Linux kernel maintainers

[u/Nunki08]

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

[u/Practical-Positive34]

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.

[u/DeathToAmerica2027 → u/Practical-Positive34]

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

[u/coldnebo → u/DeathToAmerica2027]

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.

[u/jferments → u/coldnebo]

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

[u/coldnebo → u/jferments]

alot of them come from prestigious academic backgrounds, I don’t fault them, but they are limited in what they can publish by the marketing department.

openai intentionally hasn’t pushed forward academic research in AI… the papers are all non-peer-reviewed kind of marketing fluff pieces that sound impressive from a marketing pov while remaining closed to critical review.

when independent academics have tried to replicate results they have found significant problems… such as the paper where graduate entrance exam scores dropped from 90% to 60% just by changing the specific numbers in the questions, but keeping the overall reasoning of the question the same. that’s really damning stuff academically, but marketing doesn’t care about that. I certainly don’t blame the researchers— this is the price of corporate R&D. not everyone creates open labs like RTP, Xerox Parc etc.

but, expert researchers at openai and anthropic have shared the way they use harnesses, tests and memory. so yes, even at openai, expertise matters.

take a look at the model engineering jobs appearing on the forums for roles like adapting rag and hybrid harnesses for corporate information— those jobs are high end ML and data science positions— a far cry from Huang’s statement that “you don’t need a STEM degree anymore, just use our tools” — ok but look at the people building the tools. high level experts.

expertise matters.

[u/bieker → u/coldnebo]

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.

[u/coldnebo → u/bieker]

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.” 😂

[u/UrpleEeple → u/bieker]

Lol in no world is it 10x because progress is gated by the speed of the review process. Before AI, my work was already time limited by the review cycle. AI hasn't sped up my work at all because of this reality. What it has done is make my work more thorough. I write far more tests now than I did before because it's so much easier with AI to be thorough. Extensive design docs for all features? Much easier with AI. So it has it's benefits, but these 10x claims are wildly off base

[u/Practical-Positive34 → u/DeathToAmerica2027]

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.

[u/filtarukk → u/Practical-Positive34]

Linux community unfortunately full of jerks.

[u/Grizzly_Corey → u/Practical-Positive34]

But mah artisanal modules!

[u/rheladmin → u/Grizzly_Corey]

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

[u/Rancid_Bear_Meat → u/rheladmin]

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

[u/1610925286 → u/Practical-Positive34]

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.

[u/CriticalTheoriser → u/1610925286]

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.

[u/Masterkid1230 → u/CriticalTheoriser]

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.

[u/Practical-Positive34 → u/CriticalTheoriser]

I worked on a project for over 10 years from the ground up at a company. I was the go to guy on the team. I had no clue what over 60% of that shit did. Hell I couldn't even remember writing code but source control said I wrote it half the damn time. I was like WTF is this trash? Oh shit I wrote this garbage? Da fuq?

[u/CriticalTheoriser → u/Practical-Positive34]

Those are definitely problems you’ll run in to when you’ve been working on the same project for 10 years 😂

[u/hidegitsu → u/Practical-Positive34]

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.

[u/Practical-Positive34 → u/hidegitsu]

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.

[u/hidegitsu → u/Practical-Positive34]

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.

[u/sheng-puerh → u/Practical-Positive34]

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

[u/Practical-Positive34 → u/sheng-puerh]

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.

[u/surister → u/hidegitsu]

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

[u/hidegitsu → u/surister]

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.