This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I keep seeing headlines like this, and of course conveniently leaving out how Torvalds chewed people out for vibe coding.
Torvalds didn't vibe code away the Linux bug. He actually knows what he's doing.
Yeah he has said many times the submitter of the code is the one responsible for knowing how it works. That's not the only issue with LLMs though. Stolen intellectual property and the larger environmental impact that the data centers required to run them is having are just a couple more.
Well it's not that this shit CAN'T be useful, it's that it's being pushed at people heavily in ways that aren't.
unpopular opinion, especially on the fediverse, but: AI is not inherently bad.
it is a tool, that can do everything to a pretty low standard but rather fast. so it is up to the learnt human to use the thing at the right time. i use the company ai at regularly at work, but treat it as an apprentice: every line of code has to be checked, because it will fail hilariously. but it does type faster than me, so simple and boring jobs can be done by it.
i don't see the appeal of avoiding generated code at all cost. it is not different from human code in that it can fail horribly. the important thing is oversight. is there someone with the knowledge and keen eye to ensure no BS is merged. Linus, in my opinion, spent a lifetime building that reputation.
I agree. Most actual technical professionals agree. AI has long existed in some form before tech bros in silicon valley turned it into a SaaS. It's just the fediverse is filled with a bunch of anarchists obsessed with Loli anime, and to them chaos and a return to medieval age is their best chance of living out their child loving fantasies.
I have access to essentially unlimited local compute at my work. Some of my coworkers use it to run LLMs, some use the pre-enshittified corporate models, and I gave all that a shot—like really went for it, but ultimately would rather just work at my own pace.
In my workplace the people who use them come off as kind of frantic to my eye. Like they're always making these overly engineered greenfield things no one asked for, which gets them a shout out at quarterly and then no one ever thinks of it again...
I'm not saying there's 0 legitimate use for the technology if you could divorce it from its problematic origins, but I'm not that smart, and people are increasingly coming to me for help when previously they seemed happy to just talk to their little corporate minder.
I feel like chatbot and text generating models generally encourage dark patterns we don't even have names for yet and I'm just highly wary of the whole thing.
I've spent the last 9 months coming in behind these "look what I did! AI!" projects and fixing them. One was turned over to a coworker as a "here I did all this work for you" ... Wouldn't even start because it tried to bind to the same TCP port three times in the init, for some reason.
It's getting a little better, but I still mostly unfuck shit that people LLMd and then (they) walked away to much fanfare at their "expertise" to do it again.
It's a tool, not a replacement for thought.
nothing is good nor evil, but thinking makes it so.
But i see the issues on both sides of the aisle. Kind of like how social media is a great tool that brings about instant worldwide communication. But those merits don't cancel out how it's been used to exploit the human psyche, influence elections, and even coax genocides.
In this case, the downwind effects from encouraging use by mature professionals is impacting the impressionable future. And no one seems to care about the future anymore.
"oversight" is a myth. I'm pretty sure you can't oversight your way of plagiarism out of millions of training data sources that you don't even have on your local disk for comparison and reference.
(This isn't legal advice. I'm not a lawyer.)
I personally don't care about the tech. I care about the economy around the tech.
Using AI is not the same as vibe coding.
Asking AI to write a piece of code and then read it, understand and use, is a very reasonable use case.
Yeah, and Torvalds using generative AI to write code is not the same as Bobby LinkedIn telling us he's coding his third app this week.
AI is like a power tool. If you give a contractor a nail gun instead of a hammer he can build a house faster. If you give someone who has no idea how to build a house a nail gun they'll just fail at building a house faster than if you only gave them a hammer and they'll probably hurt themselves.
Problem being that the majority of software engineers really don't know how to build software well.
And are using AI as a tool to just accelerate their lack of engineering.
Finally got where I stand: why uncomfortable? It's just being hard to impose a sensible approach to it:
AI code bans may be impossible to enforce in the first place
I hate this attitude that if a rule or standard can't be enforced perfectly, we shouldn't strive for it. We can't (reasonably) run an OS free of proprietary software, does that mean the free software movement should just give up?
"People are going to murder anyway, so why even make murder illegal?"
You are correct, you should make rules even understanding that they will be broken by some.
I think one way is to make people realize that there is a concept in copyright called Threshold of Originality, meaning that because machine generated output in itself is not creative work, it's not copyrightable. You can do literally anything with it, the licenses attached don't matter. The GPL is not enforceable and no proprietary EULA is enforceable.
In his commit message:
[And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.
I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.
I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.
But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.
This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus "round_up()" to a "round_down()", but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]
Didn't he state quite early on that LLMs were a good tool to spot bugs? Found this from 3 years ago: https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/
Hackers use LLMs to spot odd exploits so it makes sense developers use them too. The usage of LLMs in development likely won‘t make Linux better or safer overall, because bugs and exploits wouldn‘t have been found by either side without it in the first place. It‘s like pandora‘s box where Linus is kind of forced to use it. If that makes sense.
The AI cabal is a very small group with a very large amount of power and powerful friends who want to push this on you. Remember, walking away from this does not impact hunger or shelter at all. You can survive without this shimmering facade.
People are forgetting the AI hype train is reliant on the fact that businesses and individuals can't host the AI themselves, which is rapidly changing.
All that insane power that OpenAI and Anthropic have harnessed is suddenly completely useless when you can just spin up a competing model at home, with HF hosting a crap ton of finetuned models like uncensored/abliterated to do whatever you want with it.
Even Deepseek released their full size models if you happen to have 400Gb (or 1.5Tb) of VRAM lying around.
When the bubble (hopefully) pops, AI will just continue to be a tool that devs use where applicable, and likely not on a massive data center cloud as it migrates into consumer electronics.
I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
ethical questions aside
And his here is the problem. Oh yeah lets just waive off the biggest critisicm on and issue of AI.
Hitler was a pretty neat guy, ethnic cleansing aside.
And before you say this, no, i am not comparing you to hitler, I'm only using an over the top example to hopefully make my point more clear.
Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.
Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are.
How do you measure that?
I am asking because I tried all the AI coding tools (copilot, cursor, claude code, etc.), even the paid versions, to find the utopia that doubles my productivity where lots of people are talking about. But everytime I find they take more time to generate code than me typing it, they rarely get things right the first time, they produce way more code than needed (which is much more to reason about) and all in all it takes longer to achieve something using "AI" instead of doing it on my own.
The worst results are the ones that seem to be correct, but can only be found incorrect on closer inspection. For instances, a part of my job is to write data collection applications for sensors; those sensors come with a datasheet (usually 100 to 200 pages) that explain how to "talk" to the sensor. Sounds perfect for an LLM - throw the datasheet in, get a small C application out. But either I get something that does not even compile, or something that seems to collect data, but configures the sensor completely wrong. Debugging that takes more time than just working through the datasheet myself and program it myself.
[insert meme of the guy sweating over which of two red buttons to press]
I would trust Linus Torvalds to use AI to do this because the AI is literally trying to copy him when it writes that code. In that context, he is the training data.
LLMs suck at writing code, but they are absolutely amazing at reading code and finding bugs. I am firmly against the usage of LLMs to write anything, but they have a place as a diagnostics tool when verified by a human.
This will also be quite the test for the Lemmy slopwarriors
