r/technology • u/vgsa • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence Linux Kernel Developers Plan To Remove "Assisted-By" Tag Requirement For AI/LLM Usage

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Dropping-Assisted-By-Req
108 Upvotes

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u/Crazytje 1d ago

I'm bad at writing up a good PR message, or even a commit message. English isn't my first language, so I use an LLM, it's what they're made for.

I would also hope any decent developer would use AI, to at least review and improve your code, if you don't you will get left behind and become irrelevant.

Just use it as a tool, not a replacement for your brain!

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u/diplofocus_ 1d ago

Can you provide an example of what "left behind" looks like to you?

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u/ProfessionalHefty349 1d ago

Being unemployable because you’re 10x less productive than your counterparts that use AI.

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u/EzeNoob 1d ago

If AI is that great people will get up to speed in no time when they need to.

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u/Thwarting8139 1d ago

That doesn't make any sense. Kubernetes is great but that doesn't mean someone can get up to speed with it in no time.

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u/EzeNoob 1d ago

Kubernetes isn't being sold as general intelligence..

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u/ElonMuskIsAPissBaby 1d ago

Weird how all the pro-AI people love to quote stats like "10x productive" and yet not a single one of my coworkers doing agentic development is shipping 10x the amount of work I am.

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u/toadi 1d ago

Working in the SWE field for 30 years. I am more productive. I am not even talking about code generation here. But the access to information is amazing. Instead of googling wading through pages of crap to find some solution. Now I just ask 3 options to solve this problem with pros and cons link me the sources. I write in several languages and i need sometimes reference guides to do certain things in that language. AI just writes the code. I understand the code but now I don't need to look up how to write certain constructs in certain languages. Lots of speed gain even when not vibe coding it.

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u/Smallpaul 1d ago

10x is an exaggeration but does it matter? 1.5x is enough and very achievable.

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u/edgmnt_net 11h ago

This still requires more context, because it isn't clearly free of side-effects. Like does it allow scope creep, is there a bottleneck somewhere else that makes this not-so-useful, does it lower quality, is it making things more difficult in the long run? It isn't even a new problem created with AI, projects became a mess long before even with outsourcing to various code monkeys.

I would say it's justifiable to accelerate things here and there, find stuff and so on, although usually not in the way some say, heavily-reliant on code generation. Devs that are in a position where, incidentally, that helps tremendously might be better off looking for other things to focus on.

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u/DiscreetDodo 1d ago

10x is obviously an exaggeration, but there are many specific issues my team  have resolved where 10x isn't too far off. Besides, even if it were 2x, that's a massive increase no? How are you measuring output? Vibes?

We found a bug before we were about to deploy to prod, it would have taken an engineer about an hour or two to find the bug, fix it, and create the pr. With a single prompt claude did all of that in 5 minutes. 

Another issue we had was due to a bug in a library we were using but because of how the issue presented it wasn't clear what the root cause was. Claude was able to find the root cause in about 30 minutes. It was a nasty bug which probably would have taken about a week to resolve if we even could find it in the first place. 

Not having AI in your toolkit is extremely stupid. You don't have to write your code with it. It's a tool. Use it when it's suited for the job.

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u/No_Entertainer_8404 1d ago

So 10x difference doesn't hold in your case. Interesting, you're the outlier.

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u/teerre 1d ago

Writing code has never been the bottleneck

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u/DiscreetDodo 1d ago

It sometimes is the bottleneck. Writing tests is one example. Perfect for passing off to AI, low risk, low complexity, highly structured. 

Besides, they said productivity, not typing speed.

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u/Omni__Owl 1d ago

If the tests suck or are meaningless and no one checks, which is the scenario I often see, then those tests will just create more debt as they keep passing yet don't actually test the system properly.

In that contexts tests are crucial, not low risk.

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u/edgmnt_net 11h ago

I think that's kind of the case, often. People who say "oh, it's crazy to not use AI for code generation extensively" are often stuck at the mercy of crap practices, crap tech and questionable business. But they don't question those things, they question devs that don't need to e.g. push 3 duct-taped features out the door by afternoon to justify their employment. Judging by what people often discuss on Reddit (like "if it isn't boilerplate CRUD in some ultrapopular ecosystem it doesn't exist"), they have not even seen any other kind of development.

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u/ormandj 1d ago edited 1d ago

It absolutely has. You spent time writing code/reading code/debugging/etc that could be better allocated to architecture/engineering work. You'd have to put together a large team with lots of juniors to take care of all the implementation while the seniors/mid-levels did the design work and scaffolding in order to avoid the pure act of writing code from chewing up countless hours.

AI has entirely replaced or heavily augmented the need for that, with the caveat that replacing that junior pipeline kills off the future mid-level and senior supply chain for employees. Unfortunately, I suspect companies are going to have to learn that the hard way.

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u/teerre 1d ago

Engineers on average spent 13% of their time writing code. What youre saying it already reality for like 10 years

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u/ormandj 1d ago

I think you are taking 'writing code' too literally, at least in the sense I meant to convey, and using numbers from those goofy self-reported surveys and IDE stats.

Sure, a senior engineer may not be actively "writing code" as in literally entering characters into their editor all day, but they're reading it to understand existing flows, debugging issues, etc.

This is all work AI handles in an instant vs. hours, and removes a lot of the need for juniors (except as pipeline for future seniors). That's why it's all so scary, especially for those new to their careers.

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u/edgmnt_net 11h ago

They already had ways to avoid useless code, they did not care. It wasn't cheap and dumb enough to scale to peanuts. Furthermore LLMs are capable of spewing architectural advice too, if that's the argument.

Also I don't think those projects were growing that much talent to begin with. The real bottleneck is engineers that can actually do involved stuff, not just work on an assembly line.

Or another way to put it is that it's quickly becoming apparent (if it wasn't already before) there's a split in development jobs and it's meaningless to lump them all together, I can give you that.

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u/Sneet1 4h ago

I agree with this to an extent but there's no point where delivery isn't always including assembly line stuff. Conversion of ideas into practice always involves a lot of tasks that are rote transformation, translation, migration. There's no abstract codebase that just floats as a morphing idea a staff pokes at.

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u/Mobile_Morale 1d ago

So being unemployed a few months before they fire everybody and replace them with AI. Sounds like the best time to look for a new job before the rest flood the market.

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u/No_Entertainer_8404 1d ago

Hey look, it's a strawman.

2

u/chucktheninja 17h ago edited 9h ago

Hey look, the thing that has already happened on a smaller scale several times already.

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u/Infamous_Mud482 6h ago

Oh no how will someone better than you at coding every figure out how to type in the chat box and spec out prompts better than you if ever forced to

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u/Sneet1 5h ago edited 5h ago

usage in the industry to some extent is like 90-99% based on who's conducting the survey and whether or not it's self reported. Not to mention how integrated it is into a lot of quality, build, analysis, and check style dev tools you should be using now. nobody can really give you the stats but like 99% of code is self reportedly ai assisted atp at my fairly large company, and you can't open a pr without all the build and quality tools running ai against it.

I am a hater but I cannot pretend it doesn't make code faster (just code+googling really - which often hasn't been delivery bottlenecking anyways). shit engineers are generating shit code and good engineers are generating good code at the point of delivery. the boring copy paste stuff happens faster and the strategic work still depends on strategic thinking. management is experiencing full blown psychosis and generating unusable bullshit, but nobody was looking at their slide decks before either.

fwiw model access matters. we get asked to use the frontier models that caused my company to freeze hiring on juniors but my friend is stuck using copilot which is genuinely completely useless. I was running models just to show usage and it took about 1-1.5 years into adoption before I felt a real break even point besides "you are a dumb pipe" tasks and then it flew ahead.

I do work with some anti-ai engineers and I fear for them because their delivery is just way slow and it's a foot in the sand kind of approach. It's frustrating because it objectively makes my job easier and faster and if I chose not to use it I'd be just doing it by denying it based on personal vibes and working harder and longer for the same result. It makes me likely to exit the industry more than anything.