I thought it was devastating to lose Steve Yegge to AI psychosis. But damn. This is… unspeakably bad. Like if the guy in charge of the CDC decided Tylenol caused autism or like if the guy who controls the U.S. military decided it was a good idea to bomb Iran.
Linus says he only cares about quality and refuses to make a hardline rule explicitly banning LLMs in all contexts
This is… unspeakably bad
Man, genuinely… how do people not understand why nobody takes the Anti movement seriously?
How do you not understand that code quality alone is not a good measure for viability?
Take ZFS, for example. It is inarguably a good filesystem, and its code is… well, it’s not bad, so let’s quantify it as good, or good enough. But it’s still poison for the Linux codebase, because of its conflicting license.
Or take sweatshop labor, or slavery. Would you accept “good” code written under duress?
“AI is just a tool.” No. Machine learning algorithms are a tool. LLMs are an ecosystem, composed of agents, models, infrastructure, continuous labor to maintain the models updated, and more. And like in biological ecosystems, the worst performing factor determines the maximum health score, which for LLMs is “unethical as fuck.”
Linus may be smart about OSes and seems competent about project management, but I wouldn’t trust him to give me medical advice, and his opinion on AI is also wrong.
and its code is… well, it’s not bad, so let’s quantify it as good, or good enough
If “good enough” isn’t actually good enough, why are you calling it that? Your entire argument hinges on high code quality not being high code quality. Like… yeah, of course bad code is going to lead to bad outcomes. That’s literally the entire point he’s trying to make: the tool doesn’t matter, the result does.
No part of my argument hinges on ZFS code being good quality. My argument is that ZFS code is desirable.
the tool doesn’t matter, the result does.
The argument “the method doesn’t matter, only results” has been the source of so many ethics and academic violations. You saying that with a straight face says enough about you. Bye.
They were already irrelevant in real life years ago. You only see these loser holdouts on places like lemmy.
It just goes to show that ‘everything is only as strong as its weakest link’
Why does everyone who starts using AI always devolve into posting like this?
it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore. You get to have results without putting in any work of your own. In corpo-world where everything is a metric, outputting massive amounts of code quickly and effortlessly is a great thing. For the others who actually enjoy making something it’s a useless tool.
That’s pretty accurate, but only the good case. Burnt out programmers still have some kind of system understanding and some kind of leftover appreciation for good software architecture, they’ve just been battered down by years of the stupidest requirements, deadlines and incompetent management. Even with AI they usually keep a hand on the wheel and aren’t particularly set on always using it for everything. Maybe they’ll even start advocating for AI because they can’t imagine anyone using it in a different way than they do.
The bad case is all the people who never cared about anything to begin with and aren’t any more emotionally attached to writing code than they are to filling out an excel sheet. That’s the kind of people that will absolutely derail an entire project by vibecoding it into the ground and then arguing for every single thing Claude changed. “You have to be able to understand/code this yourself” does stop them dead and they will piss and shit themselves because they can’t do anything and aren’t used to feeling stupid.Tbh I mostly like no-AI policies because it’s funny to see those meltdowns 🤷I generally try to avoid using AI for my hobby projects, but I think there is still a niche for it in working out issues that take a disproportionate amount of time to track down manually relative to the scale of the fix. Things like a subtle typo somewhere or missing some hyperspecific nuance of whatever stack I’m working with. In those particular cases I would say it actually enhances my own creative ability insofar as I don’t need to spend hours of effort banging my head against a wall until I eventually figure out what went wrong, and I can put that time and mental energy into the stuff that’s actually interesting to me.
But yes, in general I do agree it’s kind of useless otherwise for creative endeavors or passion projects. It’s great for helping with code being written solely for a paycheck, but for personal projects it largely defeats the purpose of working on them in the first place. I think the trouble is that in general AI does make a lot of things easier and I have a lot of anxiety about getting into the habit of overusing it in that way, so I try to keep it as a sort of last resort.
It’s really weird when people with a kink try to push that kink on everyone else and they act like everyone else is wrong for building their entire persona around the kink. We get it, you really love hand crafting your code, line by line character by character, but I don’t need that to enjoy coding. I like producing useful things and then working on ways to make them even more useful. I have hand crafted enough widgets and thingamabobs that I don’t need to personally fondle another one into existence. I don’t need to be an expert at yet another language that will be obsolete well before I retire. When I was a young lad I could get off a really good wank to the bra section of the Woolworths catalog, but not so much anymore. That doesn’t mean I am burnt out or that I don’t like a good wank anymore, but frankly I would prefer someone with a pretty face and soft hands to yank on my dick for me. Have you never worked with or trained junior programmers before? I guarantee you that the nonsense a junior can produce is much worse than the crazed hallucinations of some AI.
There are a lot of reasons to hate AI, like the destruction of the dev experience pipeline… but shitting on people who manage to find ways to use AI is not really helping your crusade.
What if the kink that you enjoy is actively killing the planet and ruining people’s lives?
To be clear, I’m saying that those are side effects. Not that it’s the kink itself.
Elon, I keep telling you, the answer is no.
it’s crack for burnt out programmers who don’t enjoy the process of creating software anymore.
That explains perfectly my use of it for my job (where we’re expected to use it anyway). I’d been burnt out at my company for a long time, and LLMs give me the ability to at least still fulfill my feature quotas long after my desire to give a shit about the codebase and software had gone. I am a techmeth addict now. It kinda sucks, but I feel hopeless about tech as a career nowadays and just the future in general, so I don’t even care anymore.
We’re all being hypnotized by aliens who have replaced our political leaders and oligarchs, and now they’re using LLM chat hypnosis to take over the next tiers of society. /s
Probably because they get pissed off by the illogical anti-AI crazies.
He’s drunk the AI Kool-Aid.
That’s a good thing, it was Flavor Aid that was laced with poison in Jonestown.
wow… his ego is pretty big and bursting. Good thing that he evacuated his brain power to LLMs.
Won’t anyone think of the environment or small communities? AI is a nice-to-have, not an essential. We need to stop developing technology without thinking long term about the world we live in. We can’t use the “oh we didn’t know” excuse anymore.
Software Developers need to learn that there is a world outside of their projects. I do not care if it makes your life easier, this technology is having worldwide impacts we are not prepared for. It’s leaf blower mentality. They don’t care that the neighborhood stinks like 2 stroke exhaust, they don’t care that it’s loud as hell, they don’t care where the leaves go, their yard is clean and that’s all that matters.
Well, it was nice while it lasted.
*slaps an orange flag over the tux sticker on my laptop*
2027 will be the year of the NetBSD desktop, guys!
I’m switching to haiku.
I plan to put Haiku on my old ThinkPad; but the lack of even a lock screen in the OS sadly makes it unsuitable for my main machine.
He’s been like this for a while now (at least a few months), I admit it affected my choice of OS for a new machine.
I use FreeBSD btw.
NetBSD hasn’t fallen into AI psychosis but it still has some slop in it.
Year of the GNU/Hurd desktop!NetBSD has one slop commit, and they have apparently since removed the code it brought in. Besides, I need some level of mainstream software support for uni, and pkgsrc is half-decent for that.
GNU Mach (a component of Hurd), meanwhile, have been using Claude for code reviews (https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-03/msg00100.html, https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2026-02/pdffAOvuZusjj.pdf); and the GNU Project itself is still on the fence (GCC, for example, has 57 slop commits and counting).
Comparing AI to traditional tools is a bad faith argument and it’s a bummer to see Linus fall for it.
I don’t know… tools made by companies who can’t wait to get in bed with the Pentagon to kill brown people around the world would seem to be toxic af.
If we’re playing the altruism olympics game, everyone is already throwing stones in a glass house as it is, because virtually all electronics and batteries on Earth are made from materials mined by forced/child labor.
Yes, but… here comes the next squeeze. I know that they would sell us the rope to bang them with, but god damn.
Surely the Linux kernel gets used by those same organizations too, in some way
Don’t call me Shirley, though
For me the most criticism against AI is rather criticism against Big Tech. AI itself however doesn’t have to inherently come from Big Tech so banning it wouldn’t really be reasonable for something like the Linux Kernel.
It doesn’t inherently have to come from big tech, but currently there’s nowhere else to get it, soooo…
Maybe we ban it now and then revisit all this after small open source local models are actually useful for anything?
Of course! But also, AI shouldn’t be used to simply generate code. It should assist human developers into solving problems like figuring out why your code won’t build, or why certain errors occur or detect bugs.
Why? Because if everyone starts using AI to generate code, you lose experienced developers who will understand what’s happening in the first place. You lose the expertise. And that’s a big problem.
Yeah, and as I understand it that’s what Linus wants people to do. So banning AI would not allow this to happen when working on kernel code.
Don’t compilers have some guarantee of behaviours? I.e even if you don’t know exactly what instructions and order the compiler generates there is a guarantee that it is computationally/mathematically equivalent to the statements you wrote. Otherwise it would be a pretty terrible compiler. That’s a pretty big jump to writing instructions you don’t understand, since LLMs can’t make the same guarantees about a prompt/request.
Yes, they are deterministic. LLMs are not.
I am curious about the downvotes; what I said is factual. LLMs use random numbers in deciding output, so they are not deterministic.
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The only intelligent people that I trust are those that use drugs and drink until they drop!
If you deny to consume those things than you ate dumb!
What? It’s obvious that it can lead you to a downwards spiral, into alcoholism, a life of mental problems and struggles? Create a toxic environment around you, make your family worry and suffer because of those actions? Makes the world a even worse place? Oh well that’s on you being weak, you should’ve been smart and know how to use the things well.
AI will come for Linus too someday.
I agree, tbh. If your submissions are bad, they’re bad. If your submissions are good, they’re good.
This is exactly right and I love Linus so much for cutting through the emotion every time. All he cares about every single time is if the commit is good or bad. Thats how it should be.
'all he should care about is that we increased profits, the effect on everything external has no bearing on my decisions"
the earth hates people like you.
You put a made-up quote in my mouth and then got angry at it. I said commits should be judged on their merits. I said nothing about profits or ignoring harm.
They are equivalent. Your quote:
This is exactly right and I love Linus so much for cutting through the emotion every time. All he cares about every single time is if the commit is good or bad. Thats how it should be.
So the only thing that matters is that the commit is good. Not whether the commit turns on DRM for every Linux machine on the planet, not if the commit starts requiring age verification for every user, not if the commit fucking bombs every city on earth.
Your reasoning is literally ignoring harm.
I said nothing about profits or ignoring harm.
No, you implied it with a dog whistle. And now you’re pretending like you didn’t.
Agreed.
LLMs aren’t new or interesting.
Linus being Linus :)
