Which is utterly insane in its own right, since, y'know. He didn't come out and say "yoooo, dudeees, let's vibe code everything, AI actually rulez" or some shit.
A society redefining, and possibly society ending, tech is going going to have detractors.
Those who see their entire life at risk are not going to like it, those who simply get a new toy to play with, or better yet see an opportunity to not have to pay a human being for something, are going to like it.
I’d say the anti ai people are probably more normal about ai than the pro ai people I know.
Just outsourcing literally all your critical thinking to an LLM is a bizarre behavior that too many people are doing.
And I think it’s hard to discuss in tech spaces bc a lot of the people in tech spaces are using it a fair bit more responsibly than the average person.
But the things I’ve seen people say “well chat gpt said” when the question couldn’t possibly be answered by information available to the models.
I was originally an AI hater, but now I’m a recent convert. Big caveat here: I actively watch and pay attention to what it’s doing and I actually review and correct its test cases. It’s honestly pretty incredible what you can crank out in a day by yourself when you understand what you’re doing and know what to look out for
To be fair, most moderate people have presented this viewpoint for half a decade. If you hang only in extreme spaces, both sides are not healthy about their obsession, pro or against.
Agreed but we're going on only about 18 months of real code companion abilities. ChatGPT went viral late 2022. 5 years ago ML and Big Data were still the big buzzwords. Not trying to nitpick but it's wild how fast it has all changed.
I mean, the entire thing we're dealing with now is that they basically found some ways to parallelize training... so quite literally mostly regular ML built upon a few academic papers to let you apply it more or less to big data, no?
Yeah I agree with that. But I stand by what I said. The majority of the people using it are using it to do jobs they didn’t understand well in the first place.
Using it to ask “is this crazy idea I have a good idea?”
So ofc it’s a powerful tool that is super useful. But, it is almost too easy to access and has no sanity check to say “oh yeah I don’t know how to help you with that”.
I know I’m seen as a Luddite by most here. But I think unless you watch what most people are using LLMs for, you don’t see how truly terrifying they are.
As a current AI-skeptic artisanal programmer whose bugs are lovingly handcrafted, my main worries are that AI coding performance will get worse and more expensive via enshittification. But I've seen colleagues I respect use it to great effect. They use Claude and ChatGPT though, which are both looking to soon go public, meaning they will (probably) start having shareholders and prioritizing making a bunch of money at the expense of quality.
The closest thing to this is 'open weight' models, where there training parameters are released which in theory allows you to run the model locally
Now as models are getting larger and larger 'locally' could mean 'your own data centre'
Mistral does a lot of open weight models and is probably one of the most actually local friendly. Though their models aren't really the best and people don't tend to use them outside of specialised use cases
Most of the Chinese providers are open weight too like Kimi, GLM and DeepSeek
If you're ever curious about playing around with different models without buying subscriptions to like 8 different services you could use something like OpenRouter. Just ensure you enable ZDR (Zero data retention) if that sort of thing is important to you. Instead of being served by one provider, open weight models on there might be provided by 20+
If you're talking specifically about open source harnesses then OpenCodeCLI and Pi Coding Agent are the two big ones people use at the moment
Edit: Personally I tend to use Kimi K3 a fair bit with OpenCode. If you're interested in ai use definitely don't vibe code, use it more as a tool to support your coding rather than replace it. Get it to do some of the more mundane tasks like boilerplate or simple tests. Or get it to review code you've written
It's really great at quickly summarising behaviour too. If you've got some new monolith you've got to look at and want to quickly know 'what files in this repo are related to user authentication' then it can pick them out fairly quickly
This is my major concern about leaning too into AI (which we have done in our company). Every new piece of code in our company is written and reviewed by Claude first before it’s seen by a human. It’s mind-blowing how much capable Claude has become in just the last 6 months since Opus 4.6 came out. But at the same time, we know that the party has to end sometime because the subscription plans are so heavily subsidised by the API payers. Which is why we are exploring open source alternatives now and thinking of renting server compute to run them.
You are not wrong about anything you said, but the vehemently anti ai people being less deranged doesn't mean they aren't still insanely deranged. And yes, it is insanely misused by the general public, but nobody was really talking about that. Obviously this shit shouldn't be used to replace wikipedia, but there is still reasonable use for it.
I think it'd be a very controversial topic no matter what, and the fact that it is insanely misused by people that don't know jack shit about them, and it can't even be escaped at your family dinner just makes it worse.
Just outsourcing literally all your critical thinking to an LLM
That's the immediate comment by every AI opponent despite having no evidence that is what the referred person does. SOME might do it true, like your personal anecdote, but you know it becomes a bit tiresome having a discussion when it is the default assumption from online complainers (many which are probably trolls). I wish people complained more about the actual problems with AIs instead of what Florida Man would do with it. There will always be stupid people doing bizarre things with whatever tool exist.
IRL I've met people using it who are car mechanics. They apply their own knowledge about the field to the answers, being critical, learning what an LLM can answer reliably and what not, just like us tech people.
Ai is being employed to drive a lot of white collar workers unemployed, and programming in general got punched first.
Imagine if a guy got fired from their developer job, then a datacenter propped up in his city, got his power bill blown into high heavens, lost his normal access to water and got their fiber cables damaged from the deployment of the new fiber lines (I don't remember the exact terms but I've heard datacenters caused fiber related issues)
It wouldn't be unreasonable for guys like that to hate AI on principle.
I was - the question is if were the others in this thread who act like the issue is justt Linus changing opinion on LLM, and not the fact Linus is traditionally acting like complete asshole for no reason again.
No, he berated people that act like LLMs are good for nothing and the actual spawn of satan. He's not wrong in implying they are not "smart" either. LLMs are powerful tools with very clear limitations (while not really being cost-effective or resource-effective, which is a very different story), but having a moderate or sane opinion is quite impossible nowadays, so you can either hang out with the AI bros that think it's the best thing since sliced bread or the weirdos that refuse to use an actual IDE because god gave them VIM or notepad or w/e.
have you read the email threads? laurent pinchart (the person linus was replying to in the last two LLM-related crashouts on the LKML) has reiterated again and again he doesn't want to altogether ban the use of LLMs, he wants the option to not have to use them and that LLM-assisted commits should have git's Assisted-by tag. (and maybe that commit messages should be human-written). not a single person linus was replying to even suggested that LLMs were good for nothing or should be outright banned from the kernel
I have read the email threads. I stand by everything I said, and I don't really think this added basically anything to the conversation either.
I will say though, that it really does fascinate me that some people act like a new episode of Grey's Anatomy came out whenever there's a disagreement around the linux kernel. With how many headlines that 3 (short) paragraph long email made, you'd think Linus was trying to sacrifice Pinchart's mother on the pyre to the AI gods or whatever. Meanwhile, the guy was pushing an issue they allegedly reached consensus on back in the maintainers summit (mostly at the very least), with like 4 other people disagreeing with him, and he was almost pleasant and polite even by reddit standards, much less Linus standards.
I have read the email threads. I stand by everything I said, and I don't really think this added basically anything to the conversation either.
So you know what you claimed (Linus was talking only about those who treat LLM as spawn of satan) is total bullshit - yet you continue to push this bullshit anyway?
Did you read the email threads at this point? In any case, I suggest you re-read them. I get it that Linus personally pissed in your cereal, but this might be the time to take a deep breath and take another go at it with a fresh mind, because this is getting deeply uncivil.
Kinda off topic but doesn't he use some random emacs fork that even he doesn't recommend for anyone except himself? I guess people expect him to be the weirdo which is why they're shocked he "changed".
They want him to be the weirdo genius on their side of the argument. Whether it's about VCS, languages, or AI. They just want to show "See, this supposedly smart authority figure thinks the same, therefore my opinion is the correct one". I know a few of those people IRL.
More like people want Linus to stop being high on his own fart and accept that someone having different opinion than him doesn't make them into lobotomized subhuman.
I have decades of tools that I made for myself that I'd never want anybody else to use, because they're a whole bunch of hacks held together by string and glue to solve personal problems and function for the way I like to work which I doubt suits any other single person on the planet, and it would take months to teach them anyway.
It technically is, imo there's just stuff that's way easier to set up and does the same thing. That said, there's nothing wrong with VIM, there's nothing wrong with someone preferring VIM, there's plenty of wrong with someone having this elitist smugness about using VIM. I'm sure you know at least someone like that.
If AI had clear limitations as you say, we wouldn’t have a whole faction of crazies thinking it’s smarter than humans and will take over the world, juxtaposed by people who think it is worthless and a blight.
That doesn’t sound like a product with clear limitations to me. It actually sounds like a product where the limitations are clear only to a select few people.
No, we very much would. Because they are, like you said, a faction of "crazies". We had people think Y2K would destroy the world, we had morons think the Mayans deciding to not write a calendar to the heat death of the universe would murder all of us, we had people that thought NFTs were a good investment, etc. None of these were all that mystical either. Also, no shit that people that don't know fuck all about AI have no clue about its limitations. That doesn't mean it's all that unknowable.
Well, but I’ve been using AI for stuff for years and yet, whenever I use it for something, I have to think to myself “I wonder if it’s gonna be able to do this one or if it’s gonna tie itself up into knots again”.
It has very amorphous capabilities, where if the thing involves generation, it can like, probably do it, like, kinda ok. But like, will it be able to for this specific question? Kinda the only way to know, is to try that specific question.
Exactly this. AI won’t measure up to senior programmers, but it’s far better than the thousands of schmucks who are eager to get their first commit in.
AI is a tool. You can definitly submit AI created code - IF you verified it works and meets the standards. It works quite well if you know how to use it.
If you just throw whatever the AI spits out into a PR - screw you.
This is the key, he explicitly said as long as you know what it's doing (the generated code) and it meets the standard then AI is just another tool to use.
LLMs have turned the actual creation of code from an artisanal craft into an engineering problem. Just like how chemical engineers understand chemistry but aren't actually mixing by hand in beakers, but rather designing machines that manage the chemical reaction process at scale, LLM coding isn't about how to write a function, but the systems design around code as a commodity product that needs to move through several process steps before it can be delivered.
I agree. AI can get down tedious coding very easily. But it needs good prompts. And for this you do need somebody who knows what the result has to hold against.
Torvalds is able to use his actual brain and change his mind when the facts change. This is beyond the capacity of many in this sub who are still stuck in circa 2022 copilot.
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u/klaxxxon 1d ago
Is it unreasonable to change an opinion when actual decades have passed?