Fuck Linus.
Another article about my fav traitor 😍
JK Rowling expresses her opinion on transgender women and receives some pushback - Rowling responds to that by going all out in making her being a TERF her entire personality.
Linus Torvalds goes on Linus Tech Tip and when ask for his opinion on AI, states that it’s coming anyway so we better get used to it - receives some pushback and is now rapidly becoming the guy who makes using AI his entire personality.
I fail to see how this has anything to do with the Harry Potter lady or the YouTube tech guy.
Oh, the irony here. In truth, it is your kind that make AI hate their entire personality. AI really lives rent-free in your heads. To all us normal people, it’s simply just another tool.
Do people also make it their personality to “worship the sphere Earth theory”?
I mean, the AI hate is unfortunately really justified, for so many reasons. And I say this as someone who appreciates how useful LLMs are at processing language, especially those of the programming variety.
There’s the whole billionaire techno fascism trying to use AI as a tool to further enslave us. Or those same people stealing people’s work illegally and profiting off of it. The entire consumer tech market being destroyed. The environment. The tax breaks and subsidizing small communities pay to prop up data centers. Those same communities paying more for utilities, while they still CAN afford them. Brain atrophy. The issues the education failing to keep up. Misinformation. Fraud. The list goes on, so so many terrible things.
But yeah, for people who already understand how programming works, it can definitely help save time and effort.
Does the cost outweigh the benefits?
Does the cost outweigh the benefits?
No.
Its time to fork Linux
I’m sure Stallman would welcome your contributions to GNU Hurd kernel if you wanted to go that direction.
“This is a BIG merge window,” he wrote in his weekly state of the kernel update, as it contains almost 20,000 commits compared to the usual ~15,000 that developers submit for a new cut of the kernel.
Great to see so much momentum!
Lawyer-turned-software-developer reporting in! (American, to be clear…)
My concern with AI generated code has to do with software licensing. Mainly…. What is the license of AI generated code??? What if it regurgitates entire sections of proprietary code? Unless I’ve totally missed some legal/tech news, these questions are FAR from settled.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills sometimes, but that seems like something the Linux kernel community should be at least mildly curious about….
Look, to be fair, maybe they are! I don’t follow the kernel mailing list; I don’t know what they talk about. I’m just a humble backend developer/infrastructure guy.
But I know it worries me… personally, I mostly use LLMs in my own work via asking questions about code I’ve already written. Then I look at suggestions it’s made, or potential issues it points out, and decide what to do accordingly. But that’s just me!
Oh no! Not our beloved corporate-owned proprietary intellectual property! Won’t somebody think of the sacred copyright system, bestowed upon us by God? /s
Sorry, but it sounds like you’re saying that AI is a threat to tech Capitalism, and that this is a bad thing somehow.
I’m more miffed about GPL or copyleft code going to proprietary software and then being profited from without any attribution. It’s a poison pill.
Yes! This concern absolutely cuts both ways.
Yeah, that is a pretty shitty consequence, but it’s nothing new or different from the strandard clean room techniques the industry has been using for decades.
I mean it’s clean room but without even having to pay highly skilled engineers to do all the labour. It’s pretty catastrophic to the field.
Yeah, fair enough.
If it regurgitates proprietary code the model should not have had access to for training data… well…
That street goes both ways, there’s more GPLed code in the training corpus than there is leaked proprietary code.
Unironically a AI’s biggest win. Absolutely fair criticism on art and weak imitations of human creativity, but code is just math with syntactic sugar. “Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time. What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation? What if printers just worked? What if you could put adblockers on any device? What if every online game could be self hosted and modded? AI is (for the moment) giving an approximation of that timeline and I’m here for it.
You could say the same about patents for physical inventions. But there are legitimate reasons for patents to exist.
I often wonder how much better and more accessible software would be if everyone wasn’t reinventing nearly every wheel all the time.
Well… we have open source for a while, and people are still reinventing the wheel every time. There’s always the new chat protocol that claims to be the best, but works almost the same as all others, there’s always reimplementations of some software in another language just because the developers don’t like the original language. There are forks of software due to ideological divergence. There are reimplementations of famous software just for fun. There’s a lot of other cases, all reinventing of the wheel, all the time.
It’s arguably not always a bad thing for people to reinvent the wheel, but anyway, I see it getting MUCH worse with ai. People are already going to chatbots asking to implement things before even searching for work already done on that, and we’re going to end with milions of businesses and individuals with reinvented wheels everywhere, instead of everyone using a shared codebase. If nothing happens in the near future, I see things getting less compatible with each other due to no standards in implementations
Just playing devil’s advocate here; do you think an architect should not be able to own the blueprints they’ve produced?
To a slightly broader point, do you not agree with the notion that technical solutions can have creative implementations, and that that can be a form of artistry?
I don’t know much about architecture, but a building is generally bespoke. It’s made to a specific physical location and has to work in its surroundings and be built to local regulations. From that viewpoint I can’t really judge how much value the blueprint actually has and therefore if it matters who “owns” the IP. The architect has done real legwork to bring that specific building to life and anyone else would need to redo much of it to copy the result.
Any human effort can be a creative artistic expression. You could mass produce a jacket or a hand-stitch an equivalent jacket and both will be warm. You could code a subtle and elegant CMS for a website or use some pre-built solution, both will deliver the same content. The difference is, people will laugh you out of the room for trying to patent your home stitching technique but nod and clap when you put a license on your code.
“code is just math with syntactic sugar”
Wow!
Tell me you don’t write code wihout telling me you don’t write code.
I do write code. Code only exists as a high level abstraction that codifies logic and allows us to talk about the function of the silicone without getting bogged down in details. The utility of code depends entirely on the context of the people looking at it (eg. different code works better for a small shop of experienced devs vs a large scale enterprise vs a FOSS project).
I can show you a
forloop and talk in simple English about what it’s doing or write a formal proof showing that it meets the problem parameters. I could show you the compiled ASM and we would struggle to have the same conversation even with the exact same functionality. Same math, different syntactic sugar.The process of building software is where humans will always be needed (identify the human meat space problems, define features, manage risk and cost, set delivery expectations, etc). The specifics of how we create the code within that process isn’t as crucial.
I’m incredibly against the big LLM SaaS providers and material waste besides. Anyway I don’t have a crystal ball and I’m highly sceptical that this technology will work out for average people, but it sure would be interesting if it somehow lead to less corporate control and cultural enclosure rather than how it seems to be going right now.
You believe people using systems created by big corps in giant datacenters, that depend almost exclusively on nvidia gpus to run will lead to less corporate control? I’m highly skeptical
That’s exactly what I said—that I’m highly sceptical.
It would basically have to backfire on all their plans and all the trillions of dollars they’re spending.
It would be very surprising. I would be so surprised.
I probably misread it, don’t mind me
Sorry we’re enemies now. We have to fight anytime we’re in the same thread. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.
But what about the poor corporations making money off those games that already fired all the devs that made it after overworking them?
What if every phone could copy-paste an Airdrop implementation?
That’s apple’s decision, one of many to force their users to only get their devices, similarly not being able to host your own game servers benefits the publishers/ devs. (Edit for clarity: by this I mean that this state of things isn’t caused by unavailability of open source solutions but rather by corporate greed.)
“Owning” algorithms and hiding implementations is such an absurd concept.
Not any different from protecting one’s art creations. You spend a bunch of time learning how to code and are doing it for a living so you don’t want others/ competition to take it and sell as their own. Not sure what’s hard to understand.
Most programmers earn a wage, not the full value of their labor.
That’s true of course. And it’s true for a lot of people in other areas as well. In vacuum I’m all for open source software, in fact I would like it a lot if everything was open. But reality is that as a developer in a smaller software company we’d be out of our jobs immediately as other, larger companies would take everything that’s worth taking and use their larger budgets to out advertise their copy.
Software licensing is dead, you should really catch up because what are even talking about.
apparently many people’s stance on ai is “ai is bad unless my idol uses it”. there is not intellectual discipline, suddenly they are willing to ignore all the other problems with ai: jod lose, excessive energy use, training on stolen data, preying on vulnerable people, exacerbate wealth inequality and concentration of power. and let’s not forget the ones that apply specifically to Linus: diskilling and ai psychosis.
“b-but linus reviews his code!” 🤦
Nice strawman.
Are you sure you’re not mixing up different people with different opinions with opinion changes of some people?
This Lemmy guy is horribly inconsistent.
Linus Torvalds has fucking lost it.
Going from chewing out someone for committing dumb AI code to becoming an AI techbro himself. How the mighty have fallen.
It’s healthy to change mind in light of new evidence. AI has improved since GPT 3 days - in particular in coding tasks.
LLMs have proven time and time again to be a cognitohazard. It just sucks people in like a drug.
And conversely, many people seem to have a “the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus” stance.
Sometimes you’re not even allowed to even suggest that AI might be a thing that exists
It is. Read the top comment. It is bad if you stop assessing it only in vacuum of its existence. It’s like in physics when you ignore all other forces to make simple calculations
Many people on Lemmy will start to crash out the moment you suggest AI is anything other than pure evil
Because that’s what it is.
It’s not the algorithms people oppose, it’s the way they are trained within a capitalist system (infringement of many copyrights without compensation), they way they are being marketed as a living mind that can basically befriend us and take a mental load off of us (they can’t and it’s problematic to humans who allow them to try), and they way they’re being used an excuse to buy up the wntire world’s capacity for computing so that rich tech oligarchs can force us all onto the cloud services for all computing in the future.
I think if at the very least they weren’t bulldozing people’a home and poisoning their drinking water in order to forever capture all technology and then rent it back to us we might have a more favorable view of the possibilities, but so far Big Tech has done almost nothing but try to find ways to make individuals and enterprise addicted to their Mechanical Turk in order to take advantage of us.
Please tell me about how you were poisoned.
Straw man
I haven’t been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it’s gradually getting a bit better here. There’s still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I’ve been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it’s just naturally getting more diverse.
And these communities should be banned.
Ah yes, only approved subjects may have communities and be discussed on the Fediverse.
Yeah, because fascist aren’t welcome here, and AI = fascism.
I just consider the weight of their argument and ignore the votes. We have basically no defense against sock puppet alt accounts, some of which could be LLMs.
As long as nobody is being like a personalized salesman of AI and getting it in everyone’s face, I think it’s okay. I still find AI as a useful tool. But I also don’t see AI as an everything-solve-all kind of tool. It has its limits and I’ve seen them by experience.
I mean it’s kind of undoubtedly a miraculous and game changing technology. Anyone who isn’t completely blown away by it doesn’t realize the implications imho
The problem about AI right now is multi-pronged.
But the main key problems are;
It’s costing people’s jobs. In a way, this is of no surprise because before AI, there were shitty bosses and CEOs. They were always there and they will always find any excuse, if any, to release you from your job. AI only merely accelerated it.
Data Centers/AI Plants take too much water. I like how people conveniently forget today, how much water companies like Coca-Cola and Nestle actually take while turning around, bottling said water, just to sell it back to you. And if anyone has watched How It’s Made, you can find arguments everywhere in that series, about how much resources are taken to make everything we use.
My point is, is a lot of arguments that people bring up against AI, there’s such a wedge of counter-arguments in them that negate the problem of AI itself. It’s just demonized because people are disappointed that AI isn’t magically fixing roads and potholes, I guess, I don’t know. Society doesn’t know what they truly want anymore out of anything, it’s just the feeling in the moment of the current ‘I want said thing’ dominates their mindsets.
But the actual problem with AI shocks no one - shitty CEOs.
Here’s mine: the world would be a much, much better place if LLMs did not exist. Also, it would be stupid–today–to not use LLMs to find flaws in the Linux kernel. The only other option is to get your machines compromised.
Pretty much. It‘s a really shitty situation and it would be better if the world decided to not use them and sanction them. A bit like nuclear weapons that are also far more effective than alternatives but too destruktive to seriously consider. For now, many developers are doomed to use LLMs for security reasons. Because LLMs are not just a tool. They are an entire production line at the grasp of your hand. Just using complex architecture to obscure risks doesn‘t cut it anymore.
I mean you know about tactical nukes and uranium ammunition
I’m not a huge fan of AI but comparing them to nukes is wild
I like to compare them to meth. Sends velocity through the roof…with just a few minor drawbacks… 😅
The environmental implications of the data centers fuelling the LLMs will undoubtedly end more lives than nuclear weapons ever have
You got a reference for that?
Pretty extreme, but okay.
Will you be factoring in the lives that get saved by various AI-assisted medical and other technological advances that are in the pipe as well? Or are you only considering negatives?
Using LLMs for security auditing? Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes…
The only other option is to use something inconvenient like OpenBSD, constantly audited for three decades, LLMs could find only very few obscure bugs.
Ok, but people are mad that LLM-assisted code, tons of it, is now getting into the kernel and Linus is no longer slamming the brakes…
I also think this is a bad idea unless we want less stability in the kernel. I’ve seen Torvalds call people all kinds of names for trying to add things to the kernel that he feels are subpar. He’s legendary for it. So I’d probably trust him more than any human alive to avoid slop.
But I also don’t think he has the power to effectively defend against it. Some badness will get through.
As always, we’ll choose the least-crappy OS to run.
deleted by creator
OpenBSD, constantly audited for three decades
Oh buddy… Did you not hear that not only did OpenBSD start using AI for audits but that it actually found a handful of serious issues that decades of human audits have missed?
There is a difference between an AI doing a security review (which they have become quite accomplished) and generating code that gets committed into the codebase.
Again, how does one verify that the code it has generated isn’t some verbatim chunk of copyrighted code that it happened to be trained on, and it turned out to be the best fit? There’s no guarantee that a model will not do this, even if instructed.
Also, content generated by AI models has already been deemed uncopyrightable, and this includes code. So are some larrtsmof the Linux kernel now able to be copied freely without GPL restrictions? How can you license code or executables compiled from said code if you do not hold the copyright on it?
There is a difference between an AI doing a security review (which they have become quite accomplished) and generating code that gets committed into the codebase.
I guess I should’ve quoted the whole part, as my primary point was to show that not only did AI spot niche, obscure bugs… it spotted niche, obscure bugs that HUMANS couldn’t.
Again, how does one verify that the code it has generated isn’t some verbatim chunk of copyrighted code that it happened to be trained on, and it turned out to be the best fit? There’s no guarantee that a model will not do this, even if instructed.
And what if someone has a genius idea and comes up with a piece of code, completely on their own, and it turns out to be the exact same, verbatim, character by character matching as a copyrighted piece of code?
What if AI does this? What if the model wasn’t even trained on that piece of code, but, by sheer coincidence, it puts together the same solution because it’s the most obvious and best option?
Copyright and licensing in code is already a weird topic because mechanical problems often have the same solution. There’s a finite (and in fact, usually very low) number of ways you can run the same algorithm or represent the same data. Say you have to implement a key-value storage system. No requirements on it needing to support millions of entries, historical caching, snapshotting, anything, expectations are simple: a command to add an entry (and update the value assigned to the key, if the key already exists), a command to delete an entry, and a command to get the number of stored items. Wanna bet that if you give this task to 1000 developers of the same language, a large majority will write nearly the same code? Hell, if you don’t consider inconsequential things like variable/field/property/function naming, there’s good chance 90%+ of them will write the same thing. Woukd that be plagiarism though? Would copyright apply?
On the other hand if you were to write and release a book that is verbatim the same as another, famous book, with the only difference being the names of characters and places… Well I guess you can see where I’m going with this.
Also, content generated by AI models has already been deemed uncopyrightable, and this includes code. So are some larrtsmof the Linux kernel now able to be copied freely without GPL restrictions? How can you license code or executables compiled from said code if you do not hold the copyright on it?
You could already copy small enough parts of the Linux kernel without needing to cover yours in GPL. Trivial things for example. Say you have a driver that talks to sone niche hardware in a specific data packet format. Can you copy/recreate that? Or a trivial solution like the aforementioned cache. GPL doesn’t mean you can’t copy a single line of code without your codebase becoming GPL too.
Oh btw that copyright claim is much weaker than you’d think. It didn’t specify the level of human involvement for example. Also, given the base code is GPL and human written, and GPL applies to all derivative works, it still applies.
The comment you replied to had absolutely zero to say about licensing and rights issues, yet your entire reply is only about that.
You lost?
Not everything needs to be about winning or losing
Pretty sure that was “lost” as in, “needing a map.” Not everything needs to be about winning or losing.
I mean 5 years ago the world was shit with no llms so no ?
5 years ago things were bad, therefore there’s no way LLMs can be bad. Is that the argument?
LLMs are bad but things would have been bad differently without them anyway.
The world was bad, it will be worse thanks to LLM. Both things can (and IMO, are) be true at the same time.
correct
Apart from the de skilling and psychosis thing. That’s up to you
I’ve agreed with Linus on a lot of things over the years. This is not one of them.
But I hear what you’re saying, and we’re not talking about me.
Nope.
The crucial fact here is: like it or not, Linus decides what Linux is. As we’ve done for 30+ years, we decide whether we accept his project as-is. Otherwise, we move on.
It doesn’t get more complicated.
No one decides what linux is. Linux is literally open source. You have no idea what open source means if you think open source means one person owns Linux.
Just because it’s open source it doesn’t mean there’s not a person or group of people deciding what happens to the ‘main’/‘upstream’ version of it.
Sure you can fork it, and remove all AI contributions, but who will use your fork?
When people say “the Linux kernel”, they mean the version maintained by Linus Torvalds. They might mean a fork for a specific SoC or manufacturer or distro, but those are all just the Linux Kernel maintained by Linus Torvalds plus a few patch sets. There’s no considerable divergence.
Linus’ stance was initially “no AI written code”. And he does have final say in what goes into the repo he maintains. Now he’s changed that tune, he allows AI written code, and no matter how many forks you make to strip it out… what matters is Linus’ upstream.
Sure you can fork it, and remove all AI contributions, but who will use your fork?
This actually should be done. Let there be options. But the human fork won’t magically return you to the previous world of no-AI. AI will still audit it and find vulnerabilities humans can’t. Time will tell which version prevails, but I think at best the human fork will have only a niche use. Perhaps in education.
Linus has decided what Linux is & isn’t since forever. It has his fucking name on it for a reason. Linus decided Linux means AI code so Linux has AI code now. No way around it. We can only pick until a specific version of the kernel when no LLM was used but after that the future Linux Kernelf will forever have LLM code in them.
No distro is going to stop using new kernels, everyone downstream is essentially powerless on this decision. The Linux Foundation is HUGE compared to 90% of the distro’s workforce (volunteers). Only IBM & Canonical surpass it & they are NOT going to maintain the next Linux fork for the next 30 years.
Likuc maens AI code now and for the foreseeable future. To my demise.
Your read on that was very different than mine.
Linus controls Linux. Anyone who disagrees with how he runs it is free to fork it because the source is open.
But good luck maintaining a Linux kernel fork for any length of time unless you’ve got lots of contributors lined up and a solid maintenance structure ready to deploy. It worked with LibreOffice and OpenJDK, but it’s failed with far more projects than it’s succeeded with.
I see the “unless my idol uses it / unless someone good uses it” as a deeply human thing. For me it’s the other side of the coin from not harming oneself in discussion, even if a valid point was brought up.
Few great people do that.
It’s like there’s nuance that deserves to be acknowledged or something. Weird.
I don’t like him and I don’t like AI.
Have you seen this? https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ai-free-foss-alternatives
Fucking love that they listed pretty much every single programming language that is used today, leaving only esoteric shit.
On a personal level I get it… but as a professional, good fucking luck trying to find a job without using any of those languages, not to mention the plethora tools.
I’m rather glad I’ve gotten out of tech.
I expect AI is going to come for every role there is and turn it into being a prompt monkey.
However, I can always turn a wrench!
Ai isn’t going away… It’s like a nuclear arms race. The government won’t let it go away… They need it and will do anything locally and globally to solidify ai (and digitizing life) as the modern foundation of governing.
If people don’t want ai, they should be completely boycotting their nations. Votes don’t reach this level of need. “Need” as in the government would even sacrifices its own people to reach the goal. For all we know it’s the whole reason America had trump as president… So they could distract and implement the social and psychological strategy of easing into the upcoming modern foundation.
It’s not just “the government won’t let it go away.” Users won’t let it go away.
I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I’d keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.
I am sure out of all projects Linux has the expertise and guardrails to ensure LLM generated code works as expected
Exactly! It’s a tool that creates slop with an untrained hand. With a trained professional hand who reviews the work it’s just a helper.
Huzzah! Saurman it’s finally using the seeing stone! He’s such a wise old wizard. He’ll be able to see the future and help us choose the right path. This could never go wrong or cause any ethics issue or anything!
And yet the trained professional Linus recently PRed honestly garbage. Your argument is invalid.
Which pr do you mean?
The one from last month, when he made a pr (well, technically not a pr but you know what I mean) with race condition he missed in self review, and then when someone spotted that he fucked off on vacation and dumped it onto someone to fix.
Linus is no longer a good programmer (he even says so), but still disappointing.
Until Claude can diagnose and treat Kent Overstreet for whatever neurospicy killed bcachefs, I will never trust it blindly. It just does things faster. Sometimes it breaks things faster, other times is finds things ready to be broken faster.
“model” means “mode”, not LLM here:
He therefore hopes that the unusually large number of commits “is a sign that the AI fixes are becoming more part of the ‘normal development’ than a flood of fixes that go into the whole stabilization phase."
“I think that’s a much healthier model,” he added, before hedging with the observation that “people are expecting 7.4 to be the next LTS [long-term support] release, which is another independent reason why some releases tend larger than others.”
they should change the name to LinAIux
I like the spirit, but this is a pretty hamfisted pun. Doesn’t Lainux make more sense?
Unfortunately they maintain the main branch so we can only rename the forks. P.S. plz at me if we hear about an anti-AI Kernel Fork because I fully intend to install it myself.
Will do
Is he okay? He looks so frail
Its probably mostly because he’s in his 50s and does a desk job for a career.
56!
I don’t know why i thought he was from an older generation. He’s from gen x.Probably because you don’t expect a 22 year old to build a kernel and then maintain it for 34 years.
I’d guess Ozempic, most of the folks my age that take it get frail looking for a while.
ActionRetro has the same look right now I guess they could be sick but…
“Don’t you think he looks tired?”
as long as it doesn’t start pretending to be my friend 🐙
For anybody confuse about why Torvalds is suddenly such a slopper it’s because AI companies pumped millions into the Linux Foundation which gives him a paycheck.
what makes what the article describes slop?
Way too many people just equate any form of LLM/agentic/AI with pure slop.
As a tech lead who has to review a lot of code: those who did shit without LLM do shit with it. Those who are good without, are good with it.
I’ve found that the quality of code produced by my team has dropped significantly since my org pushed everyone to use LLMs. “Let me throw an agent at it” usually means “here’s another headache of a PR for me to review.” Engineers with decades of experience are writing such utter fucking crap now, and it doesn’t matter how many docs I write for their fuckass agents to ingest, the quality doesn’t seem to be getting better. They can make their agent loop on it for functionality/bug and hallucination squashing, but that usually just means I get a bloated fucking mess to review. It’s miserable and it makes me want to go shovel actual hog shit.
Sincerely,
a very sad and tired senior dev who used to enjoy his job
I’m trying to adjust expectations. You aren’t getting my approval unless you can explain why each part is there. Your poor planning is not my emergency. K.I.S.S. still applies.
Admittedly, this is easier to say as a senior whose opinion is respected within the company.
If they push shit, I push back. It’s a tool they can use, not an excuse. Creating rules for the agent is fine, but that’s only a soft guardrail.
We don’t have a mandate to use LLMs, if things are worse with them then we won’t use them.
That’s the mindset we started with but things have shifted to what we’re seeing now and people are being forced to use it in many cases.
As a senior dev… AI actually improved the code we wrote in my last job. Mind you the codebase was in a shite position (tons of technical debt, plague-like avoidance of inline comments because “all of that knowledge is on Jira/Notion” except it wasn’t; lots of legacy code, undocumented weird behaviours, everyone was doing their own coding style without regards to the rest of the codebase and so on).
With controlled AI contributions, we’ve managed to:
- refactor large chunks of code where the overall high level logic didn’t need to change, but the underlying tooling did (e.g. lots of UI layers got rewritten from a very early attempt at a standardised MVVM approach to a well defined MVI one, we’ve also managed to eliminate the remaining RxJava/RxKotlin legacy flows to replace them with Coroutines)
- UI layers got refactored in no time because the AI agent was able to convert them appropriately (and even fixed a handful of UI bugs)
- a handful of core monoliths (yes I know… I hated working with them as well, but we never had the chance to properly refactor) got split up into more manageable, vertical-specific domain controllers without breaking
- the elimination of a legacy overarching component that was estimated at 6 months, got reduced to 6 weeks
- unit test coverage skyrocketed because even if the code was hand-written, an agent would provide coverage, based not just on implementation but on intention (and adoption of TDD/BDD finally started spreading).
Meanwhile code quality improved because we’ve had well established patterns and styles defined in the agent instructions, and even the anti-documentation “pragmatists” got shut up when they finally understood that the AI works better if there’s fucking comments to explain what’s going on
What you’ve done is allowed an unethical and incompetent machine create an unmaintainable technical debt which will destroy the future of the codebase or the company, because you were all lazy.
It sounds more like you didn’t even read his comment and are just rabidly spewing anti-AI talking points instead of participating in the discussion.
He let AI refactor his entire codebase because the team didn’t understand each other’s techniques/approach and nobody had any time or knowledge to do the work themselves. They literally did not understand how it worked so they asked the chatbot to redo it and now they still don’t understand it but it appears to them as if it was improved.
What did you read?
As they usually do.
Chill out dude
Please shut the fuck up if you have no inkling about what you’re talking about.
On the one hand that would be nice, but on the other hand it would result in basically no content on social media any more.
Actually, no, I’m on board with this.
Eat my ass slopper
Being “
good with it” doesn’t negate the overwhelming harms it causes. Those harms are part of the slop: environmental slop, work environment slop, societal degradation slop.Didn’t say “good with it”, I said "being good*.
5 years ago the complaint was people copy pasting from stack overflow without care. Those people now push without care.
Oh, sorry for misquoting you. It wanst intentional. I get you now.
We’re harmmaxxing!
Throwing around the word slop just devalues it.
Slop has a meaning and it does NOT equal harm.
The invention of electricity also did a tremendous amount of harm. Should we have also just tried to put it back in its box?
Electricity allows us to perform otherwise impossible logistics, medical care, heating, countless beneficial technologies, and longer operation hours in industry.
Without AI… what? More jobs, cheaper utilities, lower polution? In the future it might be able to lie to you sightly more efficiently while funneling control of industry into the hands of a dozen wealthy elites.
None of that was true when it was first invented, it killed many people caused house fires etc.
We don’t know yet all the uses of AI, but we’re going to find out despite how many people on the fediverse crash out at the mention of AI
When it was first invented it literally brought light to the streets and phased out TORCHES.
Do you understand what a TORCH is?
Is that a fact or just a suspicion? Because I don’t see you providing any sources for that.
Don’t get me wrong I suspect so myself, but I wouldn’t make such a claim without backing it up.“SAN FRANCISCO – March 17, 2026 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced $12.5 million in total grants from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and OpenAI to strengthen the security of the open source software ecosystem. The funding will be managed by Alpha-Omega and the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), trusted security initiatives within the Linux Foundation, to develop long-term, sustainable security solutions that support open source communities worldwide.”
Immediately after this announcement Linus was suddenly a lot less critical of AI.
That is very interesting, thanks for sharing
👍
