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.

Except that a compiler is not a stochastic machine.

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.

Completely disagree with his take on this.

distant nuance bros’ war drumming intensifying

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

I’ve used Ai to try to make me operating systems and programs. All it does is give shells that you have to code the rest of what you want into it.

Then again, I don’t pay for Ai and I’ve pretty much exhausted everything I wanted to ask chatgpt within the first 4 months of using it. Then I was able to make gemini think it was a different universe for a while until it caught on. Then I stopped using it as much.

It was fun for a while, Ai is still something you have to pick and choose and use good judgment with. It’s not an end-all of coding.

The problem with the tools , it’s not gonna help amateur or rookies to develop the skill without the tools, it seems make the illusion that it is capable to do so but it’s not.

While for the veteran or those who know what they doing, of course it will produce various result , from diminish their entire person or jist become another tool they wield for their work, depending on skill issue.

I promise I won’t submit anything to the Linux kernel that was generated by a compiler. AFAIK they want the code, not blobs.

I wouldn’t ve surprised if this was generated by Claude.

Why yes, let us compare corporate, proprietary, closed-source tools that inherently rely on environmental destruction, breaking licenses, and intellectual property theft in general, to basic, completely free and open source programming tools that have been in use for 50 years, and harmed nobody during their development.

Of course this guy does all his work on a MacBook. Because of course he does.

I’ve usually been with him, because he’s very knowledgeable, and quite often his takes only seem ridiculous out of context.

But this is borderline corporate propaganda. If it continues, I’m afraid we’ll all be moving to BSD.

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.

Can’t help but laugh at you guys correcting literally the undisputed #1 software maintainer in the world. AI is just a tool - if you fail then it’s a skill issue.

Have fun with the incoming “contributions”, Linus

… is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.

Except you can’t with AI. It vomits a black box, and you have to decode it and test it before dumping it in a commit. Few do that.

I’m kind of gobsmacked by this. I’ve heard younger developers compare LLM with compiler and chalked it up to ignorance, but I don’t get what this is.

Can I write code in assembly? Yes. Of course. It’s true that I never do it, but if there was a rule that you needed to write some assembly now and then to certify as a kernel developer I don’t see how it would be any kind of impediment.

Comparing more directly: if you hand me a compiled binary and the source code and ask “why is the bit at address 0xXXXXXXXXX a 0?” I can, with 100% certainty, answer that. Probably in less than a day of effort. If I ask "why did the LLM output “for” as the XXXXth word of its utterance, can Linus say why?

And “can you write a good commit message without an editor?” Uhhh? At least when I was in school, this was something people did for fun/messing around. I still do cat > somefile when I need to put some quick text together. In fact, Claude will sometimes write a Git commit by cat-ing into a file–which it’s doing because there’s so many online examples of this. Fucking weird things for Linus to pick. Makes me think his brain’s rotted.