Fucking traitorous scum
Torvalds’s first publicly released chatbot code was in January this year, when he vibe-coded a project in Python because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python.
I’m pissed at the AI companies for all kinds of things like hiking computer parts prices and the impending destruction of the economy when the
lieshype dies. But this is a weak ass argument.The guy who created the Linux kernel and git can absolutely get his head around Python. He’s just allocating his time and energy toward kernel development rather than learning Python and rightly so. Besides, maybe he just hates the language. I know I do, but I started with Perl, so that shaped the way I like to work.
He could get his head around python if he wanted to, that statement is laughable.
because he didn’t know enough Python. The programming language kids learn in high school. The guy who runs the kernel couldn’t get his head around Python.
This is such an ignorant thing to say. Python syntax is indeed simple and is taught in high schools, but neither means learning to program in Python is easy or doesn’t take a lot of time.
But learning python is easy and takes no time for an experienced dev. The language is just shite.
I know I do, but I started with perl
Throwing rocks from a glass house I see ;)
Perl has scope delimiters, so a sturdy glass house.
perl accepts perlin noise as valid perl programs so scope delimiters don’t mean much.
So does Python /s
Just create a new file or a top level function
except that it breaks my debugging strategy, where I left-align debug code so I can easily spot it and remove it later.
Sure. But that’s like an English literature scholar deciding they want to write a pamphlet, but in French, despite knowing very little French – so instead of learning French, or just writing the pamphlet in English, or asking someone who knows French to translate…they use AI to write the thing. That’s really stupid.
He’s just allocating his time and energy toward kernel development
Then he should have stuck to his lane.
Absolutely. If you don’t have time to do anything else, just fucking stay away from it. Don’t fucking pretend to contribute to an area, while in reality you’re just polluting it and destroying the natural environment at the same time.
I’ll take a neutral source to read this, because the headline suggests this article is at the very least over hyping and at worst plain lying
Been a bit of a bother trying to find the actual info and not a rage piece that makes FOX News look sane. And I don’t touch that agency with an 11ft pole.
From what I remember reading, Linus uses LLMs to help during bug hunting - the second pair of eyes. This is actually a useful part of the AI models - they may be awful at code writing, but they do seem to have some capability when looking over code as a first line proofer. That is, it’s useful for you to get a direction as to where to look further with issues.
As for the Assisted-By tag being removed, it was a matter that no one was really using it, making it functionally useless.
This article seems biased given how emotional it is. It could be entirely factually correct yet still misrepresent the situation. For example, there’s no mention of the patch criteria or review procedure, which is such an important part of fairly covering this topic that omitting it is actively malicious.
I’ll be waiting for fair coverage of the situation from a reputable news source, not a website whose sole purpose is to make AI and its users look bad.
We just need more volunteers? Isn’t it just that the development is on such few people?
That is one of many issues.
Put a pin in socio-economic-environmental issues for a second.
AI is good at finding bugs/vulnerabilities. If you’re using it for peer programming, the output is 100% what you’re comfortable with, while you’re still directing what goes where and how. That’s right up Torvald’s alley. Not every piece of code we write is a masterpiece of complicated art. Sometimes, when we are writing a complicated piece, we are unable to see all the ramifications of each piece in a way that AI appears to be able to see.
From this standpoint, even if we had a LOT more people working on the kernel. We’d amplify problems, especially if the people we threw on the project were more free-hands than artists.
Unpin that socio-economic-env stuff now.
Until tokens cost enough that it’s not reasonable, or the AI providers make things dumb enough to save money/meet law/eco demands, most code at most places will likely go through at least a post-cleanup/analysis phase. Everything would be labeled slop.
I don’t think, long term, that we’re going to have AI writing everything at the level we are even now, but it’s not impossible. That’s not to say I advocate it or push it forward, but there may simply be no way to stop it if the economics / laws allow it to continue.
The most disappointing aspect of using AI on linux, to me, is that it sort of implies linux is now more comfortable with the “move fast and break things” -mindset, now caring more about “efficiency” and “speed” rather than integrity and quality.
That’s really sad actually, i didn’t think of that.
Open source is all about moving fast. Much, much more innovations happen in the oss space than in proprietary land.
Linux is a serious project.
As such, it has serious quality control.
Torvals already allowed AI-helped commits. And Linux didn’t break over it.
Bad pull requests rutinely get thrown out. And unfortunately for thode categorically against AI as a thing that exists, AI use doesn’t automatically make every PR bad. In the right hands it’s a great tool with a lot of potential.
And if Torvalds feels Linux is a project too big to be brought down by an onslaught of bad PRs made by wannabe script kiddies, so be it.
If that does become a crippling problem, the policy can be undone as easily as it was made. If not, competent contributors are free to use AI responsibly as a tool and not a magic wand.
A hard “no AI anywhere in any way, shape or form” stance is like the ostrich digging its head into the ground. Not trying a softer approach beforehand which allows responsible use (may also mean using approved environmentally friendly setups and open-weight models) is a bad idea for everyone involved.
Technology moves forward and we as individuals can choose to move with it or not. That being said, the foss moral imperative is: democratize any tech you can. This is especially true of when it’s a dangerous technology, which LLM-powered chatbots are.
If you instead move fast to burrow your head like an ostrich and deny the reality of the predator growing right beside you, the little lion cub that play hunted you just a while ago may very well soon grow into the lion that will devour you whole.
I only recently installed Linux for the first time on my HTPC last year and it was flawless at first. Last couple months I’ve noticed a handful of bugs and system hangs that never happened before. Anecdotal, I know, but it worries me as a novice. I built my home server on this machine specifically to avoid microslop…
Last couple months I’ve noticed a handful of bugs and system hangs that never happened before.
I get random blackscreens with my OcuLink-connected Radeon GPU on the latest kernels…anecdotal evidence, too, but my slopcode senses are tingling. It worked really well on 6.x kernels last year.
Software will probably get worse, but very slowly. One little stab at a time until it becomes very noticeable.
I find this annoying where every regression now gets associated with “AI slop”. I agree that genuine slop is bad. But Radeon regressions were pretty damn common pre-AI-slop too. My 6600M, my Vega iGPU and others all had regressions. And I’ve seen this pattern with everything else lately too, where even bugs that have existed for over a decade are associated with LLMs. Pointing things out specifically is important in these scenarios IMO. “This LLM-generated and claimed-to-be-human-reviewed patch caused this regression.” That’s much more useful than “slopcode senses” that people seem to be triggering in projects that have existed for so long. (I do get where you’re coming from though…)
I’ll start with fuck AI, but it does feel like most of the people commenting here only know about coding and AI from stories around a campfire.
A good developer will consider the tools and choose the ones that are beneficial. It’s crazy that people think somebody like Linus will suddenly be useless because of AI.
If you take all of the civilization level atrocities being committed constantly by ai companies and their fascist supporters…eh maybe?
I think
moredevelopers and engineers need to work on their busted ass moral compasses.Developers and engineers aren’t fans of AI. It’s our stolen work being used to try and surpress our wages & replace our trade.
Unfortunately, there’s enough engineers going along with it and supporting it for various reasons that I’m terrified that the turbulence and volatility in our industry has only truly just begun.
When part of the bubble pops and what’s left of vc cash dries up, there’s going to be a great convenient consolidation around government and military applications just in time for global conflict to give it more fuel and another big downward shake.
Also need to unionize!
Software engineer writing code for a living, day in, day out for over a decade. I’m completely self taught and never went to uni, and got my first role at 20, if that means anything. I trust nothing from Claude. We just had a “write no code have claude complete in automode”. Nope. It’s horrible. We even had it write the jira stories. Complete shit.
And yet, from experience as a software dev currently on job hunt because his company is switching mostly only AI developing, that is not what companies are doing and not what a lot of devs seem to be doing. They’ll vibe code and see it as done
In the near future (and I suspect it’s quite sooner than we thought) all those companies’ codebase will turn into mostly slopcode that no one there will have enough knowledge about it. They will eventually hit a timeline where only AI agents could still do a thing about it and that will be a huge crash for them. It’s suppose to be a tool, they act like it’s everything they need. Maybe we’ll even see that their software is changing inconsistently in every major update because they have to vibe-code it from scratch every time.
Oh no, didn’t you see? Ai agents are gonna start self replicating on smart devices everywhere and become their own botnet!
AI imo is good at finding potential issues or places to optimize but it shouldn’t be writing code on the kernel. It’s up to the human to investigate and adjust, not AI slop.
Linus is a traitor to Open Source community. Using and promoting a tool created by stealing the works of thousands of developers, artists etc. He might be a good programmer but he is a fucking douchebag.
Even worse is, that he’s inadequately helping capital, including Microsoft, in stripping the common man of their own computing, to rent it back to them.
Only TempleOS is safe now
What about BeOS?
Praise him*.
*Terry A. Davis
No one should be surprised.
Man’s got a massive ego problem, and has done for years. Of course he’d think his AI code is good.
Thanks, I thought I was in a minority thinking he is losing his marbles, but the upvotes you got say there’s more people realizing that.
he’d think his AI code is god.
Give it time.
No need. The Ppl behind GBT are litterly lobbying the pope to recognize their AI has a soul
That I know that’s really a thing makes me want to have a physical tantrum over how stupid and frustrating it is
Well… Guess we’re all fucked now.
It’s kind of incredible to me that the dude that started this project would be so quick to allow it to become slopped.
I’m forced to use LLMs at work myself, but even I have projects that I’m unwilling to let them touch, and I’m talking about a personal text editor for fuck’s sake, not something I’ve spent my whole life building and attached my name to.
So many people have become shameless garbage.
This exactly! I don’t understand how one would let an LLM touch their passion projects. I don’t mind someone quickly slopping together a little python script for something, but I would never let it touch my babies. It’d be like buying a self-assembling lego set. Sure the end result is the same, but is the end result why someone buys a lego set?
Linus on the Linux kernel (after writing a single python script w/ an LLM):
Its really sad, Linus used to be a champion of open source and now hes doing his best to ruin it.
You either die a hero…
Or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain
Yes, that is the second half of the quote Op didn’t include. American?
What does being snarky at them achieve here? Why would it be bad, to write the continuation to that saying? Maybe someone now learned it. If it annoys you, just move on, no need to bring more negativity into the world.
I have lost my faith in Torvalds when he wrote this:
This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.
Taking bets now, how long until we get a Torvalds rant about too many brown people in the kernel developer community?
“When did my political project become so political?”
- Person who doesn’t realize that literally everything is politicalHow long until he monetizes it in the biggest bait and switch attempt FOSS has ever seen?
Big corporations are already the ones paying his salaries, the biggest contributors to the Linux foundation, they have been steering it for a long time to focus on the server needs of Linux. I guess the Linux foundation stance on ai is there to guarantee the flow of money from those corporations doesn’t dry-up.
Fuck I don’t want to see that 😭
Yeah, that hurt… It’s so easy to just NOT say that shit
Linux maintainers stand on this is basically : our ai generate slop is good but yours is questionable
At what point should we start considering that the kernel maintainers and developers don’t even understand what they are adding to the project ??
What I see in ai projects these days is huge commit size changes many files at once, where the people behind those commit don’t have a single clue what is being added or changed.
