It seems Linus’s position is very clear now
I actually do think that someone who already has multiple decades of experience in programming without using AI is probably not producing shoddier code after incorporating it into their workflow. Important modern software projects, whose backbones are programmers fitting that description, aren’t going to be worse in the present because of Claude usage. I remain strongly against it though, because normalizing its usage guarantees the future won’t have programmers that fit that description running the shows.
I think this can be framed as a statement about generative AI in general: If you think AI has been making everything shittier today, just wait until you see what it’s been doing to everything tomorrow.
… then you win
I can’t wait for a base linux install to be 60 GB of slop, like windows.
Nobody freaks out when skilled programmers/professionals use AI, it’s actually a tool for them and not full-on skill substitution.
Yeah, of all the people out there using Claude, he’s the absolute least worrisome. He’ll read the whole thing, and if he doesn’t like anything at all that it does, he won’t let it do it.
What you’re saying is that if you aren’t a famous programmer you deserve to be ridiculed for using the same tool?
And how do you square this with all the crying about water?!
Not if you’re famous, if you’re bad at coding on your own
Where did I say famous? Read harder. Water concerns are separate from wreckless vibe-coding concerns.
lots of people freak out actually (not me)
If I’m at the wheel or some other newbie vibe coder, FTFO. Senior devs that use it as a time-saving tool? I’m happy to trust their judgement.
Any chance Claude code could come up with a solution that would fall under the copyright of a third party?
Any chance? Yes.
Linus has said that he reads compiler output. I have no doubt that he reads the code, I’m not particularly worried about bad code.
I just hope he doesn’t get lazy and brainrotted like I’ve seen happen with coworkers. People who used to call themselves “software craftsmen” now shipping 1k+ line changesets with fully generated documentation.
… obviously he can read it but you people insist it takes so much more time to do it this way. Linus is proving that is a lie. Why would he do that if writing code was so much easier?
Also you people cry about the water usage etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. the water is being used here. Why is it okay for him to do it?
You also don’t know him. Maybe he’s not reading every piece of code.
Yall are hypocrites. Fucking hypocrites. And yall gatekeep from people “you don’t know”(aka if you aren’t already fucking famous you’ve got the mark of the beast Abe deserve ridicule). Yall can’t see how you’re fighting the fight for the oligarchs. You can’t see how you pick and choose who is allowed to use new tech. Fuck all of yall hypocrites. You’re wrong.
Also you people cry about the water usage etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. the water is being used here. Why is it okay for him to do it?
It’s not.
I can’t edit to see Linus fucking loose it with Claude.
Is this the beginning of the end for Linux?
Might be.
for people wondering what “folios” in Linux memory management are: https://lwn.net/Articles/937239/
Linux Foundation has financial backers. He’s gotta give them lip service to keep them excited and happy. Anthropic is now a Gold Member. Oracle, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon are all Platinum Members.
FOSS has always been subject to corporate meddling in their governance. There’s a reason we call it Linux and not GNU-Linux. GNU gets no money so GNU goes nowhere.
Linus gives a headline using agents, Linux gets millions to continue doing real work. That’s the game they are playing, for better or worse.
Linus regularly posted on Google+, it’s more like he himself isn’t that into foss and sees everything as a utility to use
Nobody can prove this is the case. Linus sees coding LLMs as an inevitable evolution and compares them to what compilers were for Assembly.
I don’t personally think this particular use of LLMs is unethical, but using open models would definitely improve the look.
My issue isn’t with using AI to work on the Linux Kernel. My issue is working on the kernel with proprietary AI which enables Sam Altman to claim Millennium Prizes.
I completely agree, using an open model would be far more inline with the spirit of open source.
Yeah, I’m quickly seeing a future where stuff like this AI rewrite of the Adobe suite may need to be distributed as the model that makes the software and not the software itself. If that becomes the case then we really will have entered into a world where tech bros control everything as you will quickly find yourself in a world where you can’t use the software if you don’t have the compute to make it.
I can see a completely different kind of future where local models that run on commodity software get good enough for what most people need to do. At that point we’d be in a world that Stallman envisioned with every user having full control over what’s running on their machine, and being able to build whatever features they want. We already see how it’s becoming trivial to reverse engineer complex apps like Photoshop, or to crack PS5 games using LLMs. We are likely end up in a world where closed source is dead because code itself no longer has any value because anybody can copy and reproduce any application trivially.
And we are already starting to get there. Qwen 3.8 27b is comparable in terms of capability to Opus 4.6 which was a frontier model just half a year ago. If Qwen 4 gets to about Opus 5.5 level sometime next year, that’s going to be good enough for making vast majority of software that people need. After that it’s just a matter of further optimization or hardware getting better so it can run on most computers. But just to reiterate, it’s already running on consumer grade hardware, and it can do real work today.
It looks like many AI skeptics have been having a change of heart and maybe some growing dread. You spend the time and it streamlines through the tough problem and it cracks firmware, builds valid specs, reverse engineer enterprise software, it’s been an interesting week.
In some ways I think it might be good, perhaps a significant decrease in proprietary prison cage ecosystems. But at the same time, I have an ever growing dread that we are jumping off the knowledge cliff. The most experienced people are seeing revolutionary productivity, while the least experienced are gaining more capability without the foundational knowledge.
The future may have students who learn nothing, know nothing, and worse they will be happy with nothing.
I’m ready to unplug and live a near Amish lifestyle. Fuck modernity.
How the education system adjusts to this tech will be interesting to watch. I expect that humans who understand how stuff works is going to be a requirement for the foreseeable future, and societies will inevitably adjust. There’s always been panic and chaos every time new a disruptive technology has been invented, but humanity inevitably adjusts to it. I don’t see any reason to think this will be any different.
I’d say there is something to panic about. Look at the hand made lace economy vs the Industrial Revolution, the outcome is nearly the complete loss of a skill or art form. Now take what the trend is with these LLMs, we are outsourcing the hard thinking, the struggle, the thing that forces us to expand our knowledge to a device that can do all of that 90% faster; what will the outcome be? Sure there are some people making lace by hand, but as a hobby, will we still have people in the future who will read text and write letters on paper as a hobby in the future?
Just because people spent a lot of time learning a specific skill doesn’t mean it has intrinsic value to it. The reason most people aren’t making lace by hand is because it’s more efficient to automate the process. But nothing stops people learning skills because they enjoy doing them even if these have been automated. I do kenjutsu, it has no practical application, but I enjoy it. I don’t see what the problem here is to be honest.
I’m not sure I agree with the idea that the necessary level of compute will be made available to the average person. We are already well into a paradigm where the average “PC” is an iPad or similar, with Google locking down Android and Microsoft… being Microsoft, I just don’t have any optimism that the future will have the same kind of access to personal computing power or even software access. The “tin-foil hat” part of my brain says that the purchasing years worth of chips output is part of a conspiracy to keep consumers and potential competitors at bay more than it’s a requirement for new models.
I hope I am wrong, but I am not holding my breath.
There are already chips being developed specifically for running LLMs, so it’s almost certain this will become akin to having a GPU in the future.
- https://www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html
- https://wccftech.com/alibabas-tsmc-built-5nm-risc-v-chip-xuantie-c950-now-runs-qwen-3-8-27b-model-natively-unlocking-massive-vertical-integration-tailwinds/
And this tech is now being developed in China as well, so you might not have to rely on western hardware either going forward. Chinese companies are building stuff on top of RSIC-V like the Alibaba chip I linked above, and I fully expect there will be a lot of focus on Linux as China continues to decouple from the US tech stack.
The tech bros have insane GPU lease agreements. More than they can reasonably afford/use. When “amateurs” can recreate photoshop, 1000x “free” (would be wasted) compute at a better photoshop they control is something they can do too, and beat OSS and adobe. There are capable decompiler to readable/organized source code agents now too. At one point, the LLM labs can stop releasing new models, and just steal everything themselves.
They can’t do that unless they all stop releasing new models. And that isnt happening. As China is basically ignoring the US.
The top US labs, if their model progress is sufficient to permit its customers to “steal software”, can instead of releasing new models use them to steal software for themselves.
It’s a good thing Sam Altman isn’t Anthropic !
nitpicking doesnt change the point being made. A corpo getting more control over FOSS is a huge loss for everyone
The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical considering this is an experimental branch on his own repository. I’m not surprised he might experiment with using AI agents to solve a particular pain point to see how it does. This is using agents to experiment with things that you might not have time to address normally.
Another recent example is the build system where the author said:
An LLM was used to first determine where the bottlenecks were then to figure out how to improve them. It generated a lot of code, much of it hideous.
I extensively audited and rewrote a lot of it, and heavily edited commit messages, the cover letter and comments.
off-loading the boring grunt work of identifying bottle necks and trying new approaches seems like an ideal task for a junior agent to deal with as long is you don’t YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.
as long is you don’t YOLO the result to the lists for other humans to de-slopify for you.
(Or not de-slopify at all.)
There’s literally no one I trust more to handle llm code more than Linus.
He’s not going to pass off shit in his name. He’ll use it in the best possible way.
Lots of reasons to be anti-AI, but it’s not all black and white. It’s here to stay and it’s useful. (But we ain’t gonna spend 400 billion a year on it.)
People cannot seem to grasp that there is a difference in using LLMs to experiment and just blindly using code written by an LLM. You’d think they would realize Linus is never going to do the latter. Binary thinking leads to this…
is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way? no? these things have so many negative effects on the world in so many areas that making life more convenient for coddled computer touches doesn’t excuse literally any of it
is there a difference in the environmental destruction when used this way?
Yes. There is no doubt that if you use an LLM for everything that will use several fold more times electricity than someone who uses it a few times a year.
Like I said, binary thinking. You’re literally saying there is no difference in 1 and 1000000 because both are more than zero.
so the less you use it, the better? glad we can agree
burning a million gallons of desil to get a 1% efficiency improvement in all desil engines will result in less total desil consumption in less than a year. The linux kernel is used enough you need to consider the billions of users that will each get a small efficiency improvement.
Right, so we know Linus has used Claude for one project. You are saying there is no excuse for that and I don’t agree. I don’t think it makes sense to take absolute stances against things that will undoubtedly be used by most everyone eventually. Just like I think cars are generally bad, I’m not about to get pissed off at everyone who drives them.
the earth doesn’t care if you think this is a good use or linus is somehow worthy when the regular plums aren’t.
dario and his epstein wife sure do though. so keep going to bat for them
Your absolutism will take you nowhere. No one will bother to even listen you because you aren’t able to communicate about this topic.
LLM companies will legitimize their shit by saying “look, Linus is using our model to make Linux better”.
Okay, and? So he should either change his own processes or keep them secret because some dickbag might claim he’s legitimized their product?
I think people in a bubble like this platform seem to miss that AI tools are already “legitimized”. I am not stating an opinion, I’m just saying what the average person thinks, which is that they are useful. The reality is a lot more complicated than that and I think they’re leading us bad places but I don’t think your argument works at all
The tools are “legitimized” by a mass ad campaign to shove LLMs down our throats.
Linus is a very influential person in this space and hin using Claude for whatever project he has will legitimize the massive ad campaign that LLMs companies are pushing. It’s a jackpot for them. Organic publicity by one of the biggest nerd of the world.
Any push towards LLMs is only benefiting the ultra wealthy and destroying the planet. And this is exactly what this piece of news is doing.
Even if you were right this message would be irrelevant to 99% of the population and within the 1% who know or care who he is, minimum 75% wouldn’t be swayed by him saying that. Plus, him saying he used it is not praise.
For me, there’s more to it than just the output. But I’m sure Linus won’t let his mind rot in LLM. Yet. Still… Lots of reasons to object to using AI at all. Use a computer responsibly, folks.
I can absolutely understand some of the objections and I understand why writers and artists are pissed. My code has always been free software so I don’t object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.
The power usage is definitely a concern but that holds up for all computing. I don’t see people up in arms about inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!
My code has always been free software so I don’t object to it being in the training sets because that seems fair use according to the four freedoms.
But what about the output of an LLM that was trained on free software, then being used in closed source, commercial software? 🙁
inefficient CI loops retesting the whole world for a single line change. Think of savings that could be made!
Oh yeah, I’m definitely with you there. Oh gosh.
They probably should be up in arms! Both are bad things, simultaneously, as two things can be!
It’s a slippery slope. So far Linus has gone from using it to find bugs, to using it as a programming assistant, and now ostensibly to vibecode entire features.
Where will it end? Will Linus shut off external contributions and let the agents loose like Bun did? That would be a tragedy in my book.
The phrase vibecode has become totally meaningless. The original use was too “give in too the vibes” and let the agent go wild. There is no indication that is what Linus is doing.
The fact is LLM’s have proven to be good at finding bugs. Suitably constrained they can be diligent and helpful assistants.
The Bun experience is instructive and if that was Linus’ end goal it would be concerning but I don’t see any evidence that any of the Linux maintainers are interested in that sort of wholesale conversion. The good projects with taste will adjust to the new tools and the slop projects will eventually collapse under their own contradictory architectures.
We can just fork the latest kernel version we feel comfortable with.
The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical
i FULLY expected more hate. lol
He used ai from evil american capitalist corporations, instead of one from good chinese communist corporations though.
he’s a us empire aligned capitalist – of course he would
Absolutely. When communist AGI takes over the world, people like him would get what they deserve.
It seems like the tide is finally starting to turn here in terms of LLM usage. Even 4 months ago this thread would be a nightmare lol
AI like this is very quickly becoming the One Ring in my mind. Like there’s a bunch of people who have convinced themselves that they can use this plagiarism box in a good way, that the outcome will somehow justify the means. But the reality is that this machine was created by evil for evil reasons and as it stands right now you can’t use Claude or ChatGPT or any of that shit and not participate in the plagiarism, in the outright theft of all of the art and creativity of humanity, and the destruction of our environment.
I wish that more people would understand that the jump from the novelty of Watson beating Ken Jennings on Jeopardy to here wasn’t technological innovation. It was purely capitalism.
plagiarism
outright theft
It frustrates me to see that people are suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property right of people to control creations after they’ve been created.
I’m pretty skeptical of AI and have my doubts that it will be a net good, but I’m definitely not gonna suddenly be pro-copyright as part of that fight. Copyright has traditionally been used to entrench corporate interests, and strengthening those protections isn’t going to suddenly win a fight against some kind of AI dystopia.
People are not “suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property”. Instead they wonder why some companies can violate those rules on an unprecedented scale whiteout consequences.
the reason they can “violate” the rules is that violation is defined loosely enough that feeding millions of legally aquired contents to the AI is probably as legal as making a collage.
What about the rest that is illegally acquired though?
I think it’s more about the unequal application if those laws. People have had their lives ruined for sharing an mp3. These companies infringe on literally everything and they get rich.
I bet the next step is that the folks vibe coding emulators and replacements for major software suites are going to get serious fines, while artists are going to continue to get ripped off in the name of “innovation”.
This is very much the problem I have. We have officially reached the point where the average artist on Deviant Art has less intellectual property rights than the average even LLC let alone megacorp like Disney.
So which is it? Should people (and AI companies) be prosecuted for copyright violations or should people (and AI companies) not be prosecuted for copyright violations?
If you want equal application of those laws, that is.
It doesn’t matter. The law needs to pick one and be consistent.
If you want my personal opinion, I’ve been against a lot of copyright law most of my life, but I’m beginning to rethink that with this so called AI. I think we need strong protections against commercial infringement while maintaining strong personal fair use. The details of course are complex.
That would essentially be a position in favor of prosecuting Aaron Swartz
No. Aaron did not distribute any of the work, settled in a civil suit and was prosecuted later.
Copyright was not the problem there.
Either one would be better than the current situation. And let’s be real, we aren’t gonna have a say in it anway
People shouldn’t be and companies should, neither should be, both should be, the current situation, in order of decreasing preference.
Well i think the issue is if licenses become worthless then that’s also bad for the GPL
Exactly. What happened to “restriction of what a user can do with software or its source code is an infringement upon the users’ rights”? I’m not saying that AI companies are acting in the spirit of FOSS, they’re not, their models aren’t even open-weight (for the most part), but the issue is not the training on materials that ought to be public domain anyway. There’s plenty of ethical issues with modern technology. It’s not sustainable at all, the supply chain is full of slavery, it generates huge amounts of emissions, etc. People’s primary concern being pearl clutching about “plagiarism” shows where their priorities lie. If AI companies have plagiarised then I couldn’t care less. It’s everything else they’re doing that’s the problem.
I am not sure it was initially created for evil, I do believe that its discovery was mostly academic and in that it was, and still is, a pretty significant/interesting one. It was very quickly and very strongly made into the perfect weapon for the information age for sure, but i doubt that the original researchers wanted that, or just really thought of the implications outside of information theory. But it was indeed Google, surveillance capitalism incarnate, that initially gifted transformers to the world and kickstarted the whole thing…
Edit: I realised that I inadvertently made this comment about “AI” by way of pronouns when I’m really talking about LLMs. Google of course did not invent AI, and I more strongly disagree that AI in its actual sense was invented for or is inherently evil.
The man has clearly gone senile, going from the human label of person to gear.
Trying to use the plagiarism machine that also causes DOT lobotomied as a convenient side effect will not land you in the good graces of anyone with a functioning brain.
I see you’re the arbiter of who has a functioning brain now.
If not me, I’d rather it be the humans who reject generative AI making the call.
How much has he dumbed down his capabilities already? When will he replace himself by an LLM?
He was already pretty dumbed down back when he used to shit on C++. From there to the neutering he went on (we don’t get middle fingers for Nvidia anymore) and now this… it’s sad to watch.
Die a hero or else, as the saying goes.
the decay of humanity
Of this I agree. It may very well be the end of us.
Having said that, LLMs produce far better code and architecture than most developers.
Flame on!
