publicación cruzada desde: https://piefed.social/c/linux@programming.dev/p/2495581/yea

Linus be like:

  • "I only care about the final results and the correctness"
  • Me looks inside
  • Final results are shit and code is just slop

Ahhh, I love AI and Linus and how they're enshittifying everything /s

Seriously, how would anyone in their right mind think that AI can be used responsibly? The only acceptable level of AI use is zero or a negative number.

Linus Torvalds says AI is a great way to find joy in programming, when used responsibly
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[–] 51 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

I'm gonna have to put some context here, because Linus' opinion is alittle more nuanced than written here. I will say i don't agree with him personally, but I also see where he's coming from.

In multiple different interviews, now, Linus has lamented trash ai-generated code being pushed at codebases and flooding reviewers, so Linus is acutely aware of the problems caused by irrisponsible AI use. He sees how much people just push out AI slop without ever reviewing it. The thing is, Linus has been maintaining the linux codebase for over two decades now, and I imagine he is very aware of how much humans can pump out garbage code on their own.

He's gone on the record, though, that he uses AI himself to rapidly create tools for troubleshooting and prototyping structures. As far as i can tell, he still views the final code as being something which should be written by a human, but he sees the value in being able to rapidly produce tools and test different data structure configurations in a few minutes where he'd normally have to jerry rig something together over a matter of hours prior.

I have not heard him weigh in on the environmental impact of LLMs yet, though I imagine he assumes that LLMs will become more efficient in time and that they'll be less memory-intensive over time, to the point of being run locally on a desktop while still being just as powerful.( this part is one I have serious issue with, but i can't fault the assumption since this guy literally started his career writing machine code by hand - not assembly, machine code.)

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago

    Missing is his assessment that Vibe coding can be a nice on ramp to learning how to really code.

    I'm super skeptical because I have never seen it happen in a newcomer, but it is pretty good at helping me find good candidates for libraries and how to use them consistent with my broader project design. So on ramp to a solid candidate from not knowing anything is gentler. Seeing the required arguments vaguely mapped to my existing data helps understand, even if I should throw out the generated code as being otherwise more trying than it's worth, I still learned something useful.

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