charge of the CDC decided Tylenol caused autism or like if the guy who controls the U.S. military decided it was a good idea to bomb Iran.
It just goes to show that ‘everything is only as strong as its weakest link’
If everyone you thought was smart are disagreeing with you, perhaps take another look at your position on the matter? Might be a reason beyond spontaneous mass “psychosis.”
or consider not putting people on pedestals.
If everyone you thought was smart are disagreeing with you…
Plenty of people I thought were smart before the AI bubble started think of AI as I do today.
Big “100 physicists have signed a letter saying you’re wrong, Mr. Einstein” energy.
This also assumes that TootSweet is Einstein in this scenario, rather than just some guy on the Fediverse. If he’s got cred on par with Steve Yegge or Linus Torvalds the comparison might hold some weight, but I’m dubious about that.
No. Not that one.
There’s a story that a reporter said to Einstein “100 physicists have signed a letter saying your theory of relativity is wrong” to which Einstein replies “if they were right, it would only take one.”
Apocryphal or not, the point remains that truth is not a democracy. If a million people say AI is great, it doesn’t make it so — even if one of those people is the primary maintainer of the the Linux kernel.
And billions of people eat at McDonald’s, but that doesn’t make a hamburger better than a steak. Or any more ethical.
So… If AI were actually as bad as so many people are saying, it would actually only take one?
If people are saying that AI kills people and there was evidence that it did, then I would believe it.
This is still assuming that TootSweet is equivalent to Einstein here.
And is Linux equivalent to McDonald’s in this scenario? The analogy is becoming rather unclear.
No, it doesn’t assume TootSweet is Einstein.
It’s pretty sad that you seem to think that popular opinions are correct.
Plenty of popular opinions are wrong. And unpopular opinions are right.
The popular opinion is that AI is great at coding. But there isn’t much evidence that it is. There’s lots of evidence that it produces a lot of lines of code. Scant little evidence that it’s good code.
Hence the analogy to hamburger versus steak. They’re both beef, so technically the same. But hamburger is adulterated and watered-down. Steak is the real deal. So AI code is to real enginnering.
I pointed out that several smart people were disagreeing with TootSweet. You responded:
Big “100 physicists have signed a letter saying you’re wrong, Mr. Einstein” energy.
Who else would “Einstein” be in this analogy?
Linus says he only cares about quality and refuses to make a hardline rule explicitly banning LLMs in all contexts
This is… unspeakably bad
Man, genuinely… how do people not understand why nobody takes the Anti movement seriously?
How do you not understand that code quality alone is not a good measure for viability?
Take ZFS, for example. It is inarguably a good filesystem, and its code is… well, it’s not bad, so let’s quantify it as good, or good enough. But it’s still poison for the Linux codebase, because of its conflicting license.
Or take sweatshop labor, or slavery. Would you accept “good” code written under duress?
“AI is just a tool.” No. Machine learning algorithms are a tool. LLMs are an ecosystem, composed of agents, models, infrastructure, continuous labor to maintain the models updated, and more. And like in biological ecosystems, the worst performing factor determines the maximum health score, which for LLMs is “unethical as fuck.”
Linus may be smart about OSes and seems competent about project management, but I wouldn’t trust him to give me medical advice, and his opinion on AI is also wrong.
Well, it was nice while it lasted.
*slaps an orange flag over the tux sticker on my laptop*
2027 will be the year of the NetBSD desktop, guys!
NetBSD hasn’t fallen into AI psychosis but it still has some slop in it.
Year of the GNU/Hurd desktop!I’m switching to haiku.
I plan to put Haiku on my old ThinkPad; but the lack of even a lock screen in the OS sadly makes it unsuitable for my main machine.
He’s drunk the AI Kool-Aid.
AI will come for Linus too someday.
wow… his ego is pretty big and bursting. Good thing that he evacuated his brain power to LLMs.
For me the most criticism against AI is rather criticism against Big Tech. AI itself however doesn’t have to inherently come from Big Tech so banning it wouldn’t really be reasonable for something like the Linux Kernel.
It doesn’t inherently have to come from big tech, but currently there’s nowhere else to get it, soooo…
Maybe we ban it now and then revisit all this after small open source local models are actually useful for anything?
Not true. I’ve been coding for months now using only local models running on my own hardware. It’s perfectly adequate with the right harness.
Ok well that’s actually awesome!! But is that what these people are using in big important projects like the Linux kernel, or are they using Claude? I’m guessing it’s the latter, right?
Local models are capable of assisting coding in even enormous, complex pieces of software. That’s where having the right harness really shines - it provides the model with the tools it needs to focus in on just the bits of code it’s currently working on. Sort of like how a regular human programmer can do a much better job working on a large project with Visual Assist or equivalent in their IDE. I’ve also installed some tools like Context7 that provides the LLM with API documentation (no more hallucinated APIs) or Firecrawl (it can just go search whatever it needs like a regular person). It’s not so great at large-scale architecture questions, but that’s not what 90% of coding usually involves.
If you want a step up from what can run on just commodity desktops, some of the bigger models are also open-weight and a company or studio with a programming department could run one of those on their own hardware in the server room. GLM 5.3 is right up there next to Claude in the benchmarks, for example, and doesn’t take a data center to run.
Or you could go halfsies on the “big tech” thing and have an API subscription for a big model that your coding harness uses for doing the large-scale architecture planning and then hands off to small local models for implementing the plans the big model wrote. That’s a very common pattern too.
The key point is that there’s a lot of options here, it’s not “pay Anthropic or nothing.”
Of course! But also, AI shouldn’t be used to simply generate code. It should assist human developers into solving problems like figuring out why your code won’t build, or why certain errors occur or detect bugs.
Why? Because if everyone starts using AI to generate code, you lose experienced developers who will understand what’s happening in the first place. You lose the expertise. And that’s a big problem.
Yeah, and as I understand it that’s what Linus wants people to do. So banning AI would not allow this to happen when working on kernel code.
LLMs aren’t new or interesting.
thank you meta!
