Yes.

He is now the leader of a cabal of maintainers, and the only coding he does now is minor fixups for branch merging.

I suspect he still codes his own pet projects in his off time though, that's how we got git after all.

e

You gotta understand that not all people fall neatly into the black/white sockets of culture wars, your life will be better after that.

Many of us don't criticize the use of AI, but the MISUSE/ABUSE of it. It's one perfectly valid use case to let it generate code, and do a manual code review to make sure all of it is solid. It's the lowest of the low as a developer to ask it for a complex program, do a superficial review, and ship it claiming you did it.

Those of us against LLMs because we think they are a big societal / environmental concern have nothing more to say.

And no, those of us boycotting projects using LLMs don't have an immediate solution to everything under our feet, including our jobs, adopting LLMs.

What reply did you expect? That we apologize for being wrong and that we recognize that in hindsight, the AI boosters were right all along? We still don't want these polluting data centers next to our homes so they can feel more productive and play with their costly toy. Hell, even if they are useful / the productivity boost is real, actually we still don't want those shit datacenters, this wreckless scraping, the major economic crisis that the AI companies may cause through their wreckless behavior and more generally all the badness attached to LLMs.

There were many civilizations in the past that eagerly dug their own graves, to great success.

I, too, have this question for the anti-AI people.

What is the game plan? Use an OS version older than 2023? Stop using tech?

Some people have a hard time admitting a that a few GPUs can outperform them.

I was one of those people. Weren't we all?

They would say that it occurs at the behest of the Linux Foundation and get flagged.

Move to OpenBSD or even more not "AI", NetBSD :)

“Anti-AI” is anyone who reads code nowadays apparently so it’s about as relevant as if an IDE was used to edit the source code.

There's always GNU Hurd and Emacs...

First you'd have to define what an anti-AI person is. I'm quite bearish on AI, still use it myself, and I say "big whoop." Is this supposed to be some resounding, decisive shot in the pro-AI, anti-AI war?

Fork all of them, work on those manually and compare in a few years. It'll be like mining Bitcoin before you know if it'll take off. If it doesn't, waste of time, if it does, they'll come begging asking you to make machine go again :P

Like linux is some bastion of security or something... I'm everyday more convinced that the reason why linux was let to dominate the server side with no contestation was so that the USA spy network could be done without compromising american companies. This is just the follow up of the same plan.

Linus's policy on patch acceptance covers the LLM problem: it must still be audited by a maintainer before acceptance (and thus, actually be decent code), but also, because of LLMs, be significantly produced by a human, as machine written code cannot be Copyrighted, thus, cannot be Open Source, and thus, cannot be in the kernel because it isn't open source.

Nobody is really against LLMs producing, for example, exploits for novel security bugs to assist security researchers in patching those bugs. The exploit itself does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source. Nor is anybody against LLMs accelerating debugging, and helping find the location and root cause of the bug; again, that is not producing the end product code, thus does not need to be Copyrightable nor Open Source.

I recently attended an academic computer science conference. Several people I have looked up to my entire life were there, which also gives you an idea of their age (I am 40). They're all using AI. They are not mindless boosters about it, but clearly find it a useful tool in the toolbox.

He didn't refuse to add C++ to the kernel because he is "old school". He had a list of valid criticisms. Your comment makes it sound like his refusal to use C++ was ideology-driven and not technically-sound, and that therefore he is vulnerable to making other not technically-sound decisions such as a complete refusal to use AI.

I would guess Linus has reviewed more code than anyone else in the world, so in that sense I'm not that surprised.

I also don't think the C++ thing was out of a stubbornness for the old way of doing things, but had concrete reasons to reject it. I guess it was a little of both maybe 20 years ago.

But there's Rust in the kernel now too.

Stephen Wolfram also looks favorable to using AI in programming and he has been programming a lot. I guess the context of how these tool are used is the important part here.

I am not surprised - the general pattern with Torvalds seems to be that he's maximally pragmatic. His problems with say Nvidia drivers aren't the fact that they're proprietary, it's that they are difficult to interface with the kernel. I have a strong impression that what matters to Linus is software that works well, so he cares a lot about the quality of the kernel and ideally wants other software to be similarly reliable.

If he judges that Claude does the best job, it'd be very much like him to use Claude. It would be unlike him to use an open program if he considers it inferior.

Because the code complexity/quality claude vs open-models can currently write is day and night. I like open-source too, but it's just not there yet.

Did you consider he would have thoroughly evaluated the top contenders objectively and gone with the one producing the best results? Honestly I wouldn't expect anything else.

Srsly

Don't know why you're getting hammered here. There's a clear skill factor in piloting LLMs.

Linus (and any other human engineer that isn't a genuine super genius) cannot conceivably contribute anything to an LLM. It's the equivalent of a chess amateur spinning up the latest Stockfish on a beefy workstation and trying to find mistakes in it's reasoning.

> therefore anyone can

_Absolutely_ anyone can. If you want proof of this just download the latest kernel tree and ask Claude to write a new module for you (whether it's a driver, a new syscall, or anything really) and see how far you get. Within an hour (sometimes less) you'll have a perfectly working kernel component.

For some combinations of people this is indeed true imho.