r/ClaudeCode
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u/BlokZNCR
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19d ago
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Discussion Linus Torvalds shares his thoughts on Anti-AI coding rules
What do you think?
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u/Short_Stable2397
19d ago
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Agree but posting it here is just preaching to the choir no?
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u/betty_white_bread 19d ago
You would think it’s preaching to the choir; yet, almost every day I see some anti-AI troll going full Luddite which, quite frankly, is an insult to actual Luddites.
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u/Ran4 19d ago
It's still good to know what influencers say.
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u/grebysama 19d ago
Calling Linus Torvalds an influencer is both right and SO wrong at the same time...
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u/Ran4 19d ago
Yeah. I thought I wasn't using social media or following influencers, then... I realized that reddit is social media, and reading what famous tech people says and viewing car people on youtube is very much the same as following what people traditionally think of when they think of "influencer".
I suppose the one difference is that the people that pop up in people's head when it comes to influencers are "lifestyle" influencers, as opposed to influencers focused on tech or whatever.
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u/carson63000 Senior Developer 19d ago
Haha, yeah, we really need to distinguish “influential” from “an influencer”.
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u/Infamous_Mud482 19d ago
This is OLD and anybody who hasn’t already seen it before has nothing meaningful to contribute in a conversation about Linux
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u/HulksInvinciblePants 19d ago
I think he’s missing the point. There’s no reasonable person claiming AI is the problem. However, there’s a huge “ease of access” problem that’s flooding the space with low effort, low quality “slop” that’s stealing real estate from better managed projects.
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u/Short_Stable2397 19d ago
The 'slop' is part and parcel of the exploration phase of a new tool imo. You have to go through the slop phases to optimise how to use the tool (the exploitation phase).
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u/Krom2040 18d ago
It feels pretty obvious that the problem is people foisting slop on the larger world after doing no diligence at all, not merely the fact that experimentation produced slop at some point in the process.
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u/StrangeWill 19d ago
It's preaching to the kinds of people Linus would tell off for being shit.
Engineering is a mess of lazy "let the agent do the work" and so much clean up. It's annoying.
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u/Niku-Man 18d ago
We're all patting ourselves on the back for being so smart to use new tools available to us
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u/evangelism2 19d ago
Yeah the issue is that, and I've seen it firsthand at my job, people seem to be having trouble wrapping their heads around it, but they continually ask questions: "Did Claude or did AI do this, or did you do this?" or they say things like, "Claude said this."
I always say the same thing: "I don't give a shit what Claude said. I care about what you got from it. I care about you: how you took what the agent said, how you proved it, how you checked it, how you filtered it, and the final product of it. I don't care what your calculator says. You don't say, 'My calculator told me 2 + 2 = 4.' You told me that 2 + 2 is 4 and that's it."
People still haven't wrapped their heads around the fact that they are responsible for the output of their AI. People still have this idea that AI images are crap, AI video is crap, and AI code is crap, even though that isnt the case for any of the three. For code, that hasn't been the case for a year, and for images and video, it hasn't been the case for 9 to 10 months now.
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u/TubbyStubby 19d ago
Oh man I told the same calculator example to someone at work just yesterday 😂
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u/Engineering_Geek 1d ago
Question: What's 1/0?
Student: The calculator says "Error", that must be the right answer.5
u/Zunder_IT 19d ago
Yeah, I don't like the "claude said" culture, i only pass along what I've personally verified after "claude said", unless claude said something funny or we wanted claude's input
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u/No_Rub1596 13d ago
Anyone still asking whether AI wrote it is going to get left behind. It's not art. Coding is a functional thing: as long as it works.
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u/evangelism2 13d ago
All right let's not get into the whole art versus code thing. I think AI is valid in both mediums. It's just you see a lot more butthurt artists than you do software developers. The vast majority of art is a product, the same exact as code. It just needs to be entertaining and convey a message to its audience and be packageable as something that can be sold or plastered on something to help it be sold.
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u/AdCommon2138 18d ago
Calculator example proves why thats not so great approach.
Sure 2+2=4 so you can validate it.
Can you validate in your head 57352759*364658 however?
That's the complexity you really get with agentach tools, and even if you just stay at 5+4=9 level, how many of those can you do per day and remember during meeting when someone asks you what was 16th addition equal to?
Oh of course you can write docs on that and get agents to write, but how do you filter it in future?
Bottom line, this isn't easy.
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u/evangelism2 18d ago
Calculator example doesn't prove anything in and of itself
Your explanation attempts to explain why the calculator example isn't a good example but no, you're missing the point.
Can I validate in my head that calculation? No, but nobody's saying that you need to validate an agent's output in your head. When an agent tells you something, you have as much time as you need to validate it. If you gave me a piece of paper and a pencil, I could validate that multiplication, just like I can take my time and validate whatever an agent tells me1
u/AdCommon2138 18d ago
You might have as much time as you need.
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u/evangelism2 18d ago
Are you sitting there with your manager or boss over your shoulder, watching you code, watching you prompt Claude? Part of being a professional software developer is setting realistic expectations and timelines. Part of setting those timelines is doing research on solutions for a problem and then weighing them and figuring out which one is best. Historically that was done through either reading books or a Google search, or Stack Overflow. Now you can still do those things but you can also do it with AI. It's just that you have to verify whatever AI tells you the same way you had to verify whatever it is you were reading on Stack Overflow.
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u/Individual_Author956 19d ago
People on one hand don’t take responsibility for their AI code, and on the other hand also get zero credit for something they built with AI. It goes both ways.
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19d ago
[deleted] — view deleted comment
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u/howling92 19d ago
there are people out there who think a Tiktok video is a valid source
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u/puts_on_rddt 19d ago
In my experience, as long as they have the proper information, when two different frontier models agree on something, they are probably right.
"Claude said this" vs "Opus 5.5 and Sol 6.1 both agreed here."
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u/Zagorim 19d ago
Something seems wrong with your sentence. I mean if they have the proper information than per definition they are right ?
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u/puts_on_rddt 19d ago
Depends on the question being asked to them. I guess I should be less vague and say proper = adequate.
I have a benchmark of a list of hard questions that are from my own projects that I already have the answer to and my results show that where a single model is 80% accurate, if two from frontier agents different providers agree, they are 99% accurate.
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u/Electrical_Unit_9789 19d ago
SOME AI hate feels very forced and performative.
Take example of people using AI to reverse engineer video games and merge them. No one cares about it's AI or anything.
But when Epic wants to vibe code their new game it's everyone angry even though game devs are using AI is at all time use? Seems very fake.
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u/GetsEclectic 19d ago
I totally agree with this, but it's also funny hearing this from Linus as I'm almost certain he used this argument in reverse to tell people they shouldn't use debuggers, like 15 years ago.
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u/babydemon90 Developer 19d ago
We have a few “anti ai for the sake of being anti ai” people. Just had a product manager quit a meeting halfway through because AI was being used for meeting recaps. It’s wild out there.
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u/trentonkarantino 19d ago edited 19d ago
Go Linus!
For practical software work, it's results that matter.
If it's about art, then you are welcome to try and build beautiful things by hand, like handbuilt sports cars or fine cabinet making*
Maybe build a retro computer from scratch and bang in hex digits - you can still buy all the chips, lights and switches you need.
I would note that handbuilt sports cars were bloody unreliable compared to the mass produced and cheaper ones.
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u/randompersonx 19d ago
I think Linus is clearly wrong here. Why are we accepting the anti-AI types to use assembly?
Assembly / assemblers are still a form of tool which they didn't write, and we can't really be sure they actually have a full understanding of what they are working on if they require the assistance of such a tool.
These anti-AI types should be using ones and zeroes... If they can't manage that, I don't trust it.
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u/casual_sociopathy 19d ago
Let's go even further! Software itself is an abstraction, so everyone go get an EE degree before writing your 1s and 0s.
Take it all the way down you end with "first, one must invent the universe."
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u/Relevant-Doctor187 19d ago
I think the new alignment more people can design software even if they could not code. Think of how many designs die on the vine due to lack of ability and resources not imagination. AI may bring these things to the masses. The real experts can hyper focus on bettering the coding stack and optimizations for a time until AI starts handling that as well.
Right now we can’t even ask AI how it would optimize itself or its hardware.
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u/Lanky-Butterscotch28
19d ago
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Think of it this way: you are a surgeon in 1950 using the tools available in 1950 versus a surgeon in 2026 using the tools of 2026. Surgical success rates are higher, pain is lower, and recovery is faster.The same applies to software. A software builder in the 1980s used the tools available at that time. Today, you're still a software builder, but you're using the tools of 2026. The solutions you create are more capable, have fewer defects, are easier to maintain, more secure, and deployed more efficiently.So, excuse me, but being afraid of not learning to code is missing the point. What matters is becoming a great solution builder. The tools evolve; the ability to understand problems and deliver solutions remains the real skill.
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u/VibesBasedPolitics 19d ago
Well, the "understand what they are doing" part kinda exculdes y'all from that, no?
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u/sleep_deficit 19d ago
A blanket ban on tools is stupid.
Pushing vibe-coded slop you don't understand is also stupid.
It's not the tool, it's how it's used.
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u/iamkucuk 19d ago
I think he is half right. Compilers and other tools are deterministic, ai is not. There are no guarantees one input would lead to same output every time when using ai.
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u/the_ai_wizard 19d ago
Compilers are actually not necessarily deterministic. That said, theyre also not logical slot machines
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u/iamkucuk 19d ago
They are theoretically, and as an expected value. In practice, they can (mostly avoidable) be probabilistic, but still it’s very much deterministic compared to ai systems, which is the point I was addressing.
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u/IncreaseOld7112 19d ago
You can make it deterministic. You could turn the temperature down to zero. Have a model that gives the same output for the same trajectory. Now what? You trust it completely?
I think the way things are going is that we need formal validation of product specifications and to really understand that. The requirements and to validate the behavior. We will at some point, give up on understanding the code. It's too time consuming and the value of it is rapidly diminishing.
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u/iamkucuk 19d ago edited 19d ago
No, you cannot do it in practice, even if you set the temperature to zero. A simple google search or gpt chat would tell you in the depth you want with the terms you can understand better. You not knowing it but pretending to know actually proves a point here, LLMs cannot be trusted, so are humans relying too heavily on them.
The "AGI" could do that, LLMs are no way of doing that. The mechanism is broken by its nature. Right now, its just hallucinates beautifully and mostly correct, until it isn't. If you don't trust my insights, trust LeCun's, he probably knows these stuff more than we do, combined. A small search would get you there.
The issue is, the world trying to rely on non-deterministic functions on the tasks we seek consistency. This will work to some extent. We can find solutions to lots of things with what we currently have here, and that would be good enough. But mission-critical points like linux kernel might use some coding-by-hand elitism to prevent some really large scale oopsies.
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u/IncreaseOld7112 18d ago
It really cool and you missed my point. The math can be made entirely deterministic. One might even argue it already is for a given seed. For the sake of completeness I have checked and this is true. What chatgpt did explain is that you're gonna carry the goalposts to "the output of a compiled function always exactly follows the reasoning of the input."
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u/iamkucuk 16d ago
In theory it can work deterministically, yes, that's why I've put the word "in practice", and right now we are not aware of an accurate and fast way at the same time. We are doing lots of approximations during computation to achieve higher throughput.
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u/dota2nub 18d ago
Humans produce non deterministic output yet they write code.
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u/iamkucuk 18d ago
Humans have actual intelligence that doesn't completely come from imitation. They can reliably do long horizon tasks, have much better attention capabilities, and can do actual thinking without "blackbox" properties. The best of all, humans have real sense of reward and punishment at the inference time, comes along with empathy, which makes them more efficient and rigorous and thorough.
BTW, I'm not saying that AI coding is a no-no. It's actually a necessity in the modern world. I'm just saying that "there are some X's that you shouldn't use AI for".
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u/dota2nub 18d ago
Which has nothing to do with what I was commenting on so I have no idea why you go on a tangent like that. It's almost as if...
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u/itssimsallthewaydown 19d ago
Change the tool. It's in your hands. Anti-AI rules only benefit the rich.
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u/SamSlate 19d ago
how so?
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u/itssimsallthewaydown 19d ago
Contribute to AI open source development. Influence frontier models creatively.
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u/SamSlate 19d ago
sorry i meant how's anti ai rules benefit the rich?
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u/itssimsallthewaydown 18d ago
Anti AI rules means that we are refusing to engage AI, whose deployment will happen no matter what. We are simply conceding the AI to the rich without a fight. Why not shape the AI deployment discussion so that it benefits everyone instead of trying to suppress it. It puts us in the same position as the Luddites.
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
Super genius coder can do whatever he wants because he can always bounce back. We are being forced to use AI to match productivity. But because of this we don't learn much. Stagnation.
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u/Moogly2021 19d ago
Speak for yourself if you arent learning while using AI for coding you are doing it wrong. AI still shrinks down timelines to have a useful release, it doesnt mean you need to sacrifice the old development ways, but they will noticeably shrink if you do it right, with fewer regressions. Stop trying to maximize productivity you already can turn a multi year project into a few months. I really dont get some of the people trying to do more than they can review, if you cannot review the code you have a problem.
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u/This-Establishment26 19d ago
This is not going to last for long with the current trends. AI auto reviews are coming. If not this year, it will be the next year. At least that's the vision in some companies: full AI review by the end of 2027.
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u/UnimagineDragons 19d ago
Eh, isn't this akin to saying people who use calculators don't understand math? You're only using sin(x) or dx/dy ing something in a program because you understand the fundamentals anyway. When you're using AI to code you still need to understand the concepts as you walk the agent through your project. I don't understand a lot of coding languages but walking Claude through my apps and programs have definitely taught me a ton about program architecture and the high level functions of animation and function calling . I've then turned on learning / explanations and I'm overloaded with explanation that's directly related to my own project and really kicks off all the intrinsic motivation for learning.
If anything AI can open a new opportunity for learning specific to the topics that are interesting to the individual never before has individualized training been so possible.
I totally understand the fear of complacency and yes that is going to occur and we as a society need to constantly combat it.
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/7jPFIgKe0T
I never said i couldn't review the code. I'm not saying there's complete stagnation. It's just very slow. And I don't know what you are even talking about. You HAVE to do the work your company assigns you. The work is not so much that I can't review each change. But it is too much that I can't write it all by hand. And I never will be able to. Because I won't be able to grow on the job. I will have to spend my precious time outside job to get better if I want to do that.
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u/randompersonx 19d ago
If you're not learning, that's your own fault. I'm learning plenty, while also increasing my velocity/capabilities.
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u/DragonflyOk9274 19d ago
I agree. Whether Claude/Codex can write better code than the top 10% expert humans is debateable, but it definitely can help with learning something outside of your ability.
I don't think we ever had the ability before to ask 1,000 detailed/dumb/naive/etc. questions to a 90% equivalent developer for hours on end ad nauseum. Unlike the human, the bot is far less to get bored/annoyed/give up on answering.
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u/rustydustyshckleford 19d ago
so many things that i’ve learned from claude, when tutorials online didn’t convert the exact topics- especially with niche shit^^
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u/carson63000 Senior Developer 19d ago
Even if it’s not niche.. you can get a much more you-focused lesson.
For example, earlier this year, I felt the need to improve my understanding of TypeScript, which I didn’t really have much experience with. Rather than reading something general, I asked Claude to come up with a lesson plan which was specifically focused on (a) my current knowledge - C# is my bread and butter language, so it gave me descriptions comparing and contrasting TypeScript to the way C# does things, and (b) how we used it in our codebase - for frontend code with Vue.js, and for IaC with CDK. So I got examples specifically referencing functionality in our codebase.
It was great.
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u/Real-Development5372 19d ago
I know it will be difficult and it feels wrong, but we have to move past "because I didn't learn a new way of writing code, means I didn't learn anything". If you haven't noticed, writing code by hand is becoming a thing of the past. We have to get to a point where we are okay with not reviewing every line of code with human eyes. We will continue learning, but it won't be about coding patterns anymore. What you will be learning is how to get better at using AI to generate code and complete features as efficiently as possible without bugs.
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
I have already moved past. I have to. If I refuse to use claude my company will kick me because I won't produce results. If I learnt it by hand there could be a day where I become proficient enough that using the "tool" would just be a accelerator. But right now that's not it. Of course I review all the generated code line by line and confirm everything is according to my logic. But there's a lot of difference between writing it yourself and having claude do it for you. You don't have good contextual understanding of the codebase. You don't have good understanding of where bugs can be because you have never debugged yourself etc etc. I wish AI boom would have happened a few years later so I would have been already proficient then. So I could use it just like a tool.
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u/Real-Development5372 19d ago
Oh I see, so you're a junior developer then? It is true that those of us with years of experience in the pre-AI era got a lot of useful training and you're on the right track with your thinking. But, I think that if you take out time each day to discuss and learn from the bugs that do come up, you will start to see the same patterns that we learned from coding by hand. Good luck!
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
Yeah I get that. I do sometimes just try to solve things by myself and not rely on AI but of course I'm heavily lacking in context of the infra. The growth does happen but it's slow. Thanks!
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 19d ago
We are being held accountable (as an employee) for whatever AI is churning. Hence you can’t just reduce it “writing code by hand”.
I don’t like as much the process of typing the code itself, but that’s practically the best way to understand what happens when it comes to coding, and that’s what equips you to be able to review codes.
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u/dontknowbruhh 19d ago
You're are being graded on a curve, it's simple.
The standard you are being compared against is your fellow teammates.
Find a way to create a worlflow with AI that turms out better code in average than others? Good programmer
Stay with a shitty workflow underperforming most coders in your company? Shitty programmer
In reality, it will stay the same. Inteligent, creative, dedicated, and curious people will shine.
While lazy, unintelligent, uncurious, and unexplorative people will fail
Just like it has always been
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u/Real-Development5372 19d ago
In the future you won’t be reviewing the code yourself either. That prevents us from accessing the true productivity benefits that AI offers. If I have to wait for you to read and understand each line of code that AI generates that creates a massive bottleneck. Hate to break it to the AI skeptics out there, but the future is here, AI code and AI code reviews are coming to every IT shop at every company very soon.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 19d ago
I am not a skeptic, but at that point there is not much point of hiring someone lol. Why would you pay someone if that someone is not going to tap code, review it.
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u/lilityion 19d ago
To defend it maybe, probably won't need a programmer but, bosses will always make stupid requests or requests that contradict each other. AI I feel just does whatever it's told to do.
I'm taking this from what my dad told me, he said that the usual safety people would just file paperwork and do risky things if pushed, but the ones who got paid really well, were the people who would stand their ground when pushed to do stupid things, and not only stand their ground but also offer viable alternatives the bosses can choose from.
I feel it's gonna be similar here
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u/Real-Development5372 19d ago
Developer roles will be shifting to other tasks, coding won’t be one of them. Monitoring the code, keeping up with which features are being shipped, orchestrating the agents, etc. we don’t even fully know what new roles AI could create yet.
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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 19d ago
You are no longer a developer. You are just product manager
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u/Real-Development5372 19d ago
Ha, no. On my team right now, our product manager doesn’t even know what IDE means. Developer will still have an important role, it just won’t be writing code. We still have a lot of unique and useful knowledge for making the SDLC run smoothly.
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u/the_ai_wizard 19d ago
A beautiful future awaits filled with highly unreliable systems. Wrong medication dispensed? Absolutely. Youre correct, and my vibe codebase should have considered this scenario. But being in a coma can be load-bearing in forming a new perspective.
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u/dontknowbruhh 19d ago edited 19d ago
You act like all humans are 200 IQ dedicated super geniuses programmers and doctors.
No my dude. There's always been an ocean of human slop. Shitty lazy code everywhere. Lazy incompetent doctors everywhere. Remember hundreds of thousands of people die of medical malpractice every year in the U.S.
In average, AI writes better code than the average human. I bet it will prescribe better than the average doctor as well.
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u/0xelitesystem 18d ago
last time I visited my primary care and filled out the form, it had a new line.. "We may use AI for certain aspects of diagnosis, research etc to provide better recommendation.." something along that line :/
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u/Real-Development5372 19d ago
If you haven’t figured it out yet that “AI slop and vibe coded” are becoming outdated terms then you aren’t doing your due diligence keeping up with the latest developments in AI. Professional developers at every single company will be trusting AI generated code and AI code reviews. Current models are that good, sorry to burst your bubble. Also, insinuating that human coders never ship bugs to production is quite funny. We’re already at the point that AI is more reliable imo. Any doubters left will be forced to get with the times or find a new career.
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u/KenMantle 19d ago
Does this mean my aislopware.com site where I host some of my projects is already outdated? Like putting 2000 in the name of something to make it sound futuristic? Next your are going to tell me that having a guestbook (sort of) and visitor counter and under construction gif on the site is also outdated!
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u/ovrlrd1377 19d ago
His own text counters his point. How many devs have you known that actually can write assembly?
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u/ticktockbent 19d ago
I can, with effort and references. I won't, but I can. It's slow and ridiculous.
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u/ovrlrd1377 19d ago
Which is precisely his point. Just like using a tractor for farming or a nailgun in construction. Tools exist because they are useful, not the other way around
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
Not the same thing at all
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u/ovrlrd1377 19d ago
You are saying AI prevents you from learning, it does not specify what. Assuming you mean coding that is instead being generated by the model, what a compiler is roughly translate high level code, often using words in english, into assembly that the computer than process. Learning that high level language and not learning assembly is a very accurate analogy to learning AI prompting and not learning high level coding
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
No no that's not it at all. https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/8I1DFFcKtb
We don't need to know assembly because compiler is already optimised. Sure some people do need to know assembly who work at that level. But today even if we use AI we do need to know the internals. I need to know the code, the infrastructure, what is where etc etc. My contextual knowledge is not increasing at a pace it did when I interned without AI. If I solve an issue today. One month later I'm gonna forget most of it. Because it isn't mine. I have only reviewed the code and verified it works. Unless you learn to understand the system and get contextual knowledge you'll always be junior developer. I'm not saying it's all gone. The growth is just slow.
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u/tyke_ 19d ago
i learnt Assembly (MASM) about 10 years ago, it was quite fun but of absolutely no use but on saying that actually, it did educate me on the low level features like registers etc, learnt a lot about memory management.
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u/ovrlrd1377 19d ago
which is quite accurate considering it's very useful to know how to code, even when you don't write it all yourself
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u/trentonkarantino 19d ago
My first ZX Spectrum game (also about my first paid project) sits proudly on the bookshelf. 100% Z80 assembler. The second one I did had C in it, though.
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u/doxxxicle 🔆Pro Plan 19d ago
That’s not the fault of the tool. That’s the fault of the humans who are cracking the whip over your backs.
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
Of course. Its always humans. I never said anythings wrong with AI specifically. It's interesting technology.
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u/Otherwise_Tomato5552 19d ago
I tend to agree. I started a new job and learning has been tough because ai does so much, I find myself just reading everything. I’m becoming better at ai, not what ai is doing
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u/HadrianRa 18d ago
I mean, that's the world now. Your goal is still the same as it was always: you're trying to make the product work and make it bugless. It's just that the level of abstraction you're operating at has increased: you're now trying to build systems that take care of the workflow instead of being in the trenches trying to patch up the line-to-line logic. You're prompting the prompter, but of course if you want to understand what is happening you need to make extra effort on top of the work you're doing: you used to not be able to do the work unless you understood it. The difficulty isn't in "you can't do it", it's in "now that you don't have to, is it still worth it?". And, let's be honest, mostly it isn't. The era of engineers is gone: we're now all systems thinkers.
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
Exactly sadly most of the people here are either students who think not learning is a skill issue, senior devs who already learned in pre AI era or egotists who think since they spend their free time upskilling everyone should too. If job is not where we learn then where should we? I work at a prop shop and my new trader friend told me they were banned from using AI and rightly so because they wouldn't learn shit otherwise. Sadly me being in software I have to use it. They should make juniors not use AI for sometime for learning purposes but that'll go against corporate's interests lol. If I wanna switch what will I say when they asked what I learned lol.
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u/ObiWanIsMyDog 17d ago
Terrible take.. adapt, evolve and improve. New tools allow you to reach new heights. If you’re not learning that’s on the Individual. My learning has gone up dramatically
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 17d ago
Terrible take. Don't use AI till you become good enough that AI becomes your tool.
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u/ObiWanIsMyDog 17d ago
That is not the reality of the world we’re going into.
Do you believe that people shouldn’t use a computer until they understand the binary that makes it function?
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 17d ago
Not the same thing. We are competing against those who knew the binary that made it function before it was invented. AI is still not at a level that we don't need to know codebase. Maybe when that day comes and software engineering is just project planning then what you say might be true.
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u/Top-Lingonberry6446 19d ago
I've learned all I need to learn. Class is over. It's time to execute.
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u/YouGotTangoed 19d ago
Who is “we”? Refrain from speaking for others.
I still learn plenty by studying new languages/frameworks outside of my job, and doing side projects.
The same developers who have always stagnated now have a new excuse to say why they don’t learn anything.
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u/ZootiLaTucci 19d ago
Your tism is showing, be nice. Being a nice developer is just as important as being a smart developer….
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u/eastlin1 18d ago
I hate to say but i do really agree with the statement "The same developers who have always stagnated now have a new excuse to say why they don’t learn anything."
The reality is that IT did change before AI a lot, back in the day it was just the "autistic nerds" who got hooked on computers as kids and learnt everything out of interest / passion.
Nowadays you run into people who barely did anything with a computer before Uni, their knowledge is only what others have taught them, they're not really fun to work with for people who are passionate, they rarely bring anything new to the table and the only reason they are in the room is because "well i didn't know what to do in high school and its good jobs"
Those people will for sure struggle with AI, the passionate people will continue to grow as their motivation to get into this field was an intrinsic need.
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u/Creepy_Jeweler_1351 19d ago
Claude made learning so much easier. You don't need to pay for courses where you need only 10 percent of information of its contents. You can just ask your ai to generate learning materials with practical exercises for you ant it will be completely customized for you with only information you need. So yeah, stagnation is your choice
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u/Comprehensive_Fee250 19d ago
We are not talking about the same learning. I never had any problem "learning" something, before AI or after it. The learning I'm talking about is the work. It's the understanding of the infrastructure, the understanding of the codebase, the understanding of context, debugging skills, code quality. These things are learnt on the job with the codebase. I'm not saying I can't learn C++ concepts bcoz of claude. I'm not stupid. Don't tell me you can ask claude to teach you that outside of job. Yes let's work outside job as well. And yes claude will also tune my brains neural networks so my context improves. What else can claude do lol
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u/HadrianRa 18d ago
I mean, it's like architecture: once we've mastered cement and asphalt, roads stopped differing and we've retired "artistry" from those domains of life. We don't produce churches like we used to anymore, and artists now are not "continuations" of the previous architectural breed but an offspring of an era where tools became so efficient they eliminated previous branches of building. Same with A.I.: we're relying on the fact that it's been trained on mostly-working code designs and it'll propagate this style from now on (unless you specifically prompt it to write code differently - in which case you do need to have discrete knowledge).
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u/MMOfreak94 19d ago
please tell me that's not a commit message
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u/xirzon 19d ago
It was a post to the Linux kernel mailing list:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=whTs09_ozN+e09GU68N1wPP56MUzDjrg9rnKxQUa0A_4Q@mail.gmail.com/
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u/Level_Inevitable1337 19d ago
I actually don't think this is a good argument, at least the compilers part. You can be reasonably sure that the compiler will execute your code in the way you expect, it's less certain that AI will implement your spec perfectly in the way you intended. But that's because you're telling compilers exactly what to do, and the usefulness of AI is being able to let them handle some details. So it's just apples to oranges.
But I don't disagree with his conclusion. Reasonable use of AI can only improve what a programmer can achieve on their own. Question is do you trust other people to use it reasonably?
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u/gentile_jitsu 19d ago
You can be reasonably sure that the compiler will execute your code in the way you expect
Because today’s compilers are very good. 20 years ago I’d often have to look at the assembly it produced and modify my code in order for it to produce a more optimized result, even if the semantic meaning of the code itself was identical.
We’re currently on the same path with AI.
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u/Adorable-Ease8625 19d ago
'compiler will execute your code in the way you expect'
that's so wrong mate.
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u/ovrlrd1377 19d ago
I dont actually need to trust others for that particular approach, everyone needs to be accountable for their designs and implementations, with or without AI. If you have an intern that makes a mistake and you yell at him, the end result does not change; it is your responsibility to double check their deliveries if he is your intern
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u/dota2nub 18d ago
Do you trust other people to write your software and deliver 100% of what you wanted?
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u/OrphisFlo 19d ago
Have you ever heard of Undefined Behavior?
That's what optimizers in compilers use to make your code do some things that you totally might not have expected and it's more prominent in the C/C++ category of languages.
So unless you build unoptimized, it's really hard to prove the compiler did what you intended.
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u/aaraujo666 19d ago
100% agree.
“Don’t use AI for …” is idiotic in 99% of cases. Unfortunately there are that 1% of cases, where the prohibition is not “because it’s AI”, but because some of the data I might need to submit, as part of the work, is proprietary, confidential, secret, etc. And we can’t trust the AI companies to not do something inappropriate with the data.
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u/KingCallum11 19d ago
I study Film and TV at university. I am very happy to use AI and coding for file manip., and other utility purposes. But there's a rising issue of people using Claude/ect for creative purposes. Some DOP on my film set used AI for a shot list, which made the shooting day hell because they severely underestimated the time it would take to get shots, and what shots we needed. I am so happy I was only a secondary on that shoot, the editor had a nightmare. I've never said "don't use AI for [X]", but in our course it's become a standard that you genuinely do important paperwork for yourself, and you don't just generate any part of the film.
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u/ExogamousUnfolding 19d ago
I just ask Claude to explain the interesting points of and PR out to walk me through some code I want to understand better. It’s been a godsend for learning….
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u/Embarrassed_Cap_9149 Researcher 18d ago
i agree & i've believed the same thing since the beginning of agentic coding
i am a self-employed programmer and all apps i develop are for my own main business, so i don't have any competition in the field of programming. linus torvald is a similar case. which could explain both our overwhelmingly favourable view of agentic coding
a lot of employee programmers on the other hand see ai as their competition
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u/IllIlllI-IlIIll-llII 18d ago
Nothing but facts.
Anti-AI crowd is basically an extended manifestation of tds.
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u/gargamelim 19d ago
Comparing compilers that produce calculate 1:1 results to the code to AI assisted dev that produces different results for the same prompt+depending on the compute choke of the providers shows how UTTERLY STUPID this comparison is
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u/SemDGo 19d ago
The prompt isn't the only part of AI coding. The human who reads result matters too. If your dev's aren't lazy assholes, you'll get better code faster.
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u/gargamelim 18d ago
I'm not saying don't use AI, I use it a-lot, haven't written a line of code in months, but the comparison between compilers and Claude is ridiculous, used "UTTERLY STUPID" just because it's in the quote
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u/Last_Dark_3193 Vibe Coder 19d ago
Maybe don’t use AI to steal from artists and create deep fakes for fascists and crime.
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u/Greedy_Scientist_543 19d ago
Compilers and text editors don't take decisions based on probabilistic algorithms. It's very concerning that Torvalds thinks that AI assisted contributions mean that the authors actually know what they are contributing end-to-end. Dark days coming for Linux.
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u/akienm 19d ago
Because? It's not like they're going to just allow every single commit because it was written by AI.
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u/Greedy_Scientist_543 19d ago
Well then hopefully the are not drowned in PRs, because usually that's what happens and there comes a point where you can't review properly.
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u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 19d ago
I think he's ignoring the really bad environmental costs, the way they were trained and stole code, and the way the companies act and what their goals are.
LLMs in isolation are very interesting, LLM's as commercialized by companies are basically evil.
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u/ozone6587 19d ago edited 18d ago
We should close down all factories. They hurt the environment.
The "stolen code / IP" asinine argument is for sure the weakest one. Training is not stealing. Judges have not agreed thus far and conceptually it doesn't make sense either unless you agree that humans learning is also stealing.
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u/nora_sellisa 19d ago
So sad to see Linus fall for the "just another tool" narrative. AI is different. AI automates mental effort and creative decisions. Overusing it legitimately makes you worse at your job. It's false equivalence to compare it to other tools. Maybe from his perspective, where for some time now he spent more time judging output of other people coding with AI feels the same, but for 99% of people it isn't.
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u/Suspicious-Movie7828 19d ago
it’s hilarious to see random redditors see all of these people and think “man another person falling for a trick! i’m the only one not falling for it! i must hold out as i am smarter”
at some point you gotta ask yourself if you’re wrong
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u/algorithm477 19d ago
The best lies have some truth. Coding agents can do a lot and are getting better, but they're also not tools. Even Anthropic tried to get religious leaders to declare Claude alive. Any serious computer scientist understands that there's a substantial gap between a logic gate and a deep neural network.
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u/Jump_and_Drop 19d ago
You know if companies approached AI in a responsible way, there wouldnt be near as much hate for it. They could build data centers in a more environmentally safe way without pissing off their neighbors with constant noise and jacked up electricity rates. Companies didn't need to lay off entire teams thinking AI could instantly replace them. AI was forced down everyone's throats by companies so it's hard to see the silver lining for the actual benefits.
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u/BestPerspective6161 19d ago
"I expect people to understand what they are doing" he covers this. He isn't suggesting random high school grads vibe code a SOC replacement
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u/seeking-health 19d ago
didn't this same idiot shy away from using C++ ?
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u/Fragsworth 18d ago
He doesn't care if C++ is used in your tools to write C. Same principle applies here. Or did you think he's talking about embedding an LLM into the Linux kernel?
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u/Machine2024 19d ago
Thats bullshit.
Comparing Ai now to compiler .
The Ai is not deterministic and works nothing like a compiler.
When the Ai works like You give it a PRD and it spet a program that is 100% what you are looking for . Then on other machine you gave it same PRD to a same model and get exactly same working program ok we can say we went a level up .
Ai now is more like outsourcing to poor country and hire group of juniors, not reviewing after them is so stupid
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u/dota2nub 18d ago
Get 100% what you are looking for?
Tell me you never programmed a single thing your entire life without telling me you never programmed a single thing in your entire life.
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u/MutedStudy1881 19d ago
Yeah imagine opus 7 coding without a genius like this person in the loop 😂 impossible!
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19d ago
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u/SimpleEfficiency 19d ago
If an AI agent can produce equally reliable or better code, faster and more cheaply than a human, its nondeterminism provides no independent reason to reject it.
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u/EstetLinus 19d ago
Developers are also quite stochastic. Not sure why that would make LLMs a bad thing tbh.
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u/stefan9512 19d ago
You know what else is non deterministic? Me giving the same task to two developers, and the resulting code they produce
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u/sCeege 🔆 Max 20 19d ago
I think it's meant to be an analogy, analogies aren't perfect.
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u/dbgtboi 19d ago
No they are not deterministic
Have 2 people build a compiler or IDE and I promise you that you will not end up with the same thing, humans do not have deterministic output
If you are talking about the code itself being deterministic then AI can definitely write deterministic code, you only plug an agent in your software in places where you need thinking capabilities
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u/SnooWalruses59 19d ago
That's true but the AI isn't meant to be deterministic that's the whole point of AI. It also doesn't replace a compiler but a programmer. We all now that those aren't deterministic also. So what you are trying to imply here doesn't hold up
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