Almost anyone can cut and paste a face on a different body using a classic photo editor.
It still takes a profesional to do it in a way that delivers a quality result.
Linus Torvalds is a professional, the linux terminal is his baby, if we can trust anyone on this, its him.
The amateurs using ai to produce slop that resembles what we perceive as quality, is sometimes hard to tell but 25 years ago people though half life 1 looked insanely realistic and that graphics could not possibly look any more real. Over time our brains will adapt and we will be able to tell slop from real work in a heartbeat. I bet most people here can already tell if a mail was written by an llm and not audited by a human with ease.
I’m worried about cognitive surrender. There’s evidence of people losing skills they once had because they stopped doing it themselves and just get AI to do it for them.
“Using AI for Just 10 Minutes Erodes Your Ability to Persist at Hard Things”: https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/using-ai-just-10-minutes-erodes-your-ability-persist-hard-things
They should run the test with calculators, because they’ll see the same effect. Turns out that giving people a tool to make things trivial, and then taking that tool away, halfway through the goddamn exam, is a lot more frustrating than just asking them to do some algebra on paper.
‘Bicycling for just ten miles makes walking back seem like a pain in the ass.’
going to just copy and paste my reply to your other comment: AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there’s no skill in using AI
If you give up all critical thinking to the LLM, than it is indeed a replacement, but there are lots of ways you can use AI without giving up all your critical thinking.
And it always takes skill to be able to evaluate the results of an LLM.
so you didn’t look at the study, ok
If he’s still auditing and understanding the code. Something that he’s done as a project manager for decades at this point. I don’t see how it will. If the code is generated by a person or a machine. The auditing isn’t much different.
Ironically, I find the LLMs to be better at auditing code than generating it in the first place. Like the humans they trained under, LLMs make mistakes and miss important things in both endeavors, but: when an LLM finds a real problem, that’s a win no matter how you look at it.
Definitely. I just hope that sooner rather than later it’s possible for them all to move over to local open source models. Supporting wasteful content thieves is not sustainable.
That and that all the GPU manufacturers Etc have their sound blaster moment. These days a lot of socs have quite powerful Graphics accelerators on them. At some point, someone’s going to release a bit of silicon equivalent to the AC 97. May not have been able to compete with sound blaster on the ridiculously high end of the market. But was good enough for 99% of tasks. So that most people don’t even remember sound blaster anymore. Even though they still technically exist.
I have been using “onboard graphics” professionally in our products, including products which do 3D rendering, since 2014.
I think GPUs have a little longer life than sound blaster cards still in them, massive arrays of relatively simple CPUs have more purposes than just graphics rendering.
I searched what sound blaster is, but I don’t really understand it. Are they a company that made audio cards in the ancient times? I think I remember some people said that having audio cards was not standard.
Their website seems to have weird hardware targeted at gamers.
Maybe they sell audio interfaces? But I’m confused why gamers of all people would be the target group. I got an audio interface for my guitar myself and some MIDI things.
Back in the DOS days and early windows days. They were one of the gold standards for PC audio. Even if you didn’t own a sound blaster card, you likely owned a clone that emulated one. They were the bees knees so to speak when it came to PC gaming.
But by the late 90s the company had spread itself so thin on branding and other things. Sound blaster CDROM drives? Yep. Sound blaster video cards? Yep. Etc Etc Etc. They tried to parlay being a lucky defacto standard into something else. Wanted to be a premium brand. Prices go up, quality goes down. Kinda like Nvidia now. Fake frames, AI slop, shitting on traditional customers.
Turn of the century and a standard set in 97 finally started rolling out on consumer motherboards. No longer when you bought your computer if you wanted it to make anything more than basic beeps boops and buzzes. Did you have to go out and spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get an ad in card. It was on board. On the motherboard.
The newest computer I own is an early ryzen from the previous Dark Times. Not to be confused with these dark times. So I don’t have first-hand experience. But it is my understanding that Intel integrated Graphics isn’t quite the joke is that it used to be. Just a bastard stepchild that Intel can’t decide if they really want to support of not. And some AMD chips have an APU on it which is similar. But still chokes under anything very intense. It’s getting close. But just not quite. Give us a truly standardized setup with the basic power of a mid 2010s graphics accelerator and vulkan api, most people would be in business.
Honestly I’m hoping something along this line happens and becomes common with risc-v systems. Like Mali with arm.
Thank you for the explanation.
I have a laptop from 2022 with an Intel CPU. It’s pretty good to what laptops did last decade. You can play Factorio, Minecraft and RimWorld for example in pretty reasonable graphics. It’s not that great of course, but it works fine, especially if my laptop didn’t have heating issues (framework 12)
yeah I agree with this statement. it’s not that LLM are necessarily bad it’s making people reliant and lazy which leads to complacency.
it’s making people reliant and lazy which leads to complacency.
Pretty much the whole point of every invention in the industrial revolution.
Absolutely not. Lots of thing were created to make jobs faster and more importantly faster.
Take the simple washing machine for example. Early iteration, before electric washing machine, caused a lot of injuries because people would get their arm stuck in the machine’s mechanism.
So by creating the modern washing machine, we freed lot of time for people to do less menial stuff and made their life safer by not having your arm pushing clothes through a dangerous machine.
Only in the sense using a calculator makes you worse at long division. You’re still doing math.
Every pearl-clutching article like ‘doctors got worse at spotting cancer when we gave them a tool and then took it away’ is only measuring before and after. None of them seem interested in asking: how much more cancer did they find, with the tool?
AI is not a tool it is a replacement, there’s no skill in using AI
Weird how software engineers are better at ‘being replaced’ than novices. They seem to get better results by knowing what it’s supposed to be doing.
What a funny coincidence.
You don’t need evidence, go try it yourself. It’s like using a calculator instead of crunching out a math problem yourself.
There are places where it’s useful and if you’re smart you’ll also keep your brain balanced and sharp.
Not everyone will survive this shift in reality - NPC’s are all around.
If you want my honest answer, it requires a community of diverse people you trust so that the people who are capable of exploring this territory can figure out how to use it and it’s our duty to keep them from going into the void.
Linus explained in that Git tag message that he “did what I preach” and used modern LLM tools to make sense of patches that were hard for him to follow.
It’s already too late. He’s gone down the rabbit hole.
I can vouch for that: As a programmer, I can generally see both programming AI and general LLM use if it was copy-pasted. I know a guy who isn’t a programmer who’ve used Claude Code to make an app, and things are working, but it’s sooo clear even to a junior SE that it’s vibe-coded. There’s a clear lack of consistency, architecture, maintainability, and general human readability.
However, if the code/text was reviewed and edited by a capable human programmer, it’s incredibly difficult to single out what is a product of AI and not.Actual programmers who understand and can write code themselves who use AI simply as a tool, NOT a shortcut, will produce indistinguishable code. Linus is an incredibly smart and capable guy, and for specific uses, I’m confident in him using this tool responsibly.
(The ethics of AI use is a different topic however…)
How do you see the longevity of it. You obviously learnt how to code before ai. What about those learning now that are learning only having access to ai. Id anticipate the quality over time will deteriorate
I think we’ll unfortunately see a degradation over time of capable programmers, as it’s with most other things: Humans learn poorly from seeing things being done for them, rather than doing it themselves. AI can be a good resource for iteration and a sort of rubber duck, and even for explaining things (with external confirmation). But as it currently stands, people find it much more attractive to just let AI do the work for them. That’s the most prominent work culture after all, based on capitalistic values: Economic growth above all.
I see it in schools as well, unfortunately: Students find it much more appealing to get good grades than to actually learn. Not everyone, of course, but still way too many.
And I do understand many of the students: The bar for junior programmers has now increased, as a lot of employers simply think “why hire a human that is on the same level as AI?”.
Students find it much more appealing to get good grades than to actually learn.
Because there is a direct impact on your chances for a better life. Having better grades give you access to better schools (and in the US, scholarships as well).
The emphasis of our school system is results.
This message explains the difference between being a centaur or a reverse centaur. Pluralistic explains it in more depth.
We didn’t think Half Life 1 looked realistic against reality, just that it was the most realistic graphics we had seen yet.
It’s not like we looked at the game and went that’s indistinguishable from reality.
takes a profesional
Considering that the word points to just about anyone who has been doing a thing for money for a while, I’d suggest you look for a better word.
Expert?
Gamers often use “pro” which comes from profesional, i never really saw a connection with money there.
I guess nowadays you need to be in the category of “obsessive person”, to even try to get any doable quality of code.
Considering that words like “competent” or “careful” or even “perfectionist” don’t apply to me and I would guess Linus is putting more effort than me, to keep his codebase clean.
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I am wondering how many undetected bugs will sneak into the kernel.
Less with LLMs than without. https://projectdiscovery.io/blog/the-vulnerability-curve-bent-with-the-ai-curve https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/aixcc-results
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If the models all go up in smoke, we still have the code (and its bugs) - so let’s get as many bugs out as possible as soon as possible and not accept a bunch of garbage code - as has always been the case, it’s just happening faster now.
Trainers (all over the world) are behaving badly, because they can get away with it. I’m not sure where that ends up, but it doesn’t change the generated code or the discovered vulnerabilities or the fixes.
The personal data has been abused for decades already, but again - now it’s easier for more actors to abuse your personal data and mine. Maybe, someday, we’ll get serious about enforcing privacy policies and not just have completely toothless theater about it.
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I am a pest to my representatives
Keep it up. I’m in Floriduh so talking to our representatives is more or less like talking to a brick wall. They may accumulate counts of how many people raise an issue, but for the most part they’re serving the federal administration’s agenda, not listening to their constituents.
People have to audit that shit to make it serviceable, which greats bigger workloads
I mostly ignored LLM code generation until around August of 2025 - it was still pretty raw back then, but it was showing potential for significant improvement, and since then there has been significant improvement. At this point, I find that if I ride herd on the LLM agent and keep it focused, structured, addressing technical debt frequently, etc. I can actually review the generated code more quickly and easily than similarly mature code by human developers. What is coming out of models like Opus 5.5 now is looking like what I would write if I had all the time in the world to cover all the edge cases, handle all the errors, do the logging and auditing and all the other “good stuff”. It does explode the code for what was a simple “happy path” thing into a much larger structure that takes the real world problems into account and gets in front of them, handling them gracefully and presenting clear messages about what went wrong when unavoidable problems happen.
I guess what I’m saying is: yeah, we’re still getting more code to review, but it’s getting easier to review and the presence of meaningful automated tests and consistent documentation and non-rotten traceability from requirements through all that is actually resulting in lower overall workloads once you look at the big picture of what it takes to maintain code in the real world with security and other issues and not just the happy insecure proof of concept and ship it world.
Breaking the spirit of mostly volunteers with such inexpertly crafted code is just not the best idea.
Yeah, if your models are giving you inexpertly crafted code, you need to keep iterating with them until it’s expertly crafted before shipping it, don’t just throw up a pull request because some bogus tests passed. And, there’s still a difference among models - they’ve all improved rather dramatically over the last 12 months, but for my purposes (coding robust, secure, safe applications) Claude’s Opus and Sonnet are still “in the lead” by a pretty good margin. Other models are better at other things…
Trainers do act badly because they weren’t regulated to hell and back
There’s not enough transparency or accountability in the global business landscape for any kind of regulation to actually work. If these regulations are going to have any chance, the first step has to be true transparency - like FOSS does with open source development repositories, and more.
people paid for their data or compensated for hammering personal websites.
Keep dreaming. It would be a wonderful world, but it’s far from where we are.
said models can be made to reproduce phrases
Like English majors can quote Keats after graduation… I’m not sure that’s proof of plagarism in their other writing.
an absolute morally compromised fool
Yeah, it’s been an interesting ride this cycle - seems like they’re trying to tear down the government institutions in preparation for something like Palpatine disbanding the Senate… destroy all confidence by blowing up every problem of the past and flaunting it as something actively done at the highest levels. If they succeed in holding power through the upcoming mid-terms the ride is only going to get more interesting…
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LLMs should be used for their original purpose: Processing language, not used to generate code. Coding should stay a human activity.
That ability to see the patterns in language, particularly the ability to distill semantic meaning and make (reasonable, if imperfect) translations from one language to a variety of others, is incredibly useful in software development activities, which are basically the task of translating natural language requests into code - usually through a multi-step process of: requirements definition, design specification, application development, test development, and constant review to ensure that all those steps are in-sync, describing the same thing.
continuing to invest in humans
Always.
teaching the craft in ways that help get new programmers up to speed faster.
I’m tempted to make a “better buggy whip maker” crack here…
Anthropic literally trained on copyrighted material without permission and could be prompted to produce author’s material. It’s a bit different than a Student quoting an author.
Yeah, so Anthropic didn’t pay for legitimate textbooks when they went to school, they bought cheap, illegal, Asian photocopies instead… wrong, sure. How do you make it right now? Lobotomize the students who read illegally copied books? Fine their parents for everything they are worth? Or, hold the students liable and garnish their wages in perpetuity?
So…We shall see how that pans out.
Yep…
I’d love to see a pre-AI fork of the Linux kernel.
You can do it always
Be the change you seek in the world.
I honestly trust him. He knows what he’s doing. He isn’t a kid who just got their hands on a new tool
I hope you’re right. LLMs are doing weird things with our brains.
I can see people genuinely switching to NetBSD because of this.
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I feel like this could have been avoided if Torvalds had allowed himself to use C++, instead of suffering the ritualistic pains and frustrations of C for an entire career.
Anyone would lose their love of the craft after that. AI isn’t how you find it again, and it makes me sad to see. Not sad in a depressed/AI doomerism way, but sad in a “the people I looked up to are old and washed up now” way.
Ah yes, because c++ is famously very enjoyable to work with
famously
C++ is one of the most memed languages in computing history. The number of people who have an “opinion” on it is far, far larger than the number of people who actually work with it (or have ever worked with it…or any programming language).
My comment was kind of a joke, but not really. It’s ancient history at this point, but there some not-super-solid arguments as to why the kernel bans C++.
So I work on a C++ project with a coworker heavily using AI code.
From the amount of structural breakage I see in the code, I’d believe that using it for C code would be an even bigger pain.
There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
If anything rust is the better choice for LLMs since errors are plain english, and the compiler and borrow checker force complete code.
