He's drunk the AI Kool-Aid.

wow.. his ego is pretty big and bursting. Good thing that he evacuated his brain power to LLMs.

LLMs aren't new or interesting.

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.

I know it's early, but so far y'all just throwin' rocks. No intelligent criticism whatsoever of the content you just read (you did read it, right?) - nothing but low-effort jeers. Linus is saying he expects high quality work and doesn't accept a shotgun zero-tolerance mindset against how it's produced. What, in concrete terms, is actually wrong with that?

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.

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.

Some things deserve zero tolerance IMO

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?

Linus being Linus :)

AI will come for Linus too someday.

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?

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.

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.

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

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!

Exactly, the only thing that matters is results.

I'm switching to haiku.

Why does everyone who starts using AI always devolve into posting like this?

You can add deterministic testing to AI output though?

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.

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?

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.

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."

Wouldn't it be just... writing code yourself? It's just instead of writing what you want directly you are writing tests for it.

Some things do, but work technique isn't one of them.

What about a tool that killed someone every time you used it? Or every ten times you used it? There's a line somewhere, right?

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.

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.

What do the tests do?

Big “100 physicists have signed a letter saying you’re wrong, Mr. Einstein” energy.

No. The ethics of how something is produced are material.

The ends don’t justify the means.

I already agreed some things deserve zero tolerance, so obviously there's a line. If AI killed someone or gave the user shooting pains every ten times it was used then I would call it a failed attempt to make a tool. But the relevance of this escapes me.

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.

This one? It's a fake.

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.

"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).

My argument is that the environmental costs of AI, not to mention the knock-on effects of the societal change it incurs, lead to people dying.

Evidence would make that an argument. Without it what you have is a hypothesis. I have a hypothesis that people die from the knock-on effects of social media, but here we are doing it without demonizing ourselves.

Things were bad before AI, so let's make them worse.

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.

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.

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)?

Fair enough. I'm not going to follow up with all that just for this comment thread. At least we can agree that some things are bad enough to justify not using.

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.

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.

people who were a really good programmers before will probably use it responsibly for a while, until their skills inevitably erode

Damn, dude, I had mad 6502 assembly skillz in 1985, I could even write it out by hand - pencil on paper, and those slowly eroded through use of compilers for higher level languages until my last assembly experience in 1996, today... I'd be learning everyhing specific to assembly code from scratch. I guess I'm just useless now.

the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.

Gotta agree there. We had two clear camps of programmers before LLM agents came along, and the camp I least enjoyed reviewing the code of before (and now) of is the camp that resisted adoption of new interesting tools the most loudly.

There is a clear line between deterministic code and what comes out of an LLM. One of the bigger problems there is that LLMs have a rather large "context window" they operate from, and human operators don't readily "grok" how the content of that context window enhances and degrades the desirability of the outputs you get.

I almost exclusively use LLMs to generate, review and test deterministic code, then use that code for "the real tasks" with zero LLM involvement. The output of LLMs is still unpredictable, but once they've "said" something valuable, recognizing and using that value is a deterministic activity.

which the programmer can fully rely on.

Most of the time, today. Mid 90s I was constantly checking compiler output for bugs, and finding them. Early 90s the compiler bugs were finding me, particularly in Borland Turbo C++. I turned off the linker optimizer in 1992 and couldn't turn it back on until 2008 without getting difficult to identify bugs.

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?

Indeed, my code has never been more rich in unit tests now that coding assistants make them so easy to add

Me as well. A year ago there was significant trouble with those unit tests not adding much value but that has improved a lot over the past several model updates. The unit tests aren't 100% as good as they could or even should be (neither are human generated unit tests that take 10x as long to add) - but in terms of time invested vs value derived, they're excellent value for effort.

If the coding assistant subsequently does something weird that changes program behaviour it knows immediately.

About 90% of the time for me now, in Opus 5.5.