AI ethics aside (but not discounted overall), if there's one person I trust above all others to use an LLM to assist in coding properly, it's Linus Torvalds.

Lemmy is gonna lose its mind. Lmao!

I actually do think that someone who already has multiple decades of experience in programming without using AI is probably not producing shoddier code after incorporating it into their workflow. Important modern software projects, whose backbones are programmers fitting that description, aren't going to be worse in the present because of Claude usage. I remain strongly against it though, because normalizing its usage guarantees the future won't have programmers that fit that description running the shows.

I think this can be framed as a statement about generative AI in general: If you think AI has been making everything shittier today, just wait until you see what it's been doing to everything tomorrow.

What is the difference between Code Linus get from other people and an LLM? As far the AI do not get hurted Feelings from the answer.

The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical considering this is an experimental branch on his own repository. I'm not surprised he might experiment with using AI agents to solve a particular pain point to see how it does. This is using agents to experiment with things that you might not have time to address normally.

Another recent example is the build system where the author said:

An LLM was used to first determine where the bottlenecks were then to figure out how to improve them. It generated a lot of code, much of it hideous.

I extensively audited and rewrote a lot of it, and heavily edited commit messages, the cover letter and comments.

off-loading the boring grunt work of identifying bottle necks and trying new approaches seems like an ideal task for a junior agent to deal with as long is you don't YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.

My issue isn't with using AI to work on the Linux Kernel. My issue is working on the kernel with proprietary AI which enables Sam Altman to claim Millennium Prizes.

Nobody freaks out when skilled programmers/professionals use AI, it's actually a tool for them and not full-on skill substitution.

Linux Foundation has financial backers. He's gotta give them lip service to keep them excited and happy. Anthropic is now a Gold Member. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon are all Platinum Members.

FOSS has always been subject to corporate meddling in their governance. There's a reason we call it Linux and not GNU-Linux. GNU gets no money so GNU goes nowhere.

Linus gives a headline using agents, Linux gets millions to continue doing real work. That's the game they are playing, for better or worse.

Is this why they recently added nieu rules to not be mean to Claude?

AI like this is very quickly becoming the One Ring in my mind. Like there’s a bunch of people who have convinced themselves that they can use this plagiarism box in a good way, that the outcome will somehow justify the means. But the reality is that this machine was created by evil for evil reasons and as it stands right now you can’t use Claude or ChatGPT or any of that shit and not participate in the plagiarism, in the outright theft of all of the art and creativity of humanity, and the destruction of our environment.

I wish that more people would understand that the jump from the novelty of Watson beating Ken Jennings on Jeopardy to here wasn’t technological innovation. It was purely capitalism.

Linus has said that he reads compiler output. I have no doubt that he reads the code, I'm not particularly worried about bad code.

I can't wait for a base linux install to be 60 GB of slop, like windows.

"With great power comes great responsibility."

Hopefully LLMs may help fix some random small bugs or rewrite legacy code.

How much has he dumbed down his capabilities already? When will he replace himself by an LLM?