It seems Linus’s position is very clear now
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.
The reactions to this have been pretty hysterical
i FULLY expected more hate. lol
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
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
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?!
Where did I say famous? Read harder. Water concerns are separate from wreckless vibe-coding concerns.
Not if you’re famous, if you’re bad at coding on your own
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.
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
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.
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.
Love this, opus 5.5 is absolutely nuts at optimization. I was able to use it to get some 10x performance improvements recently.
Is this the beginning of the end for Linux?
for people wondering what “folios” in Linux memory management are: https://lwn.net/Articles/937239/
I can’t edit to see Linus fucking loose it with Claude.
It was already clear. Anybody speaking otherwise has already been tagged and flagged as such.
I can’t wait for a base linux install to be 60 GB of slop, like windows.
Maybe he just
diffs it to the latest commit and actually only manually reads through what Claude changed? No idea…Sure, buddy. That’s what everyone is doing.
