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…
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!
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:
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.
(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…
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!
But what about the output of an LLM that was trained on free software, then being used in closed source, commercial software? 🙁
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!
i FULLY expected more hate. lol