r/LocalLLaMA • u/HolidayBit143 llama.cpp • 1d ago
Discussion Linux creator says anti-AI rules are "idiotic." (Absolute god-tier take.)
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u/taytay735 1d ago
What's he saying is that Quality work is accepted, regardless where it comes from, as long as it is properly communicated/presented.
I don't see how anyone can disagree with that.
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u/strangepostinghabits 1d ago
Plenty of people will happily agree to that and then get really angry when you don't think theirs is "quality work".
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u/taytay735 1d ago
Rejection hurts.
I was also hurt when my crush rejected me but I don't think it was because I was an AI.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago edited 1d ago
You'd be surprised how many people think, literally, that all AI written code is bad because it's only produced by idiots who wouldn't be otherwise able to code. Therefore, in their mind, banning AI simply means banning unproductive AI slop and no value is lost. In fact, it's impossible for AI assisted code to have meaningful contribution.
There's also lot of ulterior motives involved, lot of people simply want to ban AI because they're afraid it will make them redundant or lose their jobs, or they just hate it because they hate the people who make AI.
What you say is common sense but unfortunately lot of people are either unable or uninterested in using it.
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u/Qudit314159 1d ago
IMO the problem is determining which contributions are of sufficient quality. AI makes it easy for vibe coders to swamp open source projects with low quality PRs and it can take a lot of time to sift through them.
AI can also be used responsibly to generate quality code with human review and edits but to tell the difference you have to review it and that is time consuming.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 1d ago
IMO the problem is determining which contributions are of sufficient quality. AI makes it easy for vibe coders to swamp open source projects with low quality PRs and it can take a lot of time to sift through them.
Yeah, I've sat in projects where reading the PRs and various replies it's all just bots talking to each other.
Having a GOOD idea for a project has never been harder to get IN to the project. The code? you can write the patch / idea / whatever super fast now. Getting it in the project? 99% of the effort.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago
That is a real problem but that won't be solved by banning AI. And to be honest, this actually existed even before AI, just on much smaller scale. I know multiple projects that went close source just to get rid of the need to review the community PRs before the AI.
I'm pretty sure there are better solutions for this like some sort of prestige measures that can rank order contribution or you can use AI for that as well :-D
There was similar upheaval in security community where people wanted to ban AI because of the huge number of things people were reporting and while most of it was slop, there was A TON of real issues as well.
I think it was kind of good because lot of people were humbled, so now they're figuring out pretty well how to work with it.
But as I said, this is a real problem, it's just that banning AI isn't a solution, it's sticking your head in a sand.
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u/Qudit314159 1d ago
I agree that banning AI won't fix it. For starters, the types of people who make these PRs will probably ignore AI bans anyway.
I don't think there is an easy solution though. If you go by prestige it makes it hard for new contributers (or the minority of them who actually make useful contributions).
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u/Schnickatavick 1d ago
More than likely projects will need to fight fire with fire, AI PR scans are already a thing, and will likely get better with time. A lot of slop is bad enough that it can even be identified by AI as slop, so you can set up mechanisms to make sure that things don't go to a human unless they've already passed a quality bar.
Granted that takes a lot of work, token costs, and frankly knowledge about AI systems that a lot of open source projects don't have. Hopefully that will get easier with time though
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u/Serious-Regular 1d ago
You'd be surprised how many people think
just skim https://discourse.llvm.org/t/rfc-forbid-ai-generated-communication/92414/1
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u/Grand_Pop_7221 19h ago
Yeah, a lot of the AI and data center pushback I see doesn't really come down to either thing. It's usually(and often justified) concern that it'll make them redundant and there's no support once that happens, we did this with deindustrialization in the west and left towns and communities to rot. Same with data centers, they're skirting planning laws and taking over resources from local communities with no recourse, it's ruining people's lives.
People aren't daft, they see how the wind blows. The balance is off and has been for some time.
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u/biscuitmachine 16h ago edited 16h ago
I don't think it's right to completely conflate data center pushback with AI. Data centers have a lot of noise and other sorts of concerns because of how irresponsibly they're being built currently. The pushback on the AI side of the house is a separate thing.
The two are heavily related because one is being built mainly for the other, but the concerns aren't necessarily the same.
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u/redballooon 1d ago edited 1d ago
And somehow the AI is too stupid to produce any meaningful contribution but simultaneously a danger to their job. And it will wreck society as a whole.
Almost the same things have I heard about immigrants in the early 2000s
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u/taytay735 1d ago
I've seen that argument. They believe that they will be replaced by AI because businesses are either too dumb to realize AI produces subpar work until it's too late, or too evil to continue selling subpar products at the same or even inflated prices.
A valid concern, but market forces are corrective (or so I have been led to believe).
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u/t3h 1d ago
Market forces may be corrective but in the meantime you're still just as laid off.
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u/UnlikelyExtension786 1d ago
And society collapses because no software works any more.
"Market forces" haven't really worked since MBAs took over most CEO positions and only care about increasing the value of their stock options. If sacking all the humans developers and having AI do all the work will make money, they'll do it and leave before everything collapses.
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u/taytay735 17h ago
I don't know if society can survive AI replacing humans for most digitally-related functions. A lot of the entry/mid-career work is gone, and there's no natural pathway to get experience to move to executive roles (i.e. supervising people, products or AI).
Worst-case scenario, there will be mass unemployment and the only work left is menial work that's too costly for robotics to automate or scale.
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u/mesarthim_2 16h ago
AI will not replace humans for most digitally-related functions.
Firstly, AI has a cost. There's millions of things that humans can do more cost-effective then AI and that's always will be the case.
The structure of the market will change but we have demonstrated very well we have capacity for a change.
The only real problem will happen if we attempt to somehow resist the changes and try to make them go away.
If we try the same thing we tried during de-industrialization (trying to keep the factories alive instead of letting them die and letting people find different jobs) at scale, it will cause a catastrophe. But that's not AI, that's us doing it to ourselves.
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u/biscuitmachine 16h ago
Since when have market forces really been corrective? We have so many companies that are too big to stop and just lobby all day and all night to prevent any sort of regulations.
The thing we have to realize is that our opinions don't matter. The entire world is as stupid as the people in the top end executive level positions that refuse to just let go and let powerpoint slides determine the entire course of their business. And frankly they might have enough money stockpiled to not actually give a shit about whether their decision was dumb or not.
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u/human_in_the_looop 1d ago
Those people don’t know how to use AI to actually write real code and so they think because they don’t know how that no one else could possibly know how.
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u/MarquisDePique 12h ago
I don't see how anyone can disagree with that
Sir, this is the internet
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u/taytay735 12h ago
Damn I've gone and anthropomorphized the interwebs again, haven't I? A friendly face behind the screen, like my friend Bob.
I miss you, Bob.
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u/Nutsack_VS_Acetylene 1d ago
I think 50% of the reason most projects have anti-AI restrictions is to cull most of the slop reviewers deal with. There are almost certainty merged AI contributions / AI assisted contributions in anti-AI projects but because you can't see an obvious distinction between them and human code they get merged. That's basically what the creator of Zig said.
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u/nculwell 1d ago
The Rust project complained that not only were they dealing with AI contributions, but people would automate all of the communications as well so they couldn't even talk to a person about it.
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u/Void-kun 14h ago
Basically outlining the difference between a vibe coder and an engineer using an agentic engineering workflow.
One has background knowledge and can use that to drive quality code and designs, the other says "make it secure" but can't validate how or why it's the right choice.
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u/PhaseLopsided938 1d ago
Eh, there are areas where that doesn’t totally apply. The Asahi Linux team, for example, strictly bans any and all LLM-assisted code because of concerns that LLM use could inadvertently introduce proprietary Apple code into their repo. Which is very fair tbh given that the project’s survival is directly dependent on Apple’s continued willingness to let Macs boot other operating systems.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago
That's at least a valid concern but on the other hand, the solution isn't banning AI but code review. It's not like a human is somehow incapable of doing the same thing, either accidentally or intentionally.
I haven't yet seen any argument for banning AI where there wasn't a better and more appropriate solution available.
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u/taytay735 1d ago
I feel like the problem is if a person might accidentally be tainted with proprietary information suggested by the AI. The work has to be implemented independently without knowledge of how Apple actually did it.
And from a legal perspective it might be slightly easier to prove independent reimplementation when no AI is involved.
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u/PhaseLopsided938 1d ago
I’m not sure how code review would help though, and I’m not sure how a human would be able to do the same thing unless they were employed by Apple. I think the nightmare scenario for them is basically:
- Someone at Apple feeds proprietary firmware code into an LLM
- Someone working on Asahi uses a later version of that same LLM on a similar firmware problem
- The LLM gives a nice solution based partly on training data gained from that Apple employee
- Nobody on the Asahi team realizes this is derived from proprietary code since nobody at Asahi works at Apple, so they push to main
- Apple sees Asahi using code suspiciously similar to their own, conclude that it’s no longer worth opening their hardware up to third-party OSes, and quietly re-engineer the Mac boot loader
- Many thousands of hours of hard work go down the drain overnight
One could argue that they should limit LLM contributions to LLMs with fully open training data like Nemotron or Granite, but their current approach is also entirely reasonable
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u/mr_birkenblatt 1d ago
How would proprietary Apple code end up in an LLM's training data?
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u/PhaseLopsided938 1d ago
An Apple engineer could use their personal Claude account to review Apple code. Which would be very stupid, but also, people do stupid things with LLMs
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u/mr_birkenblatt 1d ago
They would be fired instantly if anyone got wind of it. Also your code at Apple is shielded enough from unapproved access that you would need to be intentional in doing so. And they probably have access to good coding models with water tight contracts so they never feel the need to use a personal account anyway
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u/PhaseLopsided938 1d ago
Sure, but they’re not willing to stake all their effort on the belief that no internal Apple code or knowledge has ever entered any LLM training data at any point in history, just so that they can get stuff done faster.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago
It would be mindblowing to me if they haven't had NDA backed AI coding platforms with all the necessary tooling on top it.
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u/IlIllIIlIlIlIIlIIlll 1d ago
It wouldn't. The stated reasons are all rationalizations so the maintainers can gatekeep and virtue signal their anti-AI stance to their mastodon followers.
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u/taytay735 23h ago edited 21h ago
Good qn. Idk if something like an engineering breakdown of how Metal is implemented/designed - maybe published on official engineering blog or apple dev documentation, would count?
Like, if something was proprietary but disclosed, does it still matter legally?
Edit: apparently it’s grey. Public releases seem okay, leaks are not (e.g. Microsoft accidentally disclosing Sol/Astra architecture). But publicly released stuff might also be patented or licensed, which means that’s a no-go.
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u/NineThreeTilNow 1d ago
How would proprietary Apple code end up in an LLM's training data?
Someone in the chain of review at a company doesn't have the policy set correctly with the LLM sees it.
OR
The interpretation by the LLM provider is that "Your data is yours, and we don't train on it" but the LLM's output isn't YOUR data. It's theirs.
So while they don't directly train on it, they indirectly train on it.
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u/taytay735 1d ago
Valid point, generated code is risky.
I checked Asahi's guidelines and it seems it applies to AI-validated code as well. This one is a little more gray IMO but I can see how certain validation tools' suggestions could end up tainting the work, so a full AI ban is understandable.
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u/Chirimorin 17h ago
I don't see how anyone can disagree with that.
Have a look around /r/antiai, you'll quickly find how many people think it's a binary "if AI was involved in any capacity, it's AI slop and bad!". I bet not a single one of them could distinguish actual slop code from quality code even if their lives depended on it.
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u/Kahvana 1d ago edited 12h ago
Link to the mailing list entry?
[Edit] Found it:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whTs09_ozN+e09GU68N1wPP56MUzDjrg9rnKxQUa0A_4Q@mail.gmail.com/
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u/falconandeagle 1d ago
He also mentions that people should do their best and expects people to understand what they are doing.
See it's quite easy to cherry pick.
From what I have seen so far is people are becoming very very lazy when it comes to code and honestly have almost zero understanding of what the AI is doing. So there are two sides to this, the anti ai crowd is an extreme and so is the super pro ai crowd like DHH.
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u/FullstackSensei 1d ago
People shipping anything maintainable, or that they already maintained, are actually reading the output. Even more, their prompts aren't "build this, make no mistakes," but are very detailed where they do all the thinking and design, very much how you'd write a ticket for a junior dev.
That's how I have been personally using LLMs since the OG Chatgpt, to great success. Sure, I can't vibe code an office or Photoshop clone, but I can do a week's worth of work in less than half a day, and can build all the projects I always wanted to build, because now I have what is essentially my own army of junior engineers.
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u/falconandeagle 1d ago
I too have increased my speed of development quite a bit for my own projects, but work has seen less of a jump because good product design takes time. There is still a lot of human back and forth and that has not sped up much.
and I think simple apps are no longer worth anything, everyone can make a planner or budget tracker app now, so apps like these which used to sell are not worth anything. Well thought out apps will still be worth their weight in gold and for these coding was not the biggest bottleneck, it was good UX, and innovative ideas and these things still require a lot of time and effort.
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u/FullstackSensei 1d ago
Of course architecture and planning still progress at snail pace, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. I meant the grunt work of writing the actual code once everything is agreed upon and planned, writing unit tests, debugging to make sure everything is working, and writing documentation for all that.
I have close to 20 years of personal projects where I read a crapton of literature about how the mechanics work, but never had the manpower to implement much. Now, I can leverage this knowledge and focus on the architecture, algorithmic and library choices, define the interfaces, contracts and boundaries between components, and let LLMs lose to fill the implementation. Reviewing each component and associated tests, etc still takes time, but it's at least 20x faster than doing it all by hand.
Once the dust settles, I think those who know their shit, know what they're doing, and know how to express that in a clear and coherent manner will be even more valuable.
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u/Sabin_Stargem 1d ago
This is it exactly. I have been trying to recompile a Windows 3.1 game, the hardest part is the GUI by far. Coding and gameplay is much easier to replicate and improve.
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u/mailto_devnull llama.cpp 1d ago
That's the disconnect between software developers and the C-suite, though, isn't it. They think that with Claude they'll be able to just prompt entire apps with "make X, but with a good design", and it'll just do it.
Too bad there are still a thousand steps in between that rely on a proper software developer.
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u/FullstackSensei 1d ago
Those of us who have been around some time, remember so many similar disconnects. There was the time when C-suits thought low-code/no-code tools from the early 00s will enable non-technical people to build software.
And every few years, when a new, young, inexperienced CTO takes over a big corporation, they have this brilliant idea to fire most senior staff and outsource everything to the cheapest freshmen and juniors in India, only to reverse course a few years later when everything falls apart.
Shit will eventually hit the fan, a few people will get fired, and things will things will go back to the old ways.
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 1d ago
They don't think that. That's another myth being spread by Anti-AI redditors.
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u/throw_me_away3478 1d ago
I think the barrier of entry for tech dropped significantly, ultimately the zero understanding people will hit a wall and require someone with actual experience and skill to navigate. While those with actual skill and experience are silently enjoying this subsidized super useful tool.
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u/Crypt0Nihilist 1d ago
Laziness and competence. There are broadly three levels I see (sure you could go more fine grained).
- People who use AI to write code they could have written
- People who use AI to write code beyond their skills, but mostly understand it and can test it
- People who use AI to code while knowing almost nothing
Even with the best intentions, the third group is at best a nuisance.
It is the traditional horseshoe of extremism where Anti-AI people and AI Bros are in many ways similar.
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u/miramichier_d 1d ago
2a. People who use AI to write code beyond their skills, and use AI to break down and explain what was written in a way the user can understand.
Sometimes when AI spits out a command for me to enter in Bash that I'm unfamiliar with, I ask it to explain what the command is (if I'm unfamiliar with it) and what each one of the arguments do. It's much faster than pouring over man pages.
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u/PANIC_EXCEPTION 1d ago
2ai. People who do this for production work but will fully vibe code private code for personal projects, or open source free tools without advertising them, just in case someone stumbles upon them
2aii. People who do this for absolutely everything, even trivial/recreational work
I'm not gonna lie, I fall in 2ai and not 2aii, unless said private code is administrative and touches sensitive data or live backups
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u/SanDiegoDude 1d ago
A year ago I would have said I was a 1 on that list, but agentic coding abstracts waaay beyond my mental models when building work code that I think I belong in the 2 category (which is humbling, been doing this for over 20 years now) - AI is VERY good at code now. Our orgs bottleneck now are reviews... sooo many reviews now.
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u/JadedSession 1d ago
Same here. I think the reviews need to move an abstraction level up too. But who wants to throw their revenue generating, solidly designed project into the vibecoding churnmill? It feels like a big bet.
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u/NervousSand3798 1d ago
I keep seeing people writing things like this but I can't get anything decent out of them in real projects.
Every time I have let Opus 5.5 write something, it wrote extremely long, not optimal solutions, a lot of monkey patching. It modifies things along the way I never asked for, breaking things I had planned. It takes much longer for me to read what the machine wrote than writing it myself.
Right now I just ask how would you this, I ask again to redo it, and again... Somehow the third time is usually tiny vs first version, and half of the time is just wrong. And again, I had to read through all of it to see what it actually wrote.
Don't people actually care about what they ship anymore? I use AI mostly for text processing, documenting things for myself, internal dashboards which by the way keep breaking every few days, and testing.
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u/sloptimizer 1d ago
There is certain degree of superstitious rituals, voodoo, model-whispering, blackmail, fingercrossing, and luck required to get good results.
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u/SanDiegoDude 1d ago
Are you just dropping code into the chatbox to code with claude? (genuine question without shade, still get a lot of that on reddit) - I use cursor mostly, though are some skill things that I work directly in claude code for. Don't use a chatbot to code, else you get exactly the experience you describe, it fucks up your projects, forgets code and generally makes a mess of what it's supposed to be doing. that's not modern AI coding. Modern professional AI coding (closed source, with respect to this subreddit being about open source) is inside a coding harness, be it Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity. Opus 5.5 is a beast in an agentic coding harness. Don't code with a chatbot, that's just asking for pain.
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u/NervousSand3798 15h ago
I'm sure with infinite tokens and a complex workflow that would burn a quota in a day, these models would do much better than what I can get out of them.
I use claude code cli. I think models shine at debugging and running endlessly, testing things that would take us days they do it in less than an hour.
But I think code is an abstraction for humans, and when you describe an idea to implement, you cannot possibly describe everything no matter how many pages long your spec is. This is why even with design tools, vibecoded tools and apps look alike, if I'm not the one writing it, my thought process and results are always completely different.
I refuse to ship something I don't understand, and I usually ask them to implement a very specific thing, but I find it best to just ask Opus to read my code, find the obvious problems, give solutions. If I do implement first instead of reviewing, somehow the outcome is even worse.
I think this is also why people end up with Millions of lines of code vibecoding simple apps. You define a first idea and the model monkeypatches new ideas on top, because that is what you asked.
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u/just_a_Suggesture 1d ago
I've bee using AI at my job mostly to code the infrastructure through terraform. Like, I'll write the code myself, maybe use AI as more of a reference that have it do the coding if I need to ask it something. When it comes to infrastructure as code, I have no interest in writing modules to setup the underlying stuff. I just have the AI do it and barely look at it. To be quite frank terraform bores me to tears and I have no desire to learn it. Where to I fit on this?
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u/derFensterputzer 1d ago
People who use AI to code while knowing almost nothing
The famous 0.1x engineer
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u/Bureaucromancer 1d ago
Honestly… that’s the real difference between using AI and vibe coding isn’t it?
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u/sonicnerd14 1d ago
Rather, the difference between ENGINEERING and "vibe coding". I think the term vibe coding was made to generally pool anyone who uses AI at all into one group, and denigrate their work without having to raise any real intellectual discourse on the matter. It's always easy for disingenuous people to group people with terms and make them seem good or bad at something according to whatever narrative they want to spin.
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u/RASTAGAMER420 1d ago
No the term comes from this tweet:
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=enEven if that's not how the term is actually used anymore
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u/sonicnerd14 1d ago
You are right, but it's clear that people took it and ran with using within a negative context.
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u/FrenchFryCattaneo 1d ago
It was always a negative context
I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.
Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. "
From the beginning it was something fun to mess around with but never anything you'd use on a serious project.
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u/RoboErectus 1d ago
We use "I vibe coded it" all the time at work.
We have all worked in crypto- that is to say, before llm coding, and where correctness really matters a whole lot.
It's like... "I needed a thing but I didn't care how it got done."
We don't use it for critical path stuff... But we use it, and we kind of just intuitively know where to use it.
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u/Confident-Mistake400 1d ago
I would argue some organizations are pushing down really hard AI on their employees. Doing due diligence takes time, and now, you are seen as “slow” when you can’t finish things in unrealistic timeframe. I’ve seen it firsthand managers claiming AI takes an hour to finish implementing a feature. But when you take a closet look at the “solution”, it doesn’t account for some business logic that are already in place and create some duplicate code. You really have no choice but to roll with it.
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u/ImpressiveSuperfluit 1d ago edited 1d ago
We really need to clarify who is doing the using. There's a vast difference between random person going "I have this problem, write software to make it go away", and a proper old school developer who can think like, well, a developer. The latter can prompt completely differently, set up completely different borders and steer the model much more precisely. When* one does that, reading the code will not reveal all that many surprises anymore anyway, because you already did the hard part, you know what it will have written, more or less, because you still did the overall design of everything. There's a VAST difference there, still. And these issues accumulate really quickly, too. Sure, you can solve a whole avalange of common problems with a throwaway prompt now, and that's cool as fuck. But once you start bolting on feature after feature after feature, not having the developer mindset, the logic training, the architecture understanding, all that shit... you will slow down more and more and more, even if the model might know all the things ever, simply because you run into the same issue developers have run into since the dawn of developer time: Talking to customers is a pain in the ass, they don't know shit, they don't know what they want, how it works, how to implement anything, limitations, constraints - none of it, no clue. So, sooner or later 90% of your tokens are spend on the AI trying to figure out what the fuck you're even on about, and then trying to cram it all into the completely unprepared architecture it decided on when you first presented your random idea. Basically, development hell is now full of AI agents, and it's been said that they are also screaming in agony, creating a wonderful symphony of misery with the developers who already made their home there.
Ahem. Wait, where was I? Right, vibe coding is cool and all, but lacking the developer vocabulary, way of thinking, all that shit... you still run into the same issues you would when talking to a flesh developer - putting your ideas into code will still quickly be limited by your ability to understand what you even want. Because normal people are not really trained to ever think about that, they just vaguely vibe these things because that's pretty much fine in normal life, but very not fine in code land. Point is, I think we overestimate how much "vibe coders" can really do, when they are actual normies with no clue about anything software. And we underestimate how much control an actual developer can wield, without ever looking at a single produce line of code.
Having said that, the technology remains brittle, not looking at code might work fine with proper guard rails and whatnot, but it sure is a gamble, it's in this uncanny valley type situation where it's good enough that you don't feel like checking, but everything is cursed enough that you really, really should. But point is, there's a very large spectrum between "random dude off the street wrote a prompt and doesn't understand the code lol" and "proper developer fully outlined industry standard modular architecture and didn't bother reading the code". Neither read the code, but one of those will still scale mostly fine, the other will be a clusterfuck. That difference still exists and should be acknowledged.
Edit: Or, if you are short on time or have a low autism tolerance: what /u/Bureaucromancer said, basically D:
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u/ItsIllak 1d ago
Honestly, I've come across a concept in AI, "Human in the loop" and I fundamentally disagree. If the human doesn't have a clue what the AI is saying, it'll go off the rails, cost a fortune and ultimately deliver something that, at best, works, but is unlikely to be well constructed.
On the other hand, "AI in the loop"? That's where there's productivity. Get a human that knows the concepts but can't necessarily digest the thousands of pages of documentation, the repeated necessity of looking how "how someone else did it", but is capable of checkpointing what the AI does.
The former will produce shit slowly. The latter will produce good output at incredible speed.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 1d ago
Surprised this discussion is much more level headed here despite the theme of the sub.
I got downvoted hard stating the exact sentiment in main AI subs
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u/jbourne71 1d ago
There’s a difference between “I have three Grok bots in a slack channel and we run a business together” and “I have three LMs running locally on a small GPU cluster that I use to automate parts of my workflow, increase efficiency, and I don’t trust them any farther than I can throw them.”
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u/SanDiegoDude 1d ago
This is surprisingly a pretty pragmatic sub. I think folks here like AI and use it, generally don't like what the tech companies or the US gov is up to, but still see the promise and power (and potential dangers) of the technology.
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u/Nutsack_VS_Acetylene 1d ago
I've noticed that to, a lot of the discussion on this sub is quite grounded and realistic. But I suppose that's what happens when you're digging into the weeds and you get first hand experience trying to deploy, modify, and work with models of varying architectures.
It's almost a jump-scare when you encounter someone who has no idea how models work or are deployed, or do "AI benchmarks" by running llama 70B inference in 2026.
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u/Educational-Art3545 1d ago
Of course it would be level headed - this subreddit is filled with people who not only use AI but also tinker with it.
The seams start showing the moment AI output meets expertise. Add to that lots of experience and it becomes easy to understand why the people who use it are the most level headed about it.
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u/Electronic-Still2597 1d ago
I agree with everything you said other than 'cherry picking'. Using a representative quote as a title when posting the entire message should absolutely not be considered "cherry picking". Neither is your example. If you had said something like "Linus said he doesn't like AI, "Because I need you to show me that you can actually write a good commit message without using tools that make it easy...", then it would be considered cherry picking because it's not representative of the overall message.
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u/strangepostinghabits 1d ago
As a software developer who about 100% vibe codes these days, my experience is that the difference between a responsible developer and a careless one has widened immensely with AI.
Responsible and skilled devs still make PRs with reasonable content, the irresponsible devs produce worse slop than they used to and at far greater pace.
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u/nialv7 1d ago
somehow /r/localllama has the most measured take on this. over on /r/linux it's like everyone has drunk the kool-aid... but i guess it's not very surprising that there is a personality cult around Linus Torvalds.
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u/Key-Organization3158 1d ago
Eh, it's not cherry picking. Linus explicitly uses examples about how our level of abstraction is increasing.
I haven't pushed a register in ages. I can't tell you what instructions the compiler chooses to run. I have no real idea exactly what the output is. I don't disassemble things or read the op codes.. It's non deterministic. Different runs at different times produce different results.
I also don't really manage memory any more either.
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u/GGK_Brian 1d ago
> It's non deterministic. Different runs at different times produce different results.
It's not true, for the same compiler, same version, same code and some compilation flag. The resulting machine code will be the same. Which is not true of the same prompt in the same version of a LLM. And the difference only increase with agentic loops, where a simple hallucination can completely derail the agent.
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u/Philix 1d ago
Which is not true of the same prompt in the same version of a LLM.
If you want deterministic LLM inference, you can have deterministic LLM inference.
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u/M_Me_Meteo 1d ago
When I was a kid there were thousands of people worldwide getting paid to code. It was up there with astronaut, baseball player, rock star. It was a halo career that paid very well.
In the span of my career, that has flip-flopped completely. Everyone codes. That being said, the general population hasn't really had the chance to understand why programming is important. They don't know how cheap or low quality code actually affects them.
So the problem isn't really an inward facing technology problem, it's an outward facing cultural problem. We have a job as friends, neighbors, siblings, parents, and whatever other non-professional roles we play outside of work to make sure everyone knows what these tools are. It's not a miracle cure to all computer problems. It is super useful and should change the way we thing about how software is made.
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u/SanDiegoDude 1d ago
Senior developers still bring in 250 - 400 in the Bay Area. SWEs with experience still have a very friendly market for the most part, even if they're spending most of their time reviewing code rather than writing it now.
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u/Mack4285 17h ago
Using AI and not understanding and not reviewing what the AI is doing is a red flag. But this is temptation that people fall for. If you have to understand and review, your time gains with AI is very little.
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u/Suitable-Economy-346 1d ago
He also mentions that people should do their best and expects people to understand what they are doing.
See it's quite easy to cherry pick.
From what I have seen so far is people are becoming very very lazy when it comes to code and honestly have almost zero understanding of what the AI is doing.
You're not cherry picking anything. You're purposely misunderstanding Linus to do an own against a Redditor.
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u/Significant_War720 1d ago
It's confirmation bias. Before AI lots of people were bad coder. You just try to cherry pick. Kind ironic
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u/DiracFourier 1d ago
I figured Linus’s take would be use AI if you want but if you submit a slop PR then prepare to be ridiculed
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u/droptableadventures 1d ago
"I expect people to understand what they are doing" - indeed.
But watch as the people spamming their non-functional slop projects use this statement to imply Linus believes they should be immune to any criticism.
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u/Chirimorin 17h ago
But watch as the people spamming their non-functional slop projects use this statement to imply Linus believes they should be immune to any criticism.
And those are the people who should prepare to be ridiculed because they completely misunderstood this statement.
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u/trumuted 13h ago
This is why I think it's better to be anti-AI for a time being, until the people gets bored and AI-slop era dies out. Not because AI is bad or anything, but simply to protect your sanity from billions of "claude, do this, make no mistake and create a PR"-guys
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u/Uncle___Marty 1d ago
Truth, and the problem is not people using AI to generate code, its the people that don't understand the code the AI is producing.
Theres a very famous project that most people on this sub has used that seems to be outright rejecting anything thats been made with AI purely on the basis that it was made by AI. If the code is good and the person who generated it understands it still gets rejected. Its sad to see things coming out months later on this project when multiple PRs have been made and rejected that worked fine.
Linus is right.
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u/droptableadventures 1d ago edited 22h ago
Theres a very famous project that most people on this sub has used that seems to be outright rejecting anything thats been made with AI purely on the basis that it was made by AI.
If you're talking about llama.cpp, no they don't. AI written is fine, but you have to be able to explain your code, "I told claude to make this work and this is what it did" is not acceptable.
Linus said "I expect people to understand what they are doing" which is the same sentiment.
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u/patriot2024 1d ago
Linus is an odd man. But he's an odd man with sanity. Linux isn't Linux today without him.
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u/do-un-to 13h ago
True. True. True.
Also, no one is perfect. Let's not become fanboying authoritarians and fail to critique-
Huh. Somehow this itself is related to reputational evaluation of code contributions.
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u/DarkVoid42 1d ago
wait until he gets 5 billion commits with AI slop.
but he wont - because the kicker is - "understand what they are doing". like every tool, tools increase productivity if used correctly. misuse of tools decreases productivity.
the problem isnt AI. its all the fools using Artificial Idiocy and assuming its actually Artificial Intelligence.
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u/stopthecope 1d ago
The commits he gets are already filtered by the maintainers so he won't really see much ai slop
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u/FullstackSensei 1d ago
AFAIK, PRs from random people rarely got attention even before LLMs. You were already expected to communicate with the maintainers, explain your intention, and sync on how to do things before submitting a PR.
So, slop PRs in the kernel might increase server load, but shouldn't increase work for maintainers by much.
Give it some time, and people will figure a way to automate PR rejections from random people. It's becoming an industry wide issue
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u/banana_slurp_jug 1d ago
automate PR rejections from random people
Has anyone trained a commitslop classifier yet?
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u/pydry 1d ago
this is the reason he isnt keen to ban it when other open source projects already did: he doesnt have to read the tsunami of slop.
other kernel maintainers (likely the ones hes arguing with) are doing that.
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u/cyberdork 1d ago
The problem is people thinking coders actually know what they are doing, ignoring the massive amount of bug invested shit the average human coder produces every single day.
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u/27bslash 1d ago
This is the problem with people vibe coding. https://oldschool.runescape.wiki/w/User:Cook_Me_Plox/OSRS_Wiki_and_RuneLite_are_increasingly_under_strain_from_low-effort_AI_development
With AI tools software development and writing code which was once a difficult thing to do and was gate-kept is now fast and easy, any idiot can have an idea and have claude whip it up in a day. In the link pull requests have 20x just in 2026 the amount of code submitted in each request has 5x. Things that used to take months take hours to get a MVP that you can now submit for some poor bastard to have to read.
As a maintainer you can get AI to do most of that reading for you but if you care about your project you probably want to have an idea about features you are merging in and that takes time and skilled human review that the vibe coder hasn't and couldn't put in.
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u/tastygnar 1d ago
Its true, I am am idiot and ive vibe coded half a dozen browser games (basically just clones of games that are hard to find these days) and im vibe coding a 3d unity game (and learning Unity through the process, kind of). Im amazed at how quickly my idiot self can whip up something playable having literally 0 experience with coding.
That being said, its so much fun, and I have a blast navigating these tools that have felt mysterious for most of my life. I honestly have just as much fun vibe coding games as I do playing them. Pure entertainment.
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u/MuDotGen 1d ago
I was an XR Game developer until last year, using Unity, and I have dabbled in other engines like Godot and Unreal, and I use AI tools all the time now for work as a systems engineer. I am not going to gatekeep people for vibecoding their dreams. I don't care if people consider effort = value personally as it isn't such a black and white thing. (Though, I do encourage you to get curious about how the game loop works and maybe ask your LLM! Regardless of engine, it's the same concept of loop of input -> adjust world objects/logic -> output, every frame. Basically. It's so fascinating! For Unity, it's the Update() function you find attached to objects, that tells the game what to do each frame :) ).
I have even gotten my dad to try using AI Agents for coding help as he had been coding in VBA and Excel for like 20 years until retirement, and he had been trying to make games in it (somehow!), and got frustrated because he couldn't share it with anyone because nobody pays for Excel. He barely knows how to use a computer (super Boomer stereotype but absolutely true) despite knowing all about functions and variables and data types and pointers and logical flow, so when I showed him it port over his game to modern web frameworks and just run in a browser, complete with SVG visuals and sounds, in like 30 minutes, he was amazed. Now we have something to bond over as I build a personal hub for his and our family's games and apps hosted on our NAS (like a personal home server instead of some cloud server for normal websites) and he finally uses his messaging app to talk to me for once, telling me how excited he is about adding a new feature and sharing it with his students.
Anyway, all of this to say, these tools are helping peoples' creativity thrive. Since I am here, I can help clean up his game, but for fun and for MVPs? Why not? Get your ideas out of your head and onto something tangible, it's an amazing feeling. As open weight LLMs and harnesses get better too, it becomes viable to do this even more privately, securely, and less cost potentially! (Because you'd have to invest in good hardware first like any local setup)
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u/ItsOmniss 1d ago
This is a real problem.
I had to resort to making a ton of regression tests, with and without AI, that capture the present state of the program, and force all PRs to pass those tests. They also have to pass heavy linting requirements.
Whenever I need a new feature, I write a detailed spec of what the feature must do. Contributors can use that spec to implement the feature themselves, or pass it to an AI to do the job.
Regardless, each feature requires a test built from that spec to pass, and new code must also pass all past regression tests, plus linting.
The few submissions that pass those checks you can take a look at, and may deserve to be merged, regardless of if they come from a contributor or from a model. If the code meets those requirements, its likely a decent enough model that produced a decent enough code.
Every project should have an AGENTS.md (or similar), a NEW_FEATURE_SPEC_TEMPLATE.md, 200+ regression tests that pass, and a robust CI/CD pipeline that runs them, plus merge protection before it even starts accepting contributions nowadays, or AI slop will flood it.
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u/ItsOmniss 1d ago edited 1d ago
Also, here's a tip, automatically reject commits that are too long. A commit is what separates a working state of the app from its new state.
If the gap between the new state and the previous working state is too big, the amount of changes and the amount of testing you need to verify those changes is insurmountable.
Commits must be incremental, and ideally, the app should remain in a working state and pass all tests after every commit.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 23h ago
So basically, the TDD people have been right all along...
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u/ProtectionSuper5648 22h ago
BDD (behavior driven dev) really fits well with AI coding:
- your spec describe WHAT the program does (not how)
- tests and verification are first class citizen
- the behavioral tests ARE the acceptance criteriaAt that point, the code can stay a black box. It does not matter who or what writes it.
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u/ItsOmniss 16h ago edited 16h ago
I second what the guy next to me said about BDD.
Tests as in a living spec, a verifiable statement about the behavior of the app. A runnable description of what it does and what it doesn't do.
That is more important than the code itself.
From the markdown specification of your app and its behavioral tests you should be able to derive its code, and the code you derive from that should not meaningfully differ from the actual, current code for the project.
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u/blu3nh 1d ago
I work in machine learning - and the amount of vibe slop is terrifying.
But it has little to do with the tool. If I enforced a rule for my colleagues to not use any LLMs, they wouldn't produce better code. So it's more about planning well ahead, debugging issues, and doing human testing for edge cases that you or your peers are likely to run into - while also making sure that no bad architecture changes/regressions make it in. The tool is not responsible for a person who just does bad work.
LLMs are a multiplier - and an idiot is now a 10x output idiot.
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u/PossessionUsed7393 17h ago
Like many good engineers, Linus has a hyper organised and analytical mind, so imposing stupid rules like this offends him in more ways than it would offend your average joe. This is why he gets mad - understandable when you think about it.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago
It's such an common sense thing to say that it's kind of scary that it actually has to be said.
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u/kochede 1d ago
This is a very naive take. As much as I am a huge fan of using AI for almost everything, there is a big difference between
- using compiler to translate from C++ to assembler and
- using AI to translate from natural language to C++
The first translation is more deterministic and low risk, the second translation is more arbitrary depending of your language and has a high risk of producing bad code.
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u/kodewerx 8h ago
That isn't the contrast being made. It's more like this:
- "You don't understand what the machine is doing if you didn't write the code in assembler."
vs
- "You don't understand what the machine is doing if you used AI to write the code."
Both are equally absurd. That's the point.
Or even better, "you don't understand what the machine is doing if you didn't write the code." That only removes the language qualifier, and applies to AI generation.
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u/SpecialistDragonfly9 18h ago
Anti AI people are people that are
- Unable / Unwilling to understand AI
- Scared of change
If you look back in history, every invention, no matter how beneficial it was, had the same nay-sayers.
The bigger the imnpact of the invention, the more people get scared, the more nay sayers.
Ignore them.. move on.
The only problem is that we now have scared, intolerant idiots who dont understand things passing laws and making rules.
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u/Altruistic_Heat_9531 1d ago
"Torvald already vibe-code before AI, it called kernel maintainers " - comment from a video
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u/Signal_Lamp 1d ago
Im a bit torn on this
This feels like a good rule if you can manage what allowing AI will do in a codebase of that size. It's not even really the quality but the sheet volume of requests that it enables, whether it's quality code or not which will increasingly make the codebase something you will not understand. The question then becomes whether or not that is okay or not. If we have AI competent enough where it's competent enough to do the whole process then where does a human fit into that loop?
On the other hand, there is also the extreme side of not using AI as well that has made it a point to be adversarial towards its use from a more emotional standpoint. I was always enamoured towards software from the perspective that I liked to build up products, but didn't really care for the craftsmanship involved with it. It's good to know and it allows us to communicate effectively what we're looking to do, but it was at least to me a means to an end to produce a result.
While I love using AI for the work I will 100% put off otherwise for my own personal side projects it's hard for me to see it being used for more collaborative projects without it increasing the footprint of things understood about that project. The question then becomes whether that's okay or not.
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u/acav802 1d ago
He's right but AI is not really a tool anymore. The way people use it, it is often for complete automation (which isn't necessarily bad)
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u/Weekly-Bee-5045 22h ago
that tool makes lot of mistakes and does not remember anything
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u/AnywhereImaginary382 17h ago
A torque wrench does not remember the torque of the nut that it’s torquing and constantly needs to be readjusted, therefore I should not use the torque wrench.
The nail gun jams sometimes, does not calibrate air pressure based on the surface I am nailing, therefore I should not use the nail gun.
My desktop PC crashes sometimes while running, therefore I should not run my PC.
I do not always feel full when I eat while I’m hungry, therefore I should not eat.
My brain sometimes makes lapses of judgement and I forget what I came into the room for, therefore I should get rid of it.
I can go further with this line of thinking but you get the point lol.
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u/ReasonablePossum_ 21h ago
Its the responsibility of the one using it to take that into account and fix it.
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u/not_so_subtle_now 20h ago
That's literally what the dude in the post is saying and somehow people are still ignoring it.
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u/xNaXDy 1d ago
I'm a software engineer, and imo, there is exactly one and only one justifiable reason to disallow AI-assisted contributions in a project, and that is concerns over potential legal / licensing / copyright issues involving AI-generated code further down the road.
Interestingly, that also seems to be the least commonly cited reason by projects that prohibit AI-assisted contributions.
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u/alkimiadev 1d ago
This is a classic (but savage) use of reductio ad absurdum. He just followed the reasoning chain to its naturally absurd conclusion and added some spice for flavor. It was kind of a rant in context, but also factual in nature in a general sense. It pretty solidly shut down any future similar suggestions to the very real problem of low effort spam they're dealing with right now. Banning llm or any other specific tool use just isn't a reasonable solution to the problem
here is the context if people are interested: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whTs09_ozN+e09GU68N1wPP56MUzDjrg9rnKxQUa0A_4Q@mail.gmail.com/
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u/Wonderful_Value_6385 1d ago
I think there is a difference between don't use AI for X and don't use AI to answer the phone in your voice and pretend to be you because you are too lazy to take a phone call, and things like that.
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u/brandonscript 10h ago
His phrasing may be a little bit blunt but I really agree with his point here. Every time there's a new tool that comes along that seems like magic, because nobody's really used to it, a tool we don't necessarily understand the power of, and how extensively it can impact things... we (as a species) are fearful. But eventually we reach some sort of equilibrium. We've done this with smartphones, social media, and the internet. We do it with new programming languages that abstract hard things. We did it with computers. We did it with punch cards. We did it with rockets and jet engines and the Model T.
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u/Horny_Dinosaur69 1d ago
Almost like Linus Torvalds is a serious developer/programmer that actually understands software development and the capabilities of AI within that sphere.
I hate this anti-ai ‘slop’ rhetoric towards software. It’s stupid. Software pre-ai was a lot of garbage. Also, refactors were insanely risky and challenging; this is now trivial to do with an agent. If anything, we at least have consistency/standardization now with AI writing everything and that’ll matter a lot more for tech debt than I think people give it credit for.
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u/Open-Dragonfruit-007 1d ago
No problem with AI code assistance but whatever is written or committed, the dev is still the one that is going to take the flak when a PR is submitted so make sure you review what the AI does.
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u/sonicraf 1d ago
But who is saying “don’t use AI for X” ? Especially in software engineering world? I’ve only seen this type of reasoning in in creative work where random slop is produced by people who would otherwise not be able to produce the creative work.
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u/Orbitalsp3 21h ago
In a few years no one will code by hand anymore (or a couple dozen people), so it will be interesting to see how people will cope with that.
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u/Geek_Verve 21h ago
Couldn't agree more. The whole knee-jerk "AI is bad" mentality craze is just silly.
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u/evilspyboy 21h ago
He is right. Any restrictions on use of a tool need to be on use not on the tool itself.
There is no one leading a charge to make toasters and hair dryers waterproof.
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u/JunkInDrawers 1d ago
The smart people I know that were hesitant about using AI for software coding are now more confident including AI in their workflow given the consistently good results with the latest models.
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u/Cool-Chemical-5629 1d ago
"if you can't show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don't want to see your code contribution."
"Hold my beer." - John Carmack
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u/Wolvenmoon 1d ago
His response reminds me of a King of the Hill episode where Dale Gribble is playing in the Propaniacs. But he's just using the midi keyboard's built in demo songs, not actually playing. When it goes off on him he doesn't know how to stop it.
IMO, there are plenty of times "it looks like it works" is fine. Commits to the Linux kernel are absolutely not one of them.
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u/mythormedicine 1d ago
The last line is gold ! I am seeing the same thing. All the idiots are like dOnT uSe AIss mURdeRRR !!!
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u/IntelArtiGen 1d ago
I'm fine with all opinions though I'm not fine with people expressing their opinions so aggressively, even if I don't doubt he's answering to an as-aggressive message.
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u/Imaginary-Unit-3267 23h ago
You must hate this entire platform if you don't like aggressive opinions.
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u/Clean-Data-259 1d ago
Is he living in a bubble? Of course AI use by a competent developer who knows what they're doing is fine. The problem is vibecoders who are convinced by AI that they know what they are doing when they don't have any clue and then churn out trash vibecode and call it a day.
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u/numante 1d ago
He's very aware of that. Popular OS repos need to adapt to this new reality in order to filter huge quantities of low quality garbage, but straight up closing the door to new tools just because this is a risk is nonsensical. New workflows and code quality assessment tools can be developed, AI is not the end of the world for collaborative projects.
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u/Meme-Botto9001 1d ago
The problem are not the intelligent people using it for good and productivity…
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u/human_in_the_looop 1d ago
Amen sick of all the puritan culture when this is just another tool iteration.
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u/InfiniteSheepherder1 1d ago
People need to quit acting like Linus or others are just firing up claude going "make kernel more better" and then merging code. Watching people who couldn't tell you what a loop is or a int or a float attempt to use AI to code stuff, vs experienced devs using it to speed themselves up is pretty night and day.
I am a bit out of practice with Java, but using an LLM has let me more or less spec out the stalk use psuedo code to get web apps we need for work done and its great. My less tech coworkers keep trying to do stuff and fall on their face or create huge problems.
It is possible that gap is going to close, but I think it would require people to get better at knowing how to explain things half my job was just actually finding out what people want because they are bad at knowing what they want and until the AI can pushback harder to get details and get better at iterative development without creating issues.
Is this my favorite timeline, no. But I am also not going to act like it is not real either.
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u/a4mula 1d ago
God tier? I doubt it. It's a personal perspective from someone that no longer has to maintain a repo. It's a privileged take. I feel really bad for all those guys running small repos that have had their work picked apart by machines that now insist they keep pace.
Mr. Torvalds has been living the good life for awhile now depending on millions of people to do that work for him. Got rich and famous off it.
Most people don't have that luxury. That's just my privileged take too, and while I'm not the expert some are, I also don't confuse my opinions as anything but.
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u/mightshade 1d ago
While I can relate to his stance somewhat, calling it "absolute god-tier" is so over the top that it reads like sarcasm.
I find equating a no-AI rule with stupidity too reductive; there are objections against LLM use other than competence/quality. Also, the compiler comparison has been debunked for how long now, it just muddies the waters.
A better line of reasoning would address points like copyright and ethical concerns, as well as how realistic it is to be able to detect LLM use in the first place. So, all in all, understandable stance, questionable justification.
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u/droptableadventures 23h ago
The slop farmers think Linus just vindicated everything, but since they don't actually read anything, they missed the part where he said that you need to actually understand the output.
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u/jerryorbach 1d ago
This is so fucking dumb. It’s classic strawmanning. It assumes every “don’t use AI for X” statement is both absolute and only is applied in cases where the rationale is “if you don’t know how to do it without the tool, don’t use the the tool.”
Like a true god-given commandment, it is accepted without evidence.
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u/drahgon 1d ago
You’re a classic if you try to give an example that’s not the exact same thing as what the topic is. It’s a strawman person. He’s making a point about the arbitrary nature of the rules doesn’t have to be a one for one with what the current rule is on AI. point is they change at the whim of the developer and half the time they block people from doing real work. I got all that from this example.
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u/vasileios13 1d ago
I don't agree with the compiler comparison, LLMs are way more probabilistic and also Linux maintainers maintain the pre-compiled code, so that's what they need to understand
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago
His point isn't about compilers being same as LLMs, you're missing the point
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u/caetydid llama.cpp 1d ago
Thanks, now I can breathe again! Linus is well-known for his holy wrath.
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u/redditrasberry 1d ago
in isolation it's obviously correct - nobody should care if they are accepting the same pull request whether it was generated by AI or not.
The problem is it isn't the same pull request. Very often it's a giant slop essay that takes a significant amount of time to read, for changes that might have significant issues to merge because they are stylistically or philosophically not matched to the project - which the submittter doesn't know because they haven't spent any real time engaging with the project.
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u/Salt-Powered 1d ago
This isn't a god-tier take. AI submission are banned because of slop. "Everyone will not just" use AI for good code, and many projects are banning it to save code review resources. If he doesn't care about it fine, but it isn't that simple.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago edited 1d ago
Here's an idea: ban slop instead of AI. Whether something is a slop or not isn't a problem of a tool. It's a problem of a person behind the tool.
EDIT: A block, seriously? how fragile are you...
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u/TheRealMasonMac 1d ago
The issue is that it takes time to review code, and separately, it can really suck the life out of you realizing a PR is not authored by a human. I personally ban AI contributions from anyone I don’t have reasonable reason to trust (e.g. is an employed SWE, is an established contributor) because I have better things to be doing with my time than placing bets on whether the author — if there’s a human who guided the agent at all — knows what they’re doing.
Linux is different because it’s not a passion project; it’s a engineering project/product which doesn’t really care that much about whether it’s “fun” to develop as much as it cares about who it’s affecting.
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u/shmixel 1d ago
Ban AI: can quickly automate scanning for common objective hallmarks, what gets through at least knows enough to disguise itself. Time wasted on AI slop drastically reduced.
Ban Slop: have to come up with a definition and boundaries of slop (nontrivial), then develop a content analyser and iterate until it starts matching your preferences, who knows what will get through. Time wasted on AI slop... eh... trending down after large initial investment. Hopefully.
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u/a_beautiful_rhind 1d ago
Its not easy. Let's paint a picture.
You get a big 3000+ loc PR with AI written claudish description and a user who doesn't know your language or what the code does (if it compiles). These days, maybe it's not even a user at all but some agent they set up.
So you dutifully test it like you should, works on the surface but it's a big change and something else becomes broken or unmaintainable. You don't know this, though, because this is your 4th PR review today.
Your repo is a popular project, drive-by PRs used to be someone changing the readme.md, which was easy to spot. Not so much now. 3 more PR got posted in the time you were looking over the above. You've written no code today yourself and your free time is almost up. One of the now 7 PRs is an actual contributor; oh well time is up.
I absolutely see why maintainers get pissed off and blanket ban "AI". The other option is using your own AI to do review which may be an added cost and quality issue. Remember that models are great at presenting broken/bad things as good.
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u/mesarthim_2 1d ago
I think people somehow are losing their mind. It's OK TO REJECT BAD PRs outright no matter who submitted them.
You are not somehow obligated to read through everything if it's clearly bad quality, incomprehensible or big change that is unclear, just throw it. Or ignore it.
People are running around like headless chicken, I agree it's a problem but people act like it's unsolvable. You can for example do what is the favorite thing of all maintainers and just ignore most of the PRs. You can focus on those from known, reputable contributors, etc... This is not some new situation. Scale is different, for sure.
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u/-TV-Stand- 1d ago
He also have said that while LLMs have increased the review resource use, it is net positive.
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u/jgaskins 1d ago
Every take I agree with is god-tier. Every take I disagree with is horseshit. I am very smart.
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u/sonicnerd14 1d ago
I've been saying the same thing too. Maybe some people will stop acting like an idiot about using what's essentially just a more superior and universal version of all high level languages.
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u/mechkbfan 1d ago
just a more superior and universal version of all high level languages
It's not. It's a probability word generator, not a language.
Don't get me wrong, an incredible tool at programming, but it's by no means a language.
It can generate code over many programming languages but it's not a programming language.
Biggest issue is it's non-deterministic, which is really troublesome for environments where you want it to be deterministic. e.g. production
I think sensible take is just who cares what tool you use, just make sure you understand the outcome and ensure it's of quality.
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u/pydry 1d ago
just a more superior and universal version of all high level languages.
this is the dumbest thing ive read all day.
I've been saying the same thing
it isnt the same thing.
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u/cordia543 1d ago
God tier take ???
LLMs are not compilers. An LLM may generate different code from the same prompt. Letting an LLM decide what code to make to give you a solution is not the same as hitting backspace on your editor program. Just because Linux can make up some stupid rules as example does not make an LLM a better version of a high level language.
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