I’m finding the allure of AI is particularly strong for people who have risen to positions of power where they had to stop doing the work themselves. Instead, they had to work through other people to get bigger projects done.

The allure is that you can just say what you want done, and it does it. If it’s done it “wrong” you can just tell it it’s wrong and not have to worry about arguing the technical differences. As such you feel like you get closer to what you wanted, rather than somebody else’s take on what you wanted.

The things is, when you are removed from the code, you can only work at a high level. That person you asked to do something is considering 10 other low level concerns that you didn’t consider. I think Linus’s recent patch series is a good example. He saw a potential optimisation, did a proof of concept but missed a race condition. He’s now handed it over to the person that normally works in that area and knows the details. Can the optimisation actually work? Who knows?

Linus accepting AI now says more about how far the technology has come than anything else. AI today is not the same as AI a year ago.

I’m no expert but a compiler does not equal and LLM built on stolen data

I feel about ai like i feel about cars. 90% of the idiots out there drive really poorly, but that doesn’t mean responsible people are smart to never drive a car. Same with AI, overwhelming majority of people are using AI incorrectly, i.e. recklessly dangerously, but that doesn’t mean responsible people should never use it.

He used to be cool, but then he started following some corporate hype trends that make me suspicious, I think he is nearing retirement and doesn’t want to fight corpos anymore.

The moment he accepted Rust officially on the kernel was the time I knew he got a bit too old to care anymore… This is just a continuation.

Also is so curious to see the venn diagram of people supporting Rust and AI being mostly a circle. My theory is that Rust takes every piece of joy out of programming and thus the idea of never programming again becomes so attractive if you are surrounded by Rust.

I think he’s kinda right in that competent engineers can write good code using LLMs. I don’t know whether they’re actually more productive that way though. The problem lies in the fact that incompetent engineers can write a lot of bad, but good-looking code using LLMs, which might be a pretty big burden on the maintainers.

Also, comparing LLMs to compilers doesn’t really work in my opinion. Compilers follow strict rules and translate one kind of logic into a different kind of logic, while LLMs turn natural language and vague notions into some kind of logic. Writing code is telling the computer precisely what it should do and prompting is vaguely telling it what end result you want and those are two fundamentally different things.

BASED LINUS

Id like to see Linus explain to me how a LLM works.

He is clearly ARROGANT and STUPID.

“Don’t use a compiler then.”

Does he not realize a LLM is not a deterministic system for “English to code”. I’ve long be suspicious of his “genius” and this confirms it for me.

A giant gaping asshole riding off the work of the original unix philosophy and system, while spewing putrescence.

The amount of bootlicking Linus has been doing recently is insane. I expected this bs from anyone but him. Such a sad reality we are living in.

Weird, i disagree with Linus.

AI is not a tool. Its an addiction. Maybe the first dozen times (more likely: never) you use it “as a tool”. Very quickly, you depend on it. You need it to refactor. Then you need it to debug. Then you need it to write. Next thing you know, you spend 0 time writing code (the fun part) and 100% of your time as a reviewer (the worst part). Suddenly it isnt fun. A few fools even get TWO AI MODELS, one to write, the other to debug.

Its a virus. I cannot tell you how many 300+ line commits ive rejected because they straight up dont do what the person said they do or also do some extremely asinine 2nd thing that breaks other pieces of code (which they would know if theyd actually used it).

A tool requires input. A hammer can never do anything i dont explicitly tell it to do. A good word editor does exactly what i want it to do. A good compiler does exactly what it says it will do. AI does not. Ai is a glorified autocomplete, and i dont want my code to be automatically generated. Its asking for thousands of issues down the line. If AI was any good, Windows would be a usable platform by now.

Dont get me wrong; i know that it is sometimes used as a tool by people, and meticulously checked over, but more often than not, it isnt.

Except that a compiler is not a stochastic machine.

So Linus does not respect me. Nice.

It’s mutual.

hes comparing knowing how open concepts work vs using proprietary tech whose purpose is to hook you and then enshittify after you become reliant on it

Completely disagree with his take on this.

I agree with Linus, because AI is just another Tool that won’t go away. The Problem is not AI itself the problems are

• the big techs building out AI with no respect to security, people and environment.
• people using AI without understanding the consequences of using it.