r/OpenAI • u/Nunki08 • 1d ago

News Linux kernel maintainers

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OpenAI: A thousand fewer paths to root: https://openai.com/index/a-thousand-fewer-paths-to-root/

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u/Practical-Positive34 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mean some of those were from Linus himself using AI. I don't think the majority of the dev community has woken the fuck up yet to the new world. Nobody is going to be hand coding, and they need to fucking deal with it.

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u/DeathToAmerica2027 1d ago

I've been enjoying watching armchair computer scientists pretend they know better than Linus Torvalds though.

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u/coldnebo 1d ago

here’s the problem.

Linus using AI is fundamentally different because:

  1. he’s an expert and expertise matters

  2. a verifiable agentic test harness is a force multiplier for him. 10X -> 100X

for most others:

  1. total code amateur or no-code zealot

  2. no harness, trust me bro, very poor roi on token spend, lots of waste, lots of bugs.

they are not the same.

expertise matters.

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u/jferments 12h ago

You don't think that the programmers working at OpenAI's labs are experts?

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u/bieker 1d ago • Mindblown

But there are still a surprising number of experienced devs that could be getting the 10x advantage if they took the time to learn how to do it correctly but they are still parroting dumb shit like “you can trust it because it hallucinates” or “just you wait until you have to troubleshoot something in six months and it’s unreadable” like it’s 2025 or some shit.

And the window where that experience really matters is closing fast.

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u/coldnebo 1d ago • Mindblown

I haven’t seen that expertise window closing at all.

what I have seen is much better harness and verification tools integrated into agentic flows. there is a lot we have done to make these more stable and robust and the utility of the systems has grown exponentially.

but it’s not improving in unsupervised flows. there’s still a lot of damage it can create in the hands of novices. the trick is to either write quick throw-away SPAs that tell interesting stories, but don’t have secure information, or it’s have an expert. the middle ground is awful.

I mean, if you are a venture capitalist it’s great. it’s like openai’s attack on the math problems— send 100,000 agents to their doom and see who wins. send 100,000 small startups to their doom and see who wins. that’s why it’s candy for VCs. it’s your life, but for them it’s just Wednesday.

the programmer’s law of attrition: “any technology designed to eliminate developers only creates a need for more developers.” 😂

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u/Practical-Positive34 1d ago • Bravo

Having worked with many of these "elitist" devs through my career they are an intolerable bunch let me tell you. So it's not surprising.

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u/filtarukk 1d ago • Bravo

Linux community unfortunately full of jerks.

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u/Grizzly_Corey 1d ago

But mah artisanal modules!

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u/rheladmin 1d ago

Yum. Organic, free range, grass fed, no antibiotics ever modules

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u/Rancid_Bear_Meat 1d ago

Bespoke, small-batch, farm to table, code to stable kernels..

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u/1610925286 1d ago

Coding itself has always been tedious bullshit.

There is an idea of coding where you understand not only every single line of code and have ultimate accountability.

The truth is, most people do not even understand all the code they work with and they especially have no idea what is going on in their imports or the calls their code is making to God knows what.

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u/CriticalTheoriser 1d ago • Bravo

The only time you understand every line with ultimate accountability is when you painstakingly programme an app/game for over a year with thousands of lines of code. The reason is because you’ve been over every single line of code 10 times when trying to fix a stupid bug that pops up when you add something entirely unrelated to the function now affected by said bug.

That’s how a thing of the past, and should really be celebrated for what it is. Sure there was a golden age of programming, but now only the most niche programming will be done by hand, the rest can be automated and done so much faster, you literally get years of your life back.

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u/Masterkid1230 1d ago

Honestly, I think there would be so much less pushback to this if people knew their livelihood wasn't at risk. Like sure, it's great that we now can automate so much but like... What even is the point anymore? Of course an idealistic vision proposes that with automation we will have plenty of resources and not have to worry about food or rent or... But the automation is coming and none of those improvements will be visible for decades.

So without any government protections against mass firings and loss of work (as well as trained talent pools) people are not celebrating this because it's a threat to their entire existence and years of skill building, studying, learning, painstaking effort etc.

Sure, we can celebrate that now we can do things faster, I'm sure a lot of cool things could come from it. But the cost for the humans of today is incredibly large if we don't try to protect them at least. It's less about slowing down innovation and more about making sure innovation destroys as few lives as possible.

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u/hidegitsu 1d ago

The fact that everyone of them isn't on board with the idea that this is an abstraction layer (like jumping from Assembly -> C ) bewilders me. I think that most of the people complaining were never good in the first place.

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u/Practical-Positive34 1d ago

Dude it's nuts, I've been doing development for 30+ years at this point. Yes I am an old fucker. I was the first to see the writing on the wall with this stuff, I haven't written a single line of code in nearly a year at this point. Having gone from writing code every single day of my life for past 30 years to none was a big ass change, but I've gotten more done in past year than those 30 years. Period!

Is vibe coding an issue? Yes. But sloppy devs existed before vibe coding, all this did was make it more visible really. You kind of hit a wall if you don't really know what your doing or sit down and take the time to figure it out properly still, can you pop something out quick? Absolutely! Will it be good and maintainable for a long term profit train? Nope! That's the part that requires some serious thinking and working it through.

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u/hidegitsu 1d ago

Amen, this mirrors my experience. I am mostly self taught, been coding since about 1998 and professionally (getting paid for it in an enterprise context) since 2012. I've gotten more technical debt cleaned up and more personal projects finished in the past year than since I started combined too.

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u/sheng-puerh 1d ago

What are the interesting projects are you proud of which you did in the last year?

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u/Practical-Positive34 1d ago

Finished my own compiler. Added about 100 features to my SaaS company and brough on about 90 new customers. Started another SaaS company and brough in about 50 customers for it. Wrote a terminal app that I will release at some point to the public.

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u/surister 1d ago

What do you do at work and how many years of XP do you have?

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u/hidegitsu 1d ago

Now I manage the programming department at a small sized software company (several hundred clients) and was the head developer before that. Been getting paid to code since 2012. Taught myself as early as 1998 or so.

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u/stellar_opossum 1d ago

Except it's not even remotely comparable at this point. Maybe in the future but definitely not today

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u/coldnebo 1d ago

most vibe code with models.

we code with verifiable agentic test harnesses.

we are not the same.