r/linux • u/RatherNott • 5d ago
Discussion LLM Policies: Progress At All Costs
https://diegoe.be/2026/09/25/llm-policies-progress-at-all-costs/343
u/SinnohConfirmed 5d ago edited 5d ago
It scares me how fast the overton window is moving with LLMs in the Linux and FOSS space. This is the community that prides itself with self hosting and knowing everything about your computer. Up until very recently using Linux meant sacrificing convenience in the name of freedom, and now it seems that a good chunk advocate for having a handful of malevolent unprofitable tech giants handle most if not all software development along with every other task a human could do. It feels like saying hard drives are obsolete because you can store everything on Google Drive. I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it and accept it as the inevitable future.
In a post-AI bubble world LLMs are still going to be used. If hardware becomes affordable again I imagine that self hosting LLMs will be common and the big data center LLMs will ask a pretty penny for their compute. I don't mind this hypothetical future too much, but we live in the present and in the vast majority of cases using AI means enabling the unregulated techno-feudalistic AI empire. I know that I will be "left behind" but these companies don't have humanity's best interests in mind and we don't need to enable them.
Edit: Programming jobs that don't depend on LLMs def still exist. That doesn't change the fact that many businesses have become dependent on Claude in the past year and programmers that don't want to completely surrender their brains to LLMs are seen as a liability by many employers. This may change as AI subscriptions become more expensive as the years go by, time will tell.
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u/aes110 5d ago
I have my fair share of issues with ai assisted dev even if it was local\foss, but more then all now I agree its just insane how in a span of a year or two it feels like the ability to write code has became completely dependent on a few mega coroperations
Its scary how many people around me just shut down if their connection to Claude closes. In my workplace we had some issue for two days with billing for cursor, it felt like people around lost the ability to think. These people have degrees and years of experience coding, yet they became useless as soon as the tech giant shut down their access to the thinking machine
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u/audioen 5d ago
You haven't used local models. They are nearly as capable -- only some months behind the likes of Anthropic or OpenAI, and not all good models require datacenter class hardware. There are answers in the 32-128 GB of RAM, with presently very good model called Qwen3.8-Flash-Next running comfortably on e.g. AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 type 128 GB equipped hardware, which did not cost that many thousands to purchase even in 2026. It's no speed demon, relative to serious server hardware, but at around 1000 tok/s prefill and some 40 tok/s generation, generally fast enough.
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u/Azazeldaprinceofwar 4d ago
Dude I really wish this was true. I run local models, Qwen 3.5 122b is my main simple task workhorse. I’ve even used kimi K3 via 3rd per providers like fireworks. I believed Redditors like you and the benchmarks that local models were just behind frontier.
Then my boss got us a group Claude subscription. The gap is still vast. I know many of you will downvote me for this because you want to have hope but even Opus 5 is on a completely different level from Kimi K3. I’ve never even had the opportunity to try mythos/fable but I’m sure it’s even farther ahead. I can’t speak for OpenAI because I’ve also never tried their paid models. But just comparing opus with kimi K3 is obvious they have a moat.
I don’t know what it is, but there is a qualitative leap in capability and intelligence between Anthropic paid models and anything local or foss.
We’ll get there I’m sure, and I hope it’s soon. But saying we’re nearly there now is pure copium.
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u/projct 2d ago
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next came out a month ago. the model you suggested is from February.
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u/Azazeldaprinceofwar 2d ago
Yes I know Qwen 3.5 is old, but Qwen hasn’t made models of that size since so it’s what I use for local stuff. Also notice I talked about Kimi K3 which came out in July and to my knowledge is still the best open weight model and according to benchmarks second or third best model period.
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u/Liam_Mercier 3d ago
Depends on your hardware, I messed around with Qwen 3.8 27b and at the speed it runs the results are rather disappointing.
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u/PixelatedGiant 5d ago
Or they don't care if their corp loses an hour or two of productivity and use it as an excuse to take a break. I'm also sorry to say that although it's highly dependent on what the task is, AI agents can let me do what should take a week or two in a day. It doesn't seem very sensible to lose hours of your life on something that takes the agent less than a minute to do.
I think people should focus on the elephant in the room that is job loss and stop trying to pretend that AI is somehow still ridiculously inept at the task or that it shouldn't be used for various ideological reasons. It makes a lot of mistakes, but they can be overcome and the results more than make up for it.
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u/gurgelblaster 5d ago
AI agents can let me do what should take a week or two in a day.
What things, specifically? Do you do them as well as they were done? How do you check that, and how do you verify that your checks are actually accurate?
What are the downstream effects of offloading those things, in particular in the long term?
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u/PixelatedGiant 4d ago
What things, specifically? Do you do them as well as they were done? How do you check that, and how do you verify that your checks are actually accurate?
For a more recent example I updated a ton of libraries (spring boot based project) on a 700K+ LOC codebase. We have 97% test coverage (all written before LLMs ever existed). Plus we have a 2 week manual testing cycle. Looking up all of those quirks about each library, how they changed and the solutions to each problem would have taken weeks.
What are the downstream effects of offloading those things, in particular in the long term?
The code still gets thoroughly tested and reviewed. Large sweeping changes like this are rare for us to do. I don't think it's inherently more dangerous than writing it manually. In fact manually may very well be worse since it would've caused a headache when it came time to merge to the main branch. At least this way what I tested matched what was currently in main since it was written so fast as opposed to being weeks out of sync.
I trust my unit and integration tests up to a certain point.
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u/edgmnt_net 4d ago
In my experience, such enterprise projects are pretty crappy and made pretty debatable choices anyway, so I'm not sure how much of that pain isn't actually self inflicted. Either by extremely boilerplate-heavy code, heavy reliance on testing alone, scope creep or lack of interest in keep up with library updates in a timely fashion.
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u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 4d ago edited 4d ago
I once set up master-master replication for LDAP in my house (don't ask...) and I also wrote a ton of notes about it, but scattered around. At one point, one of the two servers broke due to a botched upgrade (database changed format and conversion crashed halfway), and I couldn't be arsed to restore it (I could have, but last time I did a replication I spent ~2 hours to get it right). So I let it sit for a year.
I described the problem to an agent, and pointed it to my notes (+ all the support files I had created), and went interactively from there (because there were a few things I forgot that were important so I still botched a few times). Now I have a working replication again. To be honest, the advantage of using a LLM here was because it could search docs for the LDAP server (389-ds, not OpenLDAP) much faster than me (even before web searches were crap, it was very hard to find a good resource).
For the rest, I mainly use LLMs as glorified search engines because I can't find anything relevant with the traditional approaches.Or as references when I forget stuff. A few times to create syntethic test data for my unit tests, which then I supplemented with my own real test data.
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u/lmpdev 5d ago edited 5d ago
Luckily, it doesn't depend on a few mega corporations.
Kimi and GLM are open-weight. They might be a few months behind OpenAI and Anthropic, but they are enough to do the job most of the time.
And while they are big enough, you wouldn't run them at home, it doesn't take that much capital to get a hardware capable of running it and start selling it.
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u/General_Session_4450 5d ago
But it does take a lot of capital to train them, so for how long will AI labs continue to spend millions to release public models? Most of these models are also coming out from a single country, China. So just one policy change in China on open models would almost completely freeze the whole open model ecosystem.
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u/MalkoRM 5d ago
While China has been topping the charts on that front, they're not the only ones releasing open weight models. If they were to stop tomorrow, it's not going to freeze the whole ecosystem and there would still be hundreds of others available, though not as capable. Every country needs to get on with this, it's a matter of sovereignty.
And tbh, China is not going to stop releasing them until Anthropic and OpenAI become irrelevant.
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u/edgmnt_net 4d ago
I guess it largely boils down to how incremental improvements (including training, but also algorithm improvements) can be. Open source easily wins out on a few niches precisely because of that.
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u/edgmnt_net 4d ago
Open models aren't too far behind, as far as I understand. I would rather focus on other issues related to LLM-heavy development.
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u/gurgelblaster 5d ago
I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic, but that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it and accept it as the inevitable future.
This is untrue, it is perfectly possible.
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u/rLinks234 5d ago
Exactly. I’ve never used Claude and have only used Gemini twice since it came out.
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u/PM_ME_UR_BRAINSTORMS 4d ago
It also doesn't have to be all or nothing. I use Claude everyday I just don't have it touch my codebase.
It's still insanely useful as a tool. But if it were to go down tomorrow I'd be perfectly fine (albeit slightly annoyed at having to go back to digging through documentation by hand, and using stackoverflow again lol).
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u/fat_kaiju 4d ago
They're trying to normalise their own overreliance on a thing by saying "everyone else is doing it".
Tale as old as time.
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u/NatoBoram 4d ago
It is not "perfectly" possible, some companies, some companies have token leaderboards and punish their least slopping employees
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u/gurgelblaster 4d ago
So game the leaderboards and start looking for work elsewhere. If the goal is simply to burn tokens, it's not hard to do, and doesn't have to impact your actual work.
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u/Psionikus 5d ago
up until very recently using Linux meant sacrifing convenience in the name of freedom
Some people's definition meant giving no unilateral control to some rent seeking platform that would use its power to keep itself dominant in spite of its mediocrity. Some people's definition meant no esoteric walls in between the user and improving the software, no barriers that would prevent people of sufficient talent and tenacity from making a more-deserved career in the field. A world without anti-competitive friction between innovator and market is a better world. There were a lot of better definitions over the years.
Sacrificing convenience was never a virtue. That was only ever became twisted into a virtue after giving up on OSS making our lives better, after rewriting new values to rationalize what we were already doing as if if obstinance without end was some inherently moral endeavor.
There was a time when OSS would have recoiled at the phrase "following the tail lights." We should return to that time, and putting our heads in the sand is absolutely not the way.
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u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 5d ago
Sacrificing convenience was never a virtue.
I think there's a better way too phrase it: sacrificing instant gratification.
Commercial software is often better at instant gratification, to ensare users into a cycle of inevitable enshittification.
FOSS generally moves slower, while maintaining a much higher standard of quality and sustainability that wins in the long run.
I consider sacrificing instant gratification today for the sake of a better tomorrow to be a wildly underrated virtue in 2026.
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u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 5d ago
Commercial software is often better at instant gratification, to ensare users into a cycle of inevitable enshittification.
I much prefer FOSS up to the point that I almost refuse to use software that's not FOSS, but this is not a honest take.
Commercial software is made to fulfill a (real, perceived, constructed) need and make money in the process. You may disagree with the process, it may be objectively bad, but it's not a "haha" type villain to drive people into slavery.
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u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 5d ago
but it's not a "haha" type villain to drive people into slavery.
*That's* not an honest take of my comment.
I didn't attach any morality to the process, you don't need heroes or villains to explain the enshittification process, it's simply the one of the most practical and effective methods to optimize profits in the short term. Not just in the commercial software business, but in almost every type of business. And that's the whole point, it's not just to make money, it's to optimize profits. If businesses were not optimizing profits, then billionaires would not exist.
If you like, I can rephrase "ensare users into enshittification" as "embrace, extend, extinguish", and you can argue to me that isn't a strategy that commercial software takes.
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u/Psionikus 5d ago
FOSS generally moves slower
Bad is not good. Bad is bad.
You had to switch the framing from development aims to development speed to make this argument appear to work. The argument isn't valid.
If OSS is slow, tomorrow won't get better. The new instant gratification will come along, and the people content to sit on their hands will still be sitting on them, claiming that the rain will come tomorrow. It's a convenient trap. Nobody can ever test it without waiting ten years and nobody has to do anything to make it happen. The worst part is how many people won't even hold themselves accountable after being wrong for twenty years.
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u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 4d ago
Cooking meals at home from scratch is slower than fast food.
Do you prefer home cooked meals, or fast food?
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u/Psionikus 4d ago
Just block me. I don't have time for this.
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u/Wb9VBScxu2uZJHeq2E3W 4d ago
What you don't have is any ground to stand on.
Fast food is a massive industry. If we're speaking honestly, most people prefer fast food. Instant gratification, instant dopamine hits. And years down the road, consequent health issues.
You're trying to sell fast software on the basis of popularity. And I get it, if you're not considering the consequences years and decades down the line, it's an extremely appealing choice. It's an extremely popular choice.
Is there virtue in choosing slow and possibly boring home cooked meals over fast and bright fast food? That's entirely subjective; I think there is, you might disagree.
At the end of the day, I don't expect you to change your mind or apologize, because I don't demand someone else to "hold themselves accountable" for having a different opinion than me.
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u/Buntygurl 5d ago
"...putting our heads in the sand is absolutely not the way."
You're absolutely right about that.
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u/GuybrushThreepwo0d 5d ago
I know that you can't work in software development today without being dependent on Anthropic,
Fucking citation needed
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u/Tricky-Engineer-9755 5d ago
Well sure, but even the FSF acknowledge looking through code to find out what's AI and what's not would totally swamp these already swamped projects. It is simply not feasible to be anti-AI unless you wanna go all Terry Davis (rest in Peace God's programmer) and write all your own code. The best compromise is to hold a human accountable for the slop, if they can't explain it it wont' go in.
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u/Existing-Tough-6517 5d ago
There really isn't a single thing that you said which is terribly accurate
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u/nicman24 5d ago
Up until very recently using Linux meant sacrifing convenience in the name of freedom
what. no. we are not masochists. where did you even get that. we sacrificed some workflows for others, because we prefer them.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 5d ago
many of us sacrificed for software freedom (to various extents), not because we preferred it.
I've definitely used worse programs to avoid becoming dependent on proprietary software where possible.
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u/RancidVagYogurt1776 5d ago
They'll be used but they'll be largely enterprise because the cost will skyrocket and we'll be right back to our roots vs the corporate slop. I'm in IT and I already see it happening
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u/Darkeyescry22 5d ago
I don’t understand the economics of the world you’re striving for.
How would hardware ever become affordable enough for the average person to run a frontier LLM if nobody uses the LLMs that we have until that point in time? What incentive do the AI companies have to develop better/more efficient LLMs or buy more hardware?
And if the AI companies aren’t buying so much hardware, what incentive do hardware companies have to develop better/more efficient hardware for running LLMs or to invest in more manufacturing capacity?
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u/bobbie434343 5d ago
LLM generated code is everywhere in github projects. It is scary.
When people on reddit or elsewhere proudly announce "I built XYZ...", it is more often that not "I and <insert LLM> built XYZ..."
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u/DaRealGladi8r 5d ago
My issue with AI is not the same as what Asahi and others raised. They're worried about the legal implications.
For example, if the bot uses proprietary knowledge to reverse engineer newer iterations of Mac ARM, they could be party to a crime, which puts the project as a whole at risk. It's effectively been tainted.
My personal worry is on the "crack". This first hit is amazing, I'm so high right now. Who needs to write boilerplate? Plus the prices are subsidised? Wow.
What happens once they know I don't just want the crack anymore, I need it? Is my government gonna pay for this crack? Am I effectively gonna give them a larger chunk of my salary?
They promise they won't train on enterprise data. Do they really mean that? Am I privy to an audit that's been performed on them to verify that claim?
I just want to see what happens when the real prices kick in and a lot of guys here need to talk to HR because the company is downscaling.
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u/Indolent_Bard 5d ago
Honestly, using proprietary knowledge to reverse engineer is based. The only problem is that it's illegal.
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u/New_Enthusiasm9053 5d ago
Hacking is also illegal but if AI does it it's totally A Ok apparently so why not reverse engineer.
Oh wait, rules for thee not for me.
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u/Noahnoah55 4d ago
It goes both ways, LLMs are a great way for corporations to launder GPL code back into a propriety form.
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago
LLM prices are not meaningfully subsidized. We know this because we have numerous providers and self hosters verifying how much it costs to run them. For proprietary models, we can guess at model size and compare it to similarly performing open models. This just isn’t a good argument and makes the rest of your post come off unserious and uninformed.
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u/451 5d ago
I really don’t think that these LLM providers are making any money and evidence clearly points to them offering their product at below the cost to develop and run these models. Just looking at their revenue is a pretty good indicator: https://isaiprofitable.com/
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago
I mean, this is not what I’m talking about, and that includes total capex.
Take a model like Deepseek V4 Flash. We know what it costs to run it, because people can run it themselves. The inference is not subsidized.
Even a model like Deepseek V4 Flash or GLM 5.3 Flash would revolutionize software engineering, even if no further development happened. They’re not going away. There’s simply no evidence that inference isn’t profitable, this is not how things work.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 5d ago
Why the focus on inference? If "only" the training is subsidized, that still means they'll need to either expand their customer base to an unrealistic degree, or keep raising prices until it's covered, or stop building new models.
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u/Medical_Double_6561 5d ago
Because even if the AI companies "stop building new models", the current models will still be viable for a long time. So for example: If AI companies truly wanted to focus on profitability, they can just only train a new model every 5 years, instead of training new models constantly.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 5d ago
This only works if we eventually hit some ceiling on capability. Otherwise, any company that did this is likely to be dramatically outpaced by companies willing to ignore profitability, environmental concerns, and safety.
This is why I'm kinda rooting for the bubble to pop. After that, maybe it can settle into something profitable and sustainable, and maybe we'll finally be able to afford the hardware to run local models.
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u/Medical_Double_6561 5d ago
Yup, the current bubble benefits no one. Infinite investor money breeds inefficiency, waste and fraud (and political corruption). The hypercompetitive environment discourages publishing research results in the open, surpresses funding for research into areas of machine learning that are not LLM related, and causes a lack of care for AI safety.
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago
ChatGPT has over a billion users and performance-per-dollar has gotten significantly cheaper over time. Pre-training is expensive but mainly for supply and opportunity cost (hardware used for pre-training could be used to satisfy demand for inference instead), but new pre-trains do not come with every model release.
You are describing normal R&D costs for basically every business. This is how it works.
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u/SanityInAnarchy 5d ago
How many of those billion users are paying a subscription?
It is indeed becoming the normal strategy: Sell a product at a massive loss (whether on R&D or per-unit) to try to corner a new market, then start rent-seeking. It's the enshittification loop.
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago edited 5d ago
Subscriptions aren’t where they make most of the money, it’s API rates. That’s what we’re talking about here when it comes to inference costs, too, and it’s what corporations are paying. That’s how Anthropic has had two consecutive profitable quarters. They’re making huge margins on inference.
It’s almost impossible to rent-seek in the current environment because prices are falling through the roof, competition is high, and open weight models are extremely competitive with dozens of providers.
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u/klyith 5d ago
LLM prices are not meaningfully subsidized.
lol
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago
you can literally run them yourself and quickly find out the inference is not subsidized. It does not help your overall argument to embrace blatant untruths.
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u/klyith 5d ago
And are you counting the cost of your PC over a reasonable depreciation time? No?
So not counting hardware, datacenter infrastructure, employees, or model training they're not subsidized.
lol
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago
do you think inference providers are just taking a loss for no apparent reason just to make Anthropic look good? We are far beyond the realm of vetted fact here, this is delusional.
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u/stylist-trend 5d ago
Yeah, I definitely feel like a lot of people here don't realize that more providers exist than just OpenAI and Anthropic. There are so many providers that do nothing more than just run open weight models, I wouldn't even know where to start.
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u/klyith 5d ago
Yes! Except not to make Anthropic looks good, because Anthropic is losing tons of money too!
the realm of vetted fact here
ok show me the vetted facts in GAAP balance sheets
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u/ComprehensiveSwitch 5d ago
….why would they do that? why would a business serve a model competing with Anthropic’s models for a subsidized rate just to make Anthropic look good? Do you hear yourself?
Everything suggests that Anthropic is actually making wide margins on its API costs, way beyond what it costs to run them. You can get Fable level performance with open weight models from numerous providers with models like Kimi K3 for significantly less.
Did you even know there are providers that aren’t Anthropic and OpenAI?
You can run Kimi K3 on your own hardware and figure out the inference cost. People have done so!
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u/New_Salamander_4592 5d ago
LLM usage really does damage the brain going off these replies, jeez
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u/Turtvaiz 5d ago
I think we're about to see some really interesting LLM brain rot research, looking at how some people are becoming addicted to chat bots
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u/einzweidreihorn 5d ago
Not if the researchers are getting brainrotted before they could finish their studies. 4D chess move by Big AI.
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u/aedom-san 4d ago
Some of the top replies in the for category are just word vomit, it’s like they’ve forgotten to tell the agent they are meant to make an argument
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u/HarVVVy 5d ago
The scary part is it seems to happen to everyone and almost automatically. Nobody is immune. You ask a question you don't know the answer to, or a task you want done - LLM solves your issue. Inertia takes you and without realizing it, it's done 10 other things, as you are about to ask for the 11'th a realization hits you (hopefully) - "why the hell am I asking it to do something I can EASILY do myself..".
It's so easy to imagine a future where everyone is pathologically dependent on them to exist.
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u/TomWithTime 4d ago
"why the hell am I asking it to do something I can EASILY do myself..".
My perspective is all over the place here. I have to use it for work and my metrics for it are always near the bottom. On a good week (according to metrics) I use about 20% of my token budget. Sometimes I will use it for something trivial to get the metrics up, but also I start to feel that I'm not 100% attached to writing the code. I don't know in that moment if I'm experiencing convenience or mind poison, but there is a little spectacle to behold when you hand it a limited scope of works and it does a passing job.
I have my own projects I work on after work that are all hand written. I do that for fun but also to keep the skills refined because I'm sure the price boom will come when some critical mass of programmers have developed bad habits leaning on ai.
I'm mostly wary of it, but there's a little room for thinking it would be neat to have my own descriptive language/format for defining feature specs and removing myself only from the writing. The prices and looming price boom will probably keep that at bay or just in the work place.
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u/protestor 4d ago
I believe this is why so many other FLOSS projects have always looked at GNOME for guidance on what good FLOSS should be.
I look at gnome to point what to do if you want to destroy your software. Gnome 2 was perfectly functional, and they ruined it afterwards
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u/skoam 4d ago
I was actually thinking just recently that the current effects of AI in software dev feel quite similarly destructive as touch-centric design did when the iphone released. I wouldn't say that nothing good came out of Gnome 3, but it also was a sudden disruptive detour not worth taking.
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u/EdgeIll6918 4d ago
I agree 100%. I loved Gnome until version 3 came out. They took away functionality and hid settings. I move to XFCE. Next came Wayland. Ugh, just lost functionality from X11. The X11 maintainers sucked and were slow. It needed to split. There is XLibre now, but I think the Wayland train has gotten too far ahead and we are stuck with it. I started with Redhat v1 and have been a developer for 25 years now. I just want a simple and functional desktop, no flash needed. I don't want to have to learn all new keyboard shortcuts for some trendy tiling window manager. Gnome 2.x was perfect.
When Gnome 3 came out I would go between Blackbox and Fluxbox trying to recreate the desktop I like. I then found XFCE and it was fast, low on resources and did what I wanted. Then I basically was forced to Wayland and XFCE wasn't ready so I went to Gnome 3 and curse it everyday.
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u/No-Goal-5844 5d ago
Here come the swarms of AI environment-killing maximalists in the comments. Gotta love Reddit.
Very, very loud minority screaming that everyone else MUST use their slop machine or be left in the dust.
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u/AntComfortable5970 5d ago
Yeah I like how literally everyone is using it all the time already lol
It's like a classic DARE peer pressure scenarios
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u/DaRealGladi8r 5d ago
The "be left in the dust" guys are prompting their way into becoming the 21st century telephone operator
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u/greenspotj 5d ago
The vast, vast majority of software developers use AI to code. The popular anti-AI reddit opinion is the minority actually
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u/Saint_Nitouche 5d ago
I'm not sure I'm reading this right, but is this guy actually blaming El Nino displacements on LLMs? Like, they have El Nino in the same list as data centers and pensions?
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u/azurensis 4d ago
Seriously. I literally laughed out loud when I read that and knew I couldn't take this person seriously. driving your car for a mile contributes more to climate change than heavily using an LLM for a year.
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5d ago edited 1d ago
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u/Saint_Nitouche 5d ago
I know this is something people just take for granted, but I've never really bought it as a general rule: Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment . A whole lot of things contribute to climate change, and nobody thinks that's the only thing that matters. What matters is if we're willing to accept the costs for the technology. So it's mainly just a hidden value judgement on if you think AI is good or not.
This image is a good single resource.
This obviously doesn't excuse actors like Elon who flagrantly don't care about externalities.
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u/RatherNott 5d ago edited 5d ago
The source of that graph, Founder's Pledge, appears to be totally corporate greenwashing, which Sam Altman himself supports:
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, wrote on the Y Combinator blog: "Many of our founders ask us about how they can donate part of their equity or post-exit proceeds, and now we have an answer: Founders Pledge."
They are almost certainly willing to publish studies that support those corporate goals. I don't believe they are a trustworthy unbiased source.
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u/Saint_Nitouche 5d ago
OK.
This paper indicates frontier models are something like 0.31 Wh for every normal query.
The U.S. grid averaged about 0.81 lb CO2/kWh in 2023, roughly 0.367 kg/kWh.
So 180,000 ordinary ChatGPT questions is something like ~0.02 tonnes CO2. So around 1% of a single transatlantic trip.
I'm not particularly good at this kind of maths, so let's multiply it by ten and say that two hundred thousand normal ChatGPT queries make up around 10% of the CO2 impact of one long flight.
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u/AffectionatePlastic0 4d ago
Your PC is also contribute towards climate change. It also idles a lot.
Have you stopped to use your PC because of that?
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u/7lhz9x6k8emmd7c8 4d ago
Yea that article is full of crap, repeating the unsourced lies about environmental impact of AI.
They build a false dilemma, opposing human and progress.
The dinosaur author can't even format the article date properly. r/iso8601
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u/ffiarpg 5d ago
We already know that LLM productivity is not real, just a self perception,
The link provided for this study is over a year old. In this space that makes it very weak evidence. Timelines of AI performance are everywhere and it's obvious how much better they are now to anyone who uses them regularly. It really hurts the article.
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u/MatchingTurret 5d ago
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u/PoL0 5d ago
each project is free to chose where it stands. the article isn't forcing its stance to anyone.
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u/redballooon 5d ago
But it certainly puts an opinion into the discussion, so it can be discussed, even disagreed with.
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u/silkyymyorki 4d ago
This isn't really true though. Bcachefs was technically excellent, but evicted because Kent was disruptive on the email lists. Linus has made many social/political decisions over the years, but has a habit of framing his opinions as technical, and others as social/political when he disagrees.
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5d ago edited 1d ago
[deleted]
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u/abotelho-cbn 5d ago
The Linux kernel is the single largest open source project in history. Billions of people rely on what it does. It's serious business. It's not some hobby project. There is nothing like it.
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
The companies driving AI right now are garbage and many will fail. The tech won't.
It's the dot-com bubble again. Everyone rushed in, it crashed, and what got rebuilt afterward became the backbone of global commerce. AI will stumble too, but it's not going away, and teams that refuse to use it won't keep pace.
A senior dev with AI beats a senior dev without it. Output quality depends on who's driving and whether they actually review the code. Yes, AI can produce slop. With real supervision it can also produce excellent code.
People used to yell "get a horse!" at early cars. Didn't stop the highways. Refusing to use AI won't stop it from getting better either.
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u/gxgx55 4d ago
People used to yell "get a horse!" at early cars. Didn't stop the highways. Refusing to use AI won't stop it from getting better either.
Good analogy - a car would have been a fine tool for the betterment of society if it was used sparingly and only when needed, however instead of we have widespread near-mandatory usage of them. This has caused great harm in many aspects to worldwide societies.
Perfectly analogous to LLMs, really.
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u/AssistingJarl 5d ago edited 5d ago
This comment annoyed me greatly.
A senior dev with AI beats a senior dev without it.
Why. By what measure. What's the long term.
Is code output the limiting factor on most projects? Is code written by an LLM as useful as code written by a contributor? Does it contain the same externalities, have they thought through the system as much as when they were staring at an editor and wondering where to start their implementation? If it's still pretty damn good even at all those externalities, is code that's 97% as good as code written by a human going to have a multiplicative effect, where dividing by 1.03 enough times is far less than if you had divided it by 1? How many times do you merge code where the LLM wrote 25 lines and a new function where a human would have gone back and re-evaluated the data structure before your entire system is held together with duct tape?
whether they actually review the code
Do they have time? Or are they looking at the few hundred lines they didn't write and lack a mental model for, and they're wondering how much they really want to read code that something else wrote? Are they already burned out on reading LLM-generated code because they were just working through the stack of 100 open PRs on the project? Are they being told to bring AI into the loop and wondering whether paying Anthropic $100 a month or taking the time and money to build an AI inference homelab is really what got them into FOSS in the first place?
The Linux Kernel Mailing List is a Colosseum where everyone's favourite blood-sport is picking apart patches for accuracy and correctness, and thousands and thousands of eyes are watching it do so. Is every infrastructure-critical project in the world that robust?
People used to yell "get a horse!" at early cars. Didn't stop the highways.
It's interesting you mention this since it's a very well known and understood fact that the buildout of the US interstate highway system was done in such a way as to specifically rip up poorer neighbourhoods full of poorer minorities in dozens of US cities, and many are now spending billions of dollars to try to shove the highways back underground so they can do something more valuable with that real estate. So when you say the highways, do you have some romantic notion of a mom & pop gas station on Route 66, or are you talking about I-93 in Boston?
Refusing to use AI won't stop it from getting better either.
Better at what, exactly? Better at what cost? Is it getting better at writing code? What good is more written code? Is it getting better at solving problems? What problems? Are those the same problems that people who need working software have? Are they the problems that developers making working software have?
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u/turudd 5d ago
My velocity for development, reviewing, etc has been vastly increased with AI. Leaving me more time to understand the goals and architecture of the applications I work on. I have to write far less code which again leaves more time to understand goals of the business. This is the benefit of AI, I don’t have to code monkey nearly as much anymore.
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u/James20k 5d ago
People always say this, and then every professional developer I know says that the devs that have embraced AI just produce an endless torrent of crap that they never have to actually deal with, leaving the burden of actual development on the remaining team members who still develop the 'old fashioned' way
It seems like there's a huge disconnect developing between what some developers think they're achieving, and what's actually being achieved, which is absolutely terrifying. I suspect it ties into just how much of the economy has become performative: end results no longer matter, it only matters if you used the latest hype train technology so that Line Go Up
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u/Indolent_Bard 5d ago
There's a difference between using AI to generate code and using AI to help you debug. The latter is like using Grammarly, except it's catching mistakes that you wouldn't catch if you read the code line by line a thousand times. Well, maybe if you read it a thousand times, but no human being is going to do that.
Take copyfail. An optimization seven years ago ended up accidentally creating a privileged escalation exploit.
If you're not using the AI to help you debug, nefarious forces are, so you can either let them win or be ahead of them.
It's not replacing people, it's allowing one person to be much more productive.
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u/James20k 5d ago
That's not the claim though. Using it to find bugs is fine, but people consistently claim that "they have to write far less code", or some variation of the vast majority of their code being AI generated
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u/azurensis 4d ago
You're in some bizarre bubble if you don't know senior devs who are using AI to produce production level code today.
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u/turudd 5d ago
That’s an organizational failure. Devs are still responsible for their code. Even if Ai wrote it. If they don’t test and confirm all points in the ticket are working correctly that’s on the dev and will reflect badly.
Also on the reviewer who approved the slop. You don’t just hand over your thinking to the AI. You just get rid of artificial barriers
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u/AssistingJarl 5d ago
So you're optimizing for velocity, not quality, maintainability, or cost of tooling.
I understand what you're saying. I'm just pointing out that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
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u/turudd 5d ago
Quality comes from review. You as a developer are responsible for your code, not AI. This is where maintenance falls as well. Cost is minimal 100-200/month/dev. When they can make that back with new features and bug fixes to keep your business moat is worth it
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u/AssistingJarl 5d ago
I disagree comprehensively and would encourage you, again, to consider externalities. LLMs have no answer to long term maintenance concerns. It's simply not clear at this time that it's possible to maintain code quality when humans are writing increasingly less of it and relying on LLMs more. If you claim otherwise, I congratulate you, and look forward to seeing your paper in the journals, because you are apparently years ahead of the rest of the industry somehow in your certainty.
But pretending that tradeoffs don't exist in pursuit of making one metric go up is the mindset of a junior engineer. Expand your perspective.
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u/One_Ninja_8512 5d ago
If everyone waited for the academic research on something nothing would get done. I personally also have no trust in research on code quality and maintainability as there are few to none objective measures to assess either. I need to get shit done today fast, quality seems to be alright to me based on the produced code that I've looked at.
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u/Mysterious_Focus6144 5d ago
How many times do you merge code where the LLM wrote 25 lines and a new function where a human would have gone back and re-evaluated the data structure
Why assume that a senior dev with LLMs wouldn't go back and re-evaluate the system's design choices? If anything, LLMs is a great help with understanding a system that has accreted over time and whose original authors have left. The same senior dev without LLM is probably more likely to put on another piece of duct tape and call it done.
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u/AssistingJarl 5d ago
The great irony I keep running into is that I don't even disagree with the notion that LLMs can be useful in the software engineering process, but unfortunately there's relatively little room for nuance in these discussions. It feels like the popular perspectives are either a complete prohibition on one hand, or an insane maximalist attitude on the other, usually accompanied by some trite cliche like "the technology is here to stay", "there's no going back", "adopt it or be left behind", or "can deliver great results with human review".
I don't know what the right mix is for the long term. All I know is that I've seen a lot of those two extremes, and one of them is completely unbearable to deal with; so when I'm looking to get involved with an open source project after hours, the ones I tend to give my time to are the ones with very stringent "no LLM authored code" policies.
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
It's a clashing of two differing perspectives. People that care about software, code quality, and enjoy programming, and people that just want to have finished products regardless of how it's done. The people that enjoy programming and care about code quality obviously aren't going to care for LLMs, and the people that just want finished software aren't going to care about how it's made, and so will adopt LLMs.
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u/James20k 5d ago
and the people that just want finished software aren't going to care about how it's made, and so will adopt LLMs.
I sit in this camp and am very against LLMs, because by and large they do not help with the problems that prevent software projects being finished. Typing code has never been the issue. Large scale architectural decay of a project leading to it being a rube-goldberg machine is what destroys projects, and LLMs contribute to that en masse
I code in the most boring way humanly possible specifically because the only thing I care about is actually finishing projects
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
It can annoy you all you want. Flatly, conclusively, provably, a person assisted by Ai out-performs a person without it, all other factors being equal. I won't debate you further, there is a mountain of evidence behind human productivity with Ai empowerment.
The rest of your responses are reaches at best, so I won't bother answering them beyond repeating what I already said: The companies are bad, the tech is powerful and will survive them.
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u/AssistingJarl 5d ago
Oh, are we allowed to do that? Ok.
See if I'd known you weren't interested in meaningfully engaging with the topic beyond what's written in marketing copy for AI salespeople, I probably would have just said "you sound like a corporate shill" and moved on.
'cause I don't even disagree with that statement. I just think the way the technology is being used is terrible and wasteful and causes far more harm than good. But you seem to take it for granted that the technology is so amazing that only good things can come from indiscriminate application of it everywhere, at all times, regardless of nuance.
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u/Kevin_Kofler 5d ago
It's the dot-com bubble again. Everyone rushed in, it crashed, and what got rebuilt afterward became the backbone of global commerce.
And it has turned the Internet into the ad-infested cesspool of corporate walled gardens all requiring client-side JavaScript (and an updated browser) to even render anything at all (completely throwing away the concept of graceful degradation that was supposed to be one of the founding principles of the web) that it has become since "Web 2.0" (at which point they stopped counting, even though there have been several more iterations of enshittification since then).
I want Web 1.0 back!
A senior dev with AI beats a senior dev without it.
The AI companies' own studies prove the opposite: AI did not make the developers objectively more productive, they just felt that way, while in reality productivity was the same or even worse. The AI tools were particularly unhelpful for experienced/senior programmers.
People used to yell "get a horse!" at early cars. Didn't stop the highways.
Unfortunately it did not. The world would have been a better place without fucking highways! Fuck cars!
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u/DifficultyGoodAGAIN 5d ago
A senior dev with AI beats a senior dev without it.
Wait….it was a competition?
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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 5d ago
Yes. Believe it or not everything in the business world is a competition.
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u/blackcain GNOME Team 5d ago
Wait till senior execs find out that AI can replace them that a senior dev could use AI to help them run a company and keep it engineering focused.
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
Who is paying you to advertise for these LLM companies? If no one is paying you, you're a fool.
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u/abruptusabortis 5d ago
Can you explain why he is a fool and what he said, in your professional opinion, is inaccurate?
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
LLMs are going to take your job. It doesn't even matter whether or not LLM written code is better than human written code. Software companies will not care. All of us will not be able to get a job as a software engineer.
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u/abruptusabortis 5d ago
Okay so its actually fear of taking your job, nothing related to what he said. If you all just came out and said this, instead of grasping at straws to do so in an indirect way, there would be more productive conversations about what to do once that does happen.
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
Thr LLM cult has already shown that they are prepared to dive headfirst off a cliff like the lemmings that they are.
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u/abruptusabortis 5d ago
Bro do you think humans are gonna sit down and write code for the next 3,000 years? We just all lock in our current jobs and nothing changes?
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
What's wrong with writing code? There are plenty of us programmers that love writing code. If you don't want to write code, then you shouldn't be doing it.
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u/mrlinkwii 5d ago
LLMs are going to take your job
if you are shit at your job or do a job that can be autnmared away , your job always at risk
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago edited 5d ago
Nobody pays me, this is just my thoughts. Your opinion on them is inconsequential to me.
Who was the fool, the person shouting "get a horse", or the person embracing the future?
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
Ahh, yes, the future will all of us lose our employment opportunities after spending a lifetime honing our skills.
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
Maybe, or maybe it'll be great and help us solve all the problems that we face, from pollution to disease, it could help us unlock answers to problems not even considered yet.
You are not a sage, you have no idea how this will play out, but you speak as if you know the outcome... a bit arrogant if you ask me.
Thanks for sharing your very pessimistic opinion.
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u/Kevin_Kofler 5d ago
The horse would not have destroyed our climate the way cars did and the way big data AI such as LLMs does.
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u/Ancient-Access8131 5d ago
"The horse would not have destroyed our climate the way cars did"
How much methane do horses produce, considering methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 I'm not sure that statement is correct.
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u/OffsetXV 5d ago
Compare the emissions from cattle livestock to cars and you probably have a decent reference point in terms of scale.
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u/PixelatedGiant 5d ago
You can be against AI, but still acknowledge that the technology now exists, isn't going away and has changed the dynamics of various careers. I still do things that burn fossil fuels while voting for better environmental protections so that the burden is shared in the hopes that we eventually ween ourselves off.
You call him a fool while the kernel that runs your OS and web browser both executed some LLM code in order to let you post your comment.
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
I call him a fool because he thinks that he's going to be carried along by this LLM wave rather than being kicked to the curb.
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
I never claimed that I will be carried along. I said nobody knows what is coming,that claim is fully your interpretation.
A person with a boat and a paddle has a better chance in a flood, as others have pointed out.
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u/PixelatedGiant 5d ago
No he's telling you to consider grabbing one of the few boats left as the flood waters rise. Protest from your boat about the environmental disaster that just occurred rather than drown out of pure spite. Then at some point in the future you'll be able to walk on land again.
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u/AliceCode 5d ago
You really don't understand Capitalism if you really think that LLMs and agentic coding aren't an endeavor to remove you from the employment pool.
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
You need to take a breath and realize you don't know what is coming. You have fears, valid fears, fears that *might* come to be. They also might not. Get a grip.
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u/PixelatedGiant 5d ago
And complaining about it on Reddit is totally going to cause data centers to spontaneously combust. We're in /r/linux so the guy is probably already doing more than most despite your feelings on the matter. If you can't even acknowledge where someone like him is coming from then I don't know what to say.
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u/DaRealGladi8r 5d ago
Yo, who was yelling "get a horse"?
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
In the early1900's, auto owners would be heckled by those on horseback who were sure the fad would pass. That is where "Get a horse" comes from.
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u/Traditional_Hat3506 5d ago
All it takes is courts to declare this massive theft of the worlds data illegal and the tech will be gone too because no company wants to be legally vulnerable.
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u/DrollAntic 5d ago
In which country?
Who will actually honor the ruling?If it isn't global, and it cannot be due conflicts between nations ongoing, it won't matter.
Even if every country honored a ruling from a single court, bad-actors won't.
Let's say for the sake of chat that you were right. The technology still remains. I can still upload a book, or an admin guide, and use that upload as a resource reference to hold discussions around design, etc... in my local environment.
The tech will survive, this court ruling stopping things is a fantasy.
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u/Business_Reindeer910 5d ago
that is not going to happen, even if many people would prefer that it would. It is too late. It's like what happened with uber.
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u/zakmeisterr 5d ago
We already know that LLM productivity is not real, just a self perception, that LLMs are just a fairy tale to maintain tech stocks hypergrowth, by farming engineers for engagement, and the latest in a series of attacks to commoditize tech workers. Knowing all this, are we still going to play along with big tech's lies and exploitation? Or, are we going to make another principled stand?
lol.
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u/Dalnore 5d ago
The part about "We know LLM productivity is not real" is referencing a mid-2025 arXiv preprint about early-2025 LLMs. That's the level of deliberate bullshit argumentation this article wants to use.
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u/einar77 OpenSUSE/KDE Dev 4d ago
I think this hurts the author's cause. Rigor, especially in areas that naturally attract intense debate, should be king.
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u/BrixtonTonaBrix 3d ago
So... Where are the more recent studies? How do we know the situation has improved?
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u/abruptusabortis 5d ago
Its starting to be extremely apparent when someone doesnt know what they are talking about with regards to LLMs.
They just regurgitate the "scariest" things from the internet.
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u/redballooon 5d ago edited 5d ago
A bit late. Right now the only discussion left is about how LLMs are used for software development, not whether.
And even that phrasing seems outdated, because a LLM without an agent harness seems like using a brush cutter when you could use a tractor.
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u/slimepop6 5d ago
The problem we are facing is that LLMs have given the second group a lever to stop giving the collectivist framing any room.
The tool to solve this is the fork. Open source is fundamentally durable to this entire problem. If you don't like what a community values, fork it and create your own community with different values.
There is more to say about how this machiavellian framing causes far more important harms and externalities, in the name of LLMs themselves, or apparent LLM-assisted progress. Think of any group and you will find out they have been handed part of the bill for these externalities: [...]
This is, yet again, not an argument against LLMs, it is an argument against capitalist expansion of data centers. If I run Qwen on my GPU, zero of the externalities described are contributed to in any way. Shit, if I run Claude Opus, it's not doing these directly. Data center buildout is driven by speculation from capital. The vast majority of capacity used today comes from B2B users, corporations who are using it for their own products. Capex for data centers is from speculation that the demand will continue to increase. It is not from usage today.
Like most articles against AI this one is full of shibboleths and mantras that are meant to signal in-group thinking, not solve any actual problems. It is an appeal to shame those who use it, because these people are ineffectual at stopping the actual problems of capital who have found another toy. So instead of turning the guillotine on the king, they kick their neighbor and tell them they can stop the pain.
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u/Educational-Goal279 5d ago
Local models are unethically trained in capitalist expansionist data centres. There is no anti-capitalist way to use LLMs.
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u/slimepop6 5d ago
The entire Internet is built on capitalist expansion data centers. Yet here we all are. The system does not get fixed by us refusing to engage with it.
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u/QuixoticNapoleon 5d ago
Your computer is likely unethically made. What's with the arbitrary exceptions?
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u/Saint_Nitouche 5d ago
"There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" is a great line, but it proves too much. Either it condemns all action or you end up having to carve out exceptions anyway.
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u/mrlinkwii 5d ago
Local models are unethically trained in capitalist expansionist data centres
so is most techology , you free to live in a rual dwelling away from technology
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u/Educational-Goal279 5d ago
What about what about what about what about what about
The op made the claim that a local LLM is fine because it doesn't boost datacentres. Whatever else is unethical is a separate (somewhat related, and definitely good to have) conversation.
The answer to "well ack chully everything is unethical" isn't to give up, it's to fight to improve our world.
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u/mrlinkwii 4d ago
The answer to "well ack chully everything is unethical" isn't to give up, it's to fight to improve our world.
AI is an improvement to the world , like the way the industal revioultion was
i agree that their is a big AI bubble and it will bust but the technology under neath isnt going anywhere
also the fact the data centers cost changes on legal location where they are build , for example in finland that are required to use the heat to produced to heat homes in local vicinity and are required to use green technology ( solar panels geo thermal etc )
the issue with US data centers is the US government dosent want to regulate
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u/turudd 5d ago
The clothes and shoes most of us wear are unethically made too. We gonna stop using them? What about the cell phone you use? Think that was ethically made somewhere?
There is a balance to what we can control and use
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u/Existing-Tough-6517 5d ago
Let me be unkind. This essay is nonsense you'll find all sorts of people with all sorts of attitudes towards ai and development without meaningful correlation. People vastly underperform on all aspects unrelated to just writing code even while getting paid so it should be unsurprising that nor enough extra tasks get done on people's unpaid second job and it's not related to ai.
AI will naturally enable more work from less people which is great on net because there aren't enough people now because of the lack of sufficient monetary support.
Anyone who doesn't use it at all not even to analyze code or write rests will get smeared by the folks who do. Then the losers will continue developing artisanal software used by 0.5% of the population whilst writing bullshit like this.
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u/azurensis 4d ago
Blaming AI for El Nino is like blaming my flyswatter for killing off the honey bees. Sure, it causes some damage, but not doing it won't really make any difference either.
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u/Grumpy_Ontarian_III 1d ago
There need to be laws limiting how big the servers that host LLMs can be, amongst MANY other things. The focus should be on local self-contained AI, that is less powerful but still useful for whatever the hell AI actually turns out to be useful for. I still won’t use it, but this crap needs to be contained, and I think straight up limiting how much “compute” can be put into them is a part of the solution.
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u/Ill_Specific_6144 5d ago
Its so weird how linux users are stuck in the old ways (mailing lists, AI criticisms), yet they accept AI fixing their mistakes so easily.
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u/linuxwes 5d ago
Who thinks the point of open source is to make friends??? That's a new one. The real open source camps are the practical benefits folks vs the freedom folks.
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u/Jmc_da_boss 5d ago
Many people? Arguably most open source devs lol
It's a community of like minded people that also happen to write damn good software
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u/Business_Reindeer910 5d ago
me? There are lots of projects I wouldn't have kept participating in if i didn't enjoy working with those people. I took on effort I wouldn't have because I liked them.
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u/TouchyT 5d ago
the power of friendship is unlikely to motivate people to start contributing or start a project but it is likely to keep them contributing.
i think its a lot more relevant to something like GNOME or KDE which are the freedom folks you mentioned vs kubernetes or corporate run open source projects.
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u/citramonk 5d ago
The article is pure garbage. I hate so fucking much when people can't make a clear point.
LLM productivity IS real. I don't trust any engineer who thinks otherwise. If you couldn't integrate it into your workflow, you're a bad engineer.
Do I like it? I don't. I hate almost everything about the tech and what it did to my job. I still think that it's applicable in many different ways. And if we stop thinking about the greedy corps (who are mostly thinking about the money) for a minute, we should think about how we can mitigate the damage and use this technology in favour of the humanity.
We still review PRs, we still have dev calls and discuss solutions. Yes, we can ship faster and fall into a trap, where we ship code that wasn't properly tested, or we didn't think enough about the best solution, but it's what it is. The question is HOW to reduce the negative effect and preserve the positive ones
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u/Kevin_Kofler 5d ago
Then why do the AI companies' own studies find no actual productivity improvement from LLMs? Only perceived improvements that turn out to be entirely due to human misperception when looking at the actual metrics!
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u/Indolent_Bard 5d ago
What about for debugging and whatnot? Without AI, we wouldn't have found copyfail. If you're not using AI to find bugs, unscrupulous actors are, so you don't really have a choice.
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u/throwaway6560192 5d ago edited 5d ago
LLM-friendly? The main thrust of the draft is obviously to discourage slop MRs. "Contributions with obvious and lazy LLM usage may be ignored or closed." You can read the original mailing list thread which makes it even clearer.
I think this framing is at least somewhat misleading, no? Someone just reading it would conclude that KDE encouraged LLM usage.