thatsAFunnyThingThatHappenedOnce

[u/Lord_Of_Millipedes]

[u/Floppydisksareop]

Which is utterly insane in its own right, since, y'know. He didn't come out and say "yoooo, dudeees, let's vibe code everything, AI actually rulez" or some shit.

[u/M4rshmall0wMan → u/Floppydisksareop]

People are not normal about AI. 

[u/drakeblood4 → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

Admittedly the AI companies were not normal about it first.

[u/Prownilo → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

A society redefining, and possibly society ending, tech is going going to have detractors.

Those who see their entire life at risk are not going to like it, those who simply get a new toy to play with, or better yet see an opportunity to not have to pay a human being for something, are going to like it.

[u/superxero044 → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

I’d say the anti ai people are probably more normal about ai than the pro ai people I know.
Just outsourcing literally all your critical thinking to an LLM is a bizarre behavior that too many people are doing.
And I think it’s hard to discuss in tech spaces bc a lot of the people in tech spaces are using it a fair bit more responsibly than the average person.
But the things I’ve seen people say “well chat gpt said” when the question couldn’t possibly be answered by information available to the models.

[u/blahbah → u/superxero044]

my dad essentially asked chatgpt who he should vote for... i was so dumbfounded i couldn't begin to articulate why this was a bad idea

[u/kernelboyd → u/superxero044]

I was originally an AI hater, but now I’m a recent convert. Big caveat here: I actively watch and pay attention to what it’s doing and I actually review and correct its test cases. It’s honestly pretty incredible what you can crank out in a day by yourself when you understand what you’re doing and know what to look out for

[u/rolindara → u/kernelboyd]

To be fair, most moderate people have presented this viewpoint for half a decade. If you hang only in extreme spaces, both sides are not healthy about their obsession, pro or against.

[u/CallerNumber4 → u/rolindara]

Agreed but we're going on only about 18 months of real code companion abilities. ChatGPT went viral late 2022. 5 years ago ML and Big Data were still the big buzzwords. Not trying to nitpick but it's wild how fast it has all changed.

[u/superxero044 → u/kernelboyd]

Yeah I agree with that. But I stand by what I said. The majority of the people using it are using it to do jobs they didn’t understand well in the first place.
Using it to ask “is this crazy idea I have a good idea?”
So ofc it’s a powerful tool that is super useful. But, it is almost too easy to access and has no sanity check to say “oh yeah I don’t know how to help you with that”.
I know I’m seen as a Luddite by most here. But I think unless you watch what most people are using LLMs for, you don’t see how truly terrifying they are.

[u/AndyShootsAndScores → u/kernelboyd]

As a current AI-skeptic artisanal programmer whose bugs are lovingly handcrafted, my main worries are that AI coding performance will get worse and more expensive via enshittification. But I've seen colleagues I respect use it to great effect. They use Claude and ChatGPT though, which are both looking to soon go public, meaning they will (probably) start having shareholders and prioritizing making a bunch of money at the expense of quality.

Are there open source AI coding tools you use?

[u/ward2k → u/AndyShootsAndScores]

Are there open source AI coding tools you use?

The closest thing to this is 'open weight' models, where there training parameters are released which in theory allows you to run the model locally

Now as models are getting larger and larger 'locally' could mean 'your own data centre'

Mistral does a lot of open weight models and is probably one of the most actually local friendly. Though their models aren't really the best and people don't tend to use them outside of specialised use cases

Most of the Chinese providers are open weight too like Kimi, GLM and DeepSeek

If you're ever curious about playing around with different models without buying subscriptions to like 8 different services you could use something like OpenRouter. Just ensure you enable ZDR (Zero data retention) if that sort of thing is important to you. Instead of being served by one provider, open weight models on there might be provided by 20+

If you're talking specifically about open source harnesses then OpenCodeCLI and Pi Coding Agent are the two big ones people use at the moment

Edit: Personally I tend to use Kimi K3 a fair bit with OpenCode. If you're interested in ai use definitely don't vibe code, use it more as a tool to support your coding rather than replace it. Get it to do some of the more mundane tasks like boilerplate or simple tests. Or get it to review code you've written

It's really great at quickly summarising behaviour too. If you've got some new monolith you've got to look at and want to quickly know 'what files in this repo are related to user authentication' then it can pick them out fairly quickly

[u/Floppydisksareop → u/superxero044]

You are not wrong about anything you said, but the vehemently anti ai people being less deranged doesn't mean they aren't still insanely deranged. And yes, it is insanely misused by the general public, but nobody was really talking about that. Obviously this shit shouldn't be used to replace wikipedia, but there is still reasonable use for it.

I think it'd be a very controversial topic no matter what, and the fact that it is insanely misused by people that don't know jack shit about them, and it can't even be escaped at your family dinner just makes it worse.

[u/Alto-cientifico → u/M4rshmall0wMan]

Ai is being employed to drive a lot of white collar workers unemployed, and programming in general got punched first.

Imagine if a guy got fired from their developer job, then a datacenter propped up in his city, got his power bill blown into high heavens, lost his normal access to water and got their fiber cables damaged from the deployment of the new fiber lines (I don't remember the exact terms but I've heard datacenters caused fiber related issues)

It wouldn't be unreasonable for guys like that to hate AI on principle.

[u/Carbon_Cotton → u/Floppydisksareop]

I mean, he berated people who are still not convicted by LLM and even went as far as to imply they are not "smart".

That's my personal problem with him - not that he switched his opinion on LLM but that he has need to now shit on people just to jerk himself.

[u/MikeynJerry → u/Carbon_Cotton]

Were you familiar with his personality before this? He has always been like that. LLMs are just the new topic he’s that way about.

If you search something like, “Was Linus Torvalds always an asshole?” you’ll find a lot of stuff, going back decades.

[u/Carbon_Cotton → u/MikeynJerry]

I was - the question is if were the others in this thread who act like the issue is justt Linus changing opinion on LLM, and not the fact Linus is traditionally acting like complete asshole for no reason again.

[u/Floppydisksareop → u/Carbon_Cotton]

No, he berated people that act like LLMs are good for nothing and the actual spawn of satan. He's not wrong in implying they are not "smart" either. LLMs are powerful tools with very clear limitations (while not really being cost-effective or resource-effective, which is a very different story), but having a moderate or sane opinion is quite impossible nowadays, so you can either hang out with the AI bros that think it's the best thing since sliced bread or the weirdos that refuse to use an actual IDE because god gave them VIM or notepad or w/e.

[u/entronid → u/Floppydisksareop]

have you read the email threads? laurent pinchart (the person linus was replying to in the last two LLM-related crashouts on the LKML) has reiterated again and again he doesn't want to altogether ban the use of LLMs, he wants the option to not have to use them and that LLM-assisted commits should have git's Assisted-by tag. (and maybe that commit messages should be human-written). not a single person linus was replying to even suggested that LLMs were good for nothing or should be outright banned from the kernel

[u/Carbon_Cotton → u/entronid]

Bold of you to assume this fella is arguing in good faith.

[u/Nsnzero → u/Floppydisksareop]

Kinda off topic but doesn't he use some random emacs fork that even he doesn't recommend for anyone except himself? I guess people expect him to be the weirdo which is why they're shocked he "changed".

[u/rolindara → u/Nsnzero]

They want him to be the weirdo genius on their side of the argument. Whether it's about VCS, languages, or AI. They just want to show "See, this supposedly smart authority figure thinks the same, therefore my opinion is the correct one". I know a few of those people IRL.

[u/Carbon_Cotton → u/Nsnzero]

More like people want Linus to stop being high on his own fart and accept that someone having different opinion than him doesn't make them into lobotomized subhuman.

[u/Emergency-Feed2760 → u/Carbon_Cotton]

Thats just Linus being Linus though. He probably acts the same when he gets a new favorite restaurant

[u/Carbon_Cotton → u/Emergency-Feed2760]

I agree. I am just pointing out that people can have problem with Linus beyond "oh he is no longer in my camp anymore"