Honestly, I think it can be helpful for beginners if used in moderation.

I'm a complete beginner with programming, and yesterday was working on my home assistant to control both my AC and Radiator simultaneously. But I couldn't get it to work, with the special climate entity always crashing. After i think 2 hours, I asked Gemini what was wrong, and it pointed out that I didn't have a fallback value and that when starting up, the values were invalid, and caused the entity to crash. After I added a fallback, it worked.

I think AI can be useful if you treat it like asking someone more experienced like a teacher. It will make mistakes, but if you're stuck it might be able to help you. I'm still writing my code myself, but I use Gemini as a last resort when I've spend over an hour on a problem and can't figure it out myself.

Not that that applies to Linus, but I thought I'd also add some context from a beginner

Nothing says joy of programming like micromanaging a junior dev through text messages.

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.)

Yeah im honestly not sure what to do about this. Id very much prefer not to have AI code in my OS kernel.

I guess if your joy is outputting a lot of stuff. It's really satisfying to actually learn things and we know llms disrupt the learning process.

idk I just have joy in the process of making something. Software development is a creating craft, and devising components, getting into the nitty gritty of the application and putting it all together is where I get my joy from.

I don't think any other maker would just replace their entire process of creation with a chatbot. Only the software engineer, the poor lost soul...

It seems to me agentic coders just hate every aspect of the craft, so they replace it with AI. Then what's the point of even making software?

My hope is that he is smart enough to learn from this incident.

So how's NetBSD for someone who's experience with Linux/Unix has been Mint, Manjaro, Ubuntu and Fedora?

My dear old grandmother used to always say 'never trust a linus bro'

I always assumed she was being a bigot, but now it is hard to dispute that she was just being accurate.

LLM agent code is good if you don't try to one-shot things. Have it devise deterministic tests to test the code and give it the ability to check its own results via screenshots. Have it plan ahead, ask questions, work step by step in separate sessions. Give it enough context, always have it create a README.md explaining the structure and purpose of the project for other sessions. Fix some stuff yourself. It's not either or, it can be both.

American LLM companies are terrible for their copyright infringement, the environmental effects of their data centers and for several other valid reasons. I hated that Microsoft tried to push Copilot on every system because it sucked (mandatory "I use Arch, btw.").

So yes, LLM companies are terrible, people losing their jobs because of questionable business decisions is terrible. But LLMs are good tools. Like any tool, you can produce utter shit with it. You can use a screw driver to destroy the drive of an old screw and make it unusable. You can stick it in a wall and have a gaping hole. But you can also use it to remove and fasten screws regularly. The same applies to LLM agents. If you have got no idea what you're doing, you may produce shit. The thing with shitty AI code is, you only notice it when it is shitty. Because the output that's good is essentially invisible. The problem is not the tool, it's who's using it.

Use open-weight models locally and use a harness like Pi and expand it or modify it as you wish. Don't support the per token pricing/subscription companies.

Isn't he saying that talking to nerds about code is annoying?

I believe Linus holds the special place there. He's not constrained by shitty corporate rules.